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Sigmund Freud
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Sigmund Freud
Austrian psychoanalyst
born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Příbor,
Czech Republic]
died Sept. 23, 1939, London, Eng.
Overview
Austrian neuropsychologist, founder of psychoanalysis, and one of the
major intellectual figures of the 20th century.
Trained in Vienna as a neurologist, Freud went to Paris in 1885 to
study with Jean-Martin Charcot, whose work on hysteria led Freud to
conclude that mental disorders might be caused purely by psychological
rather than organic factors. Returning to Vienna (1886), Freud
collaborated with the physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925) in further
studies on hysteria, resulting in the development of some key
psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, including free association, the
unconscious, resistance (later defense mechanisms), and neurosis. In
1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he analyzed the
complex symbolic processes underlying dream formation: he proposed that
dreams are the disguised expression of unconscious wishes. In his
controversial Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he
delineated the complicated stages of psychosexual development (oral,
anal, and phallic) and the formation of the Oedipus complex. During
World War I, he wrote papers that clarified his understanding of the
relations between the unconscious and conscious portions of the mind and
the workings of the id, ego, and superego. Freud eventually applied his
psychoanalytic insights to such diverse phenomena as jokes and slips of
the tongue, ethnographic data, religion and mythology, and modern
civilization. Works of note include Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud fled to England when the
Nazis annexed Austria in 1938; he died shortly thereafter. Despite the
relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all
of his ideas, both in his lifetime and after, Freud has remained one of
the most influential figures in contemporary thought.
Main
Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual
legislator of his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a
theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an
optic for the interpretation of culture and society. Despite repeated
criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work,
its spell remained powerful well after his death and in fields far
removed from psychology as it is narrowly defined. If, as the American
sociologist Philip Rieff once contended, “psychological man” replaced
such earlier notions as political, religious, or economic man as the
20th century’s dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the
power of Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the
intellectual legacy he left behind.
Early life and training
Freud’s father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married
once before he wed the boy’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. The father, 40
years old at Freud’s birth, seems to have been a relatively remote and
authoritarian figure, while his mother appears to have been more
nurturant and emotionally available. Although Freud had two older
half-brothers, his strongest if also most ambivalent attachment seems to
have been to a nephew, John, one year his senior, who provided the model
of intimate friend and hated rival that Freud reproduced often at later
stages of his life.
In 1859 the Freud family was compelled for economic reasons to move
to Leipzig and then a year after to Vienna, where Freud remained until
the Nazi annexation of Austria 78 years later. Despite Freud’s dislike
of the imperial city, in part because of its citizens’ frequent
anti-Semitism, psychoanalysis reflected in significant ways the cultural
and political context out of which it emerged. For example, Freud’s
sensitivity to the vulnerability of paternal authority within the psyche
may well have been stimulated by the decline in power suffered by his
father’s generation, often liberal rationalists, in the Habsburg empire.
So too his interest in the theme of the seduction of daughters was
rooted in complicated ways in the context of Viennese attitudes toward
female sexuality.
In 1873 Freud was graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium and, apparently
inspired by a public reading of an essay by Goethe on nature, turned to
medicine as a career. At the University of Vienna he worked with one of
the leading physiologists of his day, Ernst von Brücke, an exponent of
the materialist, antivitalist science of Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1882
he entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a clinical assistant to
train with the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and the professor of
internal medicine Hermann Nothnagel. In 1885 Freud was appointed
lecturer in neuropathology, having concluded important research on the
brain’s medulla. At this time he also developed an interest in the
pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years.
Although some beneficial results were found in eye surgery, which have
been credited to Freud’s friend Carl Koller, the general outcome was
disastrous. Not only did Freud’s advocacy lead to a mortal addiction in
another close friend, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, but it also tarnished
his medical reputation for a time. Whether or not one interprets this
episode in terms that call into question Freud’s prudence as a
scientist, it was of a piece with his lifelong willingness to attempt
bold solutions to relieve human suffering.
Freud’s scientific training remained of cardinal importance in his
work, or at least in his own conception of it. In such writings as his
“Entwurf einer Psychologie” (written 1895, published 1950; “Project for
a Scientific Psychology”) he affirmed his intention to find a
physiological and materialist basis for his theories of the psyche. Here
a mechanistic neurophysiological model vied with a more organismic,
phylogenetic one in ways that demonstrate Freud’s complicated debt to
the science of his day.
In late 1885 Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of
neuropathology at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where he worked under
the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot. His 19 weeks in the French capital
proved a turning point in his career, for Charcot’s work with patients
classified as “hysterics” introduced Freud to the possibility that
psychological disorders might have their source in the mind rather than
the brain. Charcot’s demonstration of a link between hysterical
symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, and hypnotic suggestion implied
the power of mental states rather than nerves in the etiology of
disease. Although Freud was soon to abandon his faith in hypnosis, he
returned to Vienna in February 1886 with the seed of his revolutionary
psychological method implanted.
Several months after his return Freud married Martha Bernays, the
daughter of a prominent Jewish family whose ancestors included a chief
rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine. She was to bear six children, one
of whom, Anna Freud, was to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her
own right. Although the glowing picture of their marriage painted by
Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud has been nuanced by later
scholars, it is clear that Martha Bernays Freud was a deeply sustaining
presence during her husband’s tumultuous career.
Shortly after his marriage Freud began his closest friendship, with
the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, whose role in the development of
psychoanalysis has occasioned widespread debate. Throughout the 15 years
of their intimacy Fliess provided Freud an invaluable interlocutor for
his most daring ideas. Freud’s belief in human bisexuality, his idea of
erotogenic zones on the body, and perhaps even his imputation of
sexuality to infants may well have been stimulated by their friendship.
A somewhat less controversial influence arose from the partnership
Freud began with the physician Josef Breuer after his return from Paris.
Freud turned to a clinical practice in neuropsychology, and the office
he established at Berggasse 19 was to remain his consulting room for
almost half a century. Before their collaboration began, during the
early 1880s, Breuer had treated a patient named Bertha Pappenheim—or
“Anna O.,” as she became known in the literature—who was suffering from
a variety of hysterical symptoms. Rather than using hypnotic suggestion,
as had Charcot, Breuer allowed her to lapse into a state resembling
autohypnosis, in which she would talk about the initial manifestations
of her symptoms. To Breuer’s surprise, the very act of verbalization
seemed to provide some relief from their hold over her (although later
scholarship has cast doubt on its permanence). “The talking cure” or
“chimney sweeping,” as Breuer and Anna O., respectively, called it,
seemed to act cathartically to produce an abreaction, or discharge, of
the pent-up emotional blockage at the root of the pathological
behaviour.
Psychoanalytic theory
Freud, still beholden to Charcot’s hypnotic method, did not grasp the
full implications of Breuer’s experience until a decade later, when he
developed the technique of free association. In part an extrapolation of
the automatic writing promoted by the German Jewish writer Ludwig Börne
a century before, in part a result of his own clinical experience with
other hysterics, this revolutionary method was announced in the work
Freud published jointly with Breuer in 1895, Studien über Hysterie
(Studies in Hysteria). By encouraging the patient to express any random
thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at
uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche
that Freud, following a long tradition, called the unconscious. Because
of its incompatibility with conscious thoughts or conflicts with other
unconscious ones, this material was normally hidden, forgotten, or
unavailable to conscious reflection. Difficulty in freely
associating—sudden silences, stuttering, or the like—suggested to Freud
the importance of the material struggling to be expressed, as well as
the power of what he called the patient’s defenses against that
expression. Such blockages Freud dubbed resistance, which had to be
broken down in order to reveal hidden conflicts. Unlike Charcot and
Breuer, Freud came to the conclusion, based on his clinical experience
with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted
material was sexual in nature. And even more momentously, he linked the
etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual
feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it. Being able to bring
that conflict to consciousness through free association and then probing
its implications was thus a crucial step, he reasoned, on the road to
relieving the symptom, which was best understood as an unwitting
compromise formation between the wish and the defense.
Psychoanalytic theory » Screen memories
At first, however, Freud was uncertain about the precise status of the
sexual component in this dynamic conception of the psyche. His patients
seemed to recall actual experiences of early seductions, often
incestuous in nature. Freud’s initial impulse was to accept these as
having happened. But then, as he disclosed in a now famous letter to
Fliess of Sept. 2, 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories
of actual events, these shocking recollections were the residues of
infantile impulses and desires to be seduced by an adult. What was
recalled was not a genuine memory but what he would later call a screen
memory, or fantasy, hiding a primitive wish. That is, rather than
stressing the corrupting initiative of adults in the etiology of
neuroses, Freud concluded that the fantasies and yearnings of the child
were at the root of later conflict.
The absolute centrality of his change of heart in the subsequent
development of psychoanalysis cannot be doubted. For in attributing
sexuality to children, emphasizing the causal power of fantasies, and
establishing the importance of repressed desires, Freud laid the
groundwork for what many have called the epic journey into his own
psyche, which followed soon after the dissolution of his partnership
with Breuer.
Freud’s work on hysteria had focused on female sexuality and its
potential for neurotic expression. To be fully universal,
psychoanalysis—a term Freud coined in 1896—would also have to examine
the male psyche in a condition of what might be called normality. It
would have to become more than a psychotherapy and develop into a
complete theory of the mind. To this end Freud accepted the enormous
risk of generalizing from the experience he knew best: his own.
Significantly, his self-analysis was both the first and the last in the
history of the movement he spawned; all future analysts would have to
undergo a training analysis with someone whose own analysis was
ultimately traceable to Freud’s of his disciples.
Freud’s self-exploration was apparently enabled by a disturbing event
in his life. In October 1896, Jakob Freud died shortly before his 81st
birthday. Emotions were released in his son that he understood as having
been long repressed, emotions concerning his earliest familial
experiences and feelings. Beginning in earnest in July 1897, Freud
attempted to reveal their meaning by drawing on a technique that had
been available for millennia: the deciphering of dreams. Freud’s
contribution to the tradition of dream analysis was path-breaking, for
in insisting on them as “the royal road to a knowledge of the
unconscious,” he provided a remarkably elaborate account of why dreams
originate and how they function.
Psychoanalytic theory » The interpretation of dreams
In what many commentators consider his master work, Die Traumdeutung
(published in 1899, but given the date of the dawning century to
emphasize its epochal character; The Interpretation of Dreams), he
presented his findings. Interspersing evidence from his own dreams with
evidence from those recounted in his clinical practice, Freud contended
that dreams played a fundamental role in the psychic economy. The mind’s
energy—which Freud called libido and identified principally, but not
exclusively, with the sexual drive—was a fluid and malleable force
capable of excessive and disturbing power. Needing to be discharged to
ensure pleasure and prevent pain, it sought whatever outlet it might
find. If denied the gratification provided by direct motor action,
libidinal energy could seek its release through mental channels. Or, in
the language of The Interpretation of Dreams, a wish can be satisfied by
an imaginary wish fulfillment. All dreams, Freud claimed, even
nightmares manifesting apparent anxiety, are the fulfillment of such
wishes.
More precisely, dreams are the disguised expression of wish
fulfillments. Like neurotic symptoms, they are the effects of
compromises in the psyche between desires and prohibitions in conflict
with their realization. Although sleep can relax the power of the mind’s
diurnal censorship of forbidden desires, such censorship, nonetheless,
persists in part during nocturnal existence. Dreams, therefore, have to
be decoded to be understood, and not merely because they are actually
forbidden desires experienced in distorted fashion. For dreams undergo
further revision in the process of being recounted to the analyst.
The Interpretation of Dreams provides a hermeneutic for the unmasking
of the dream’s disguise, or dreamwork, as Freud called it. The manifest
content of the dream, that which is remembered and reported, must be
understood as veiling a latent meaning. Dreams defy logical entailment
and narrative coherence, for they intermingle the residues of immediate
daily experience with the deepest, often most infantile wishes. Yet they
can be ultimately decoded by attending to four basic activities of the
dreamwork and reversing their mystifying effect.
The first of these activities, condensation, operates through the
fusion of several different elements into one. As such, it exemplifies
one of the key operations of psychic life, which Freud called
overdetermination. No direct correspondence between a simple manifest
content and its multidimensional latent counterpart can be assumed. The
second activity of the dreamwork, displacement, refers to the decentring
of dream thoughts, so that the most urgent wish is often obliquely or
marginally represented on the manifest level. Displacement also means
the associative substitution of one signifier in the dream for another,
say, the king for one’s father. The third activity Freud called
representation, by which he meant the transformation of thoughts into
images. Decoding a dream thus means translating such visual
representations back into intersubjectively available language through
free association. The final function of the dreamwork is secondary
revision, which provides some order and intelligibility to the dream by
supplementing its content with narrative coherence. The process of dream
interpretation thus reverses the direction of the dreamwork, moving from
the level of the conscious recounting of the dream through the
preconscious back beyond censorship into the unconscious itself.
Psychoanalytic theory » Further theoretical development
In 1904 Freud published Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life), in which he explored such seemingly
insignificant errors as slips of the tongue or pen (later colloquially
called Freudian slips), misreadings, or forgetting of names. These
errors Freud understood to have symptomatic and thus interpretable
importance. But unlike dreams they need not betray a repressed infantile
wish yet can arise from more immediate hostile, jealous, or egoistic
causes.
In 1905 Freud extended the scope of this analysis by examining Der
Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious). Invoking the idea of “joke-work” as a process
comparable to dreamwork, he also acknowledged the double-sided quality
of jokes, at once consciously contrived and unconsciously revealing.
Seemingly innocent phenomena like puns or jests are as open to
interpretation as more obviously tendentious, obscene, or hostile jokes.
The explosive response often produced by successful humour, Freud
contended, owes its power to the orgasmic release of unconscious
impulses, aggressive as well as sexual. But insofar as jokes are more
deliberate than dreams or slips, they draw on the rational dimension of
the psyche that Freud was to call the ego as much as on what he was to
call the id.
In 1905 Freud also published the work that first thrust him into the
limelight as the alleged champion of a pansexualist understanding of the
mind: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Contributions to the
Sexual Theory, later translated as Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality), revised and expanded in subsequent editions. The work
established Freud, along with Richard von Kraft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis,
Albert Moll, and Iwan Bloch, as a pioneer in the serious study of
sexology. Here he outlined in greater detail than before his reasons for
emphasizing the sexual component in the development of both normal and
pathological behaviour. Although not as reductionist as popularly
assumed, Freud nonetheless extended the concept of sexuality beyond
conventional usage to include a panoply of erotic impulses from the
earliest childhood years on. Distinguishing between sexual aims (the act
toward which instincts strive) and sexual objects (the person, organ, or
physical entity eliciting attraction), he elaborated a repertoire of
sexually generated behaviour of astonishing variety. Beginning very
early in life, imperiously insistent on its gratification, remarkably
plastic in its expression, and open to easy maldevelopment, sexuality,
Freud concluded, is the prime mover in a great deal of human behaviour.
Psychoanalytic theory » Sexuality and development
To spell out the formative development of the sexual drive, Freud
focused on the progressive replacement of erotogenic zones in the body
by others. An originally polymorphous sexuality first seeks
gratification orally through sucking at the mother’s breast, an object
for which other surrogates can later be provided. Initially unable to
distinguish between self and breast, the infant soon comes to appreciate
its mother as the first external love object. Later Freud would contend
that even before that moment, the child can treat its own body as such
an object, going beyond undifferentiated autoeroticism to a narcissistic
love for the self as such. After the oral phase, during the second year,
the child’s erotic focus shifts to its anus, stimulated by the struggle
over toilet training. During the anal phase the child’s pleasure in
defecation is confronted with the demands of self-control. The third
phase, lasting from about the fourth to the sixth year, he called the
phallic. Because Freud relied on male sexuality as the norm of
development, his analysis of this phase aroused considerable opposition,
especially because he claimed its major concern is castration anxiety.
To grasp what Freud meant by this fear, it is necessary to understand
one of his central contentions. As has been stated, the death of Freud’s
father was the trauma that permitted him to delve into his own psyche.
Not only did Freud experience the expected grief, but he also expressed
disappointment, resentment, and even hostility toward his father in the
dreams he analyzed at the time. In the process of abandoning the
seduction theory he recognized the source of the anger as his own psyche
rather than anything objectively done by his father. Turning, as he
often did, to evidence from literary and mythical texts as anticipations
of his psychological insights, Freud interpreted that source in terms of
Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex. The universal applicability of its plot,
he conjectured, lies in the desire of every male child to sleep with his
mother and remove the obstacle to the realization of that wish, his
father. What he later dubbed the Oedipus complex presents the child with
a critical problem, for the unrealizable yearning at its root provokes
an imagined response on the part of the father: the threat of
castration.
The phallic stage can only be successfully surmounted if the Oedipus
complex with its accompanying castration anxiety can be resolved.
According to Freud, this resolution can occur if the boy finally
suppresses his sexual desire for the mother, entering a period of
so-called latency, and internalizes the reproachful prohibition of the
father, making it his own with the construction of that part of the
psyche Freud called the superego or the conscience.
The blatantly phallocentric bias of this account, which was
supplemented by a highly controversial assumption of penis envy in the
already castrated female child, proved troublesome for subsequent
psychoanalytic theory. Not surprisingly, later analysts of female
sexuality have paid more attention to the girl’s relations with the
pre-Oedipal mother than to the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex.
Anthropological challenges to the universality of the complex have also
been damaging, although it has been possible to redescribe it in terms
that lift it out of the specific familial dynamics of Freud’s own day.
If the creation of culture is understood as the institution of kinship
structures based on exogamy, then the Oedipal drama reflects the deeper
struggle between natural desire and cultural authority.
Freud, however, always maintained the intrapsychic importance of the
Oedipus complex, whose successful resolution is the precondition for the
transition through latency to the mature sexuality he called the genital
phase. Here the parent of the opposite sex is conclusively abandoned in
favour of a more suitable love object able to reciprocate reproductively
useful passion. In the case of the girl, disappointment over the
nonexistence of a penis is transcended by the rejection of her mother in
favour of a father figure instead. In both cases, sexual maturity means
heterosexual, procreatively inclined, genitally focused behaviour.
Sexual development, however, is prone to troubling maladjustments
preventing this outcome if the various stages are unsuccessfully
negotiated. Fixation of sexual aims or objects can occur at any
particular moment, caused either by an actual trauma or the blockage of
a powerful libidinal urge. If the fixation is allowed to express itself
directly at a later age, the result is what was then generally called a
perversion. If, however, some part of the psyche prohibits such overt
expression, then, Freud contended, the repressed and censored impulse
produces neurotic symptoms, neuroses being conceptualized as the
negative of perversions. Neurotics repeat the desired act in repressed
form, without conscious memory of its origin or the ability to confront
and work it through in the present.
In addition to the neurosis of hysteria, with its conversion of
affective conflicts into bodily symptoms, Freud developed complicated
etiological explanations for other typical neurotic behaviour, such as
obsessive-compulsions, paranoia, and narcissism. These he called
psychoneuroses, because of their rootedness in childhood conflicts, as
opposed to the actual neuroses such as hypochondria, neurasthenia, and
anxiety neurosis, which are due to problems in the present (the last,
for example, being caused by the physical suppression of sexual
release).
Freud’s elaboration of his therapeutic technique during these years
focused on the implications of a specific element in the relationship
between patient and analyst, an element whose power he first began to
recognize in reflecting on Breuer’s work with Anna O. Although later
scholarship has cast doubt on its veracity, Freud’s account of the
episode was as follows. An intense rapport between Breuer and his
patient had taken an alarming turn when Anna divulged her strong sexual
desire for him. Breuer, who recognized the stirrings of reciprocal
feelings, broke off his treatment out of an understandable confusion
about the ethical implications of acting on these impulses. Freud came
to see in this troubling interaction the effects of a more pervasive
phenomenon, which he called transference (or in the case of the
analyst’s desire for the patient, counter-transference). Produced by the
projection of feelings, transference, he reasoned, is the reenactment of
childhood urges cathected (invested) on a new object. As such, it is the
essential tool in the analytic cure, for by bringing to the surface
repressed emotions and allowing them to be examined in a clinical
setting, transference can permit their being worked through in the
present. That is, affective remembrance can be the antidote to neurotic
repetition.
It was largely to facilitate transference that Freud developed his
celebrated technique of having the patient lie on a couch, not looking
directly at the analyst, and free to fantasize with as little intrusion
of the analyst’s real personality as possible. Restrained and neutral,
the analyst functions as a screen for the displacement of early
emotions, both erotic and aggressive. Transference onto the analyst is
itself a kind of neurosis, but one in the service of an ultimate working
through of the conflicting feelings it expresses. Only certain
illnesses, however, are open to this treatment, for it demands the
ability to redirect libidinal energy outward. The psychoses, Freud sadly
concluded, are based on the redirection of libido back onto the
patient’s ego and cannot therefore be relieved by transference in the
analytic situation. How successful psychoanalytic therapy has been in
the treatment of psychoneuroses remains, however, a matter of
considerable dispute.
Although Freud’s theories were offensive to many in the Vienna of his
day, they began to attract a cosmopolitan group of supporters in the
early 1900s. In 1902 the Psychological Wednesday Circle began to gather
in Freud’s waiting room with a number of future luminaries in the
psychoanalytic movements in attendance. Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel
were often joined by guests such as Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung,
Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Max Eitingon, and A.A. Brill. In 1908 the group
was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and held its first
international congress in Salzburg. In the same year the first branch
society was opened in Berlin. In 1909 Freud, along with Jung and
Ferenczi, made a historic trip to Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
The lectures he gave there were soon published as Über Psychoanalyse
(1910; The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis), the first of
several introductions he wrote for a general audience. Along with a
series of vivid case studies—the most famous known colloquially as
“Dora” (1905), “Little Hans” (1909), “The Rat Man” (1909), “The
Psychotic Dr. Schreber” (1911), and “The Wolf Man” (1918)—they made his
ideas known to a wider public.
As might be expected of a movement whose treatment emphasized the
power of transference and the ubiquity of Oedipal conflict, its early
history is a tale rife with dissension, betrayal, apostasy, and
excommunication. The most widely noted schisms occurred with Adler in
1911, Stekel in 1912, and Jung in 1913; these were followed by later
breaks with Ferenczi, Rank, and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s. Despite
efforts by loyal disciples like Ernest Jones to exculpate Freud from
blame, subsequent research concerning his relations with former
disciples like Viktor Tausk have clouded the picture considerably.
Critics of the hagiographic legend of Freud have, in fact, had a
relatively easy time documenting the tension between Freud’s aspirations
to scientific objectivity and the extraordinarily fraught personal
context in which his ideas were developed and disseminated. Even well
after Freud’s death, his archivists’ insistence on limiting access to
potentially embarrassing material in his papers has reinforced the
impression that the psychoanalytic movement resembled more a sectarian
church than a scientific community (at least as the latter is ideally
understood).
Psychoanalytic theory » Toward a general theory
If the troubled history of its institutionalization served to call
psychoanalysis into question in certain quarters, so too did its
founder’s penchant for extrapolating his clinical findings into a more
ambitious general theory. As he admitted to Fliess in 1900, “I am
actually not a man of science at all. . . . I am nothing but a
conquistador by temperament, an adventurer.” Freud’s so-called
metapsychology soon became the basis for wide-ranging speculations about
cultural, social, artistic, religious, and anthropological phenomena.
Composed of a complicated and often revised mixture of economic,
dynamic, and topographical elements, the metapsychology was developed in
a series of 12 papers Freud composed during World War I, only some of
which were published in his lifetime. Their general findings appeared in
two books in the 1920s: Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the
Pleasure Principle) and Das Ich und das Es (1923; The Ego and the Id).
In these works, Freud attempted to clarify the relationship between
his earlier topographical division of the psyche into the unconscious,
preconscious, and conscious and his subsequent structural categorization
into id, ego, and superego. The id was defined in terms of the most
primitive urges for gratification in the infant, urges dominated by the
desire for pleasure through the release of tension and the cathexis of
energy. Ruled by no laws of logic, indifferent to the demands of
expediency, unconstrained by the resistance of external reality, the id
is ruled by what Freud called the primary process directly expressing
somatically generated instincts. Through the inevitable experience of
frustration the infant learns to adapt itself to the exigencies of
reality. The secondary process that results leads to the growth of the
ego, which follows what Freud called the reality principle in
contradistinction to the pleasure principle dominating the id. Here the
need to delay gratification in the service of self-preservation is
slowly learned in an effort to thwart the anxiety produced by
unfulfilled desires. What Freud termed defense mechanisms are developed
by the ego to deal with such conflicts. Repression is the most
fundamental, but Freud also posited an entire repertoire of others,
including reaction formation, isolation, undoing, denial, displacement,
and rationalization.
The last component in Freud’s trichotomy, the superego, develops from
the internalization of society’s moral commands through identification
with parental dictates during the resolution of the Oedipus complex.
Only partly conscious, the superego gains some of its punishing force by
borrowing certain aggressive elements in the id, which are turned inward
against the ego and produce feelings of guilt. But it is largely through
the internalization of social norms that the superego is constituted, an
acknowledgement that prevents psychoanalysis from conceptualizing the
psyche in purely biologistic or individualistic terms.
Freud’s understanding of the primary process underwent a crucial
shift in the course of his career. Initially he counterposed a libidinal
drive that seeks sexual pleasure to a self-preservation drive whose
telos is survival. But in 1914, while examining the phenomenon of
narcissism, he came to consider the latter instinct as merely a variant
of the former. Unable to accept so monistic a drive theory, Freud sought
a new dualistic alternative. He arrived at the speculative assertion
that there exists in the psyche an innate, regressive drive for stasis
that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. This striving for rest he
christened the Nirvana principle and the drive underlying it the death
instinct, or Thanatos, which he could substitute for self-preservation
as the contrary of the life instinct, or Eros.
Social and cultural studies
Freud’s mature instinct theory is in many ways a metaphysical construct,
comparable to Bergson’s élan vital or Schopenhauer’s Will. Emboldened by
its formulation, Freud launched a series of audacious studies that took
him well beyond his clinician’s consulting room. These he had already
commenced with investigations of Leonardo da Vinci (1910) and the novel
Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (1907). Here Freud attempted to psychoanalyze
works of art as symbolic expressions of their creator’s psychodynamics.
The fundamental premise that permitted Freud to examine cultural
phenomena was called sublimation in the Three Essays. The appreciation
or creation of ideal beauty, Freud contended, is rooted in primitive
sexual urges that are transfigured in culturally elevating ways. Unlike
repression, which produces only neurotic symptoms whose meaning is
unknown even to the sufferer, sublimation is a conflict-free resolution
of repression, which leads to intersubjectively available cultural
works. Although potentially reductive in its implications, the
psychoanalytic interpretation of culture can be justly called one of the
most powerful “hermeneutics of suspicion,” to borrow the French
philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, because it debunks idealist notions
of high culture as the alleged transcendence of baser concerns.
Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological
and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und Tabu (1913;
Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer’s explorations of the
Australian Aborigines, he interpreted the mixture of fear and reverence
for the totemic animal in terms of the child’s attitude toward the
parent of the same sex. The Aborigines’ insistence on exogamy was a
complicated defense against the strong incestuous desires felt by the
child for the parent of the opposite sex. Their religion was thus a
phylogenetic anticipation of the ontogenetic Oedipal drama played out in
modern man’s psychic development. But whereas the latter was purely an
intrapsychic phenomenon based on fantasies and fears, the former, Freud
boldly suggested, was based on actual historical events. Freud
speculated that the rebellion of sons against dominating fathers for
control over women had culminated in actual parricide. Ultimately
producing remorse, this violent act led to atonement through incest
taboos and the prohibitions against harming the father-substitute, the
totemic object or animal. When the fraternal clan replaced the
patriarchal horde, true society emerged. For renunciation of individual
aspirations to replace the slain father and a shared sense of guilt in
the primal crime led to a contractual agreement to end internecine
struggle and band together instead. The totemic ancestor then could
evolve into the more impersonal God of the great religions.
A subsequent effort to explain social solidarity, Massenpsychologie
und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego),
drew on the antidemocratic crowd psychologists of the late 19th century,
most notably Gustave Le Bon. Here the disillusionment with liberal,
rational politics that some have seen as the seedbed of much of Freud’s
work was at its most explicit (the only competitor being the debunking
psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson he wrote jointly with William Bullitt
in 1930, which was not published until 1967). All mass phenomena, Freud
suggested, are characterized by intensely regressive emotional ties
stripping individuals of their self-control and independence. Rejecting
possible alternative explanations such as hypnotic suggestion or
imitation and unwilling to follow Jung in postulating a group mind,
Freud emphasized instead individual libidinal ties to the group’s
leader. Group formation is like regression to a primal horde with the
leader as the original father. Drawing on the army and the Roman
Catholic Church as his examples, Freud never seriously considered less
authoritarian modes of collective behaviour.
Social and cultural studies » Religion, civilization, and discontents
Freud’s bleak appraisal of social and political solidarity was
replicated, if in somewhat more nuanced form, in his attitude toward
religion. Although many accounts of Freud’s development have discerned
debts to one or another aspect of his Jewish background, debts Freud
himself partly acknowledged, his avowed position was deeply irreligious.
As noted in the account of Totem and Taboo, he always attributed the
belief in divinities ultimately to the displaced worship of human
ancestors. One of the most potent sources of his break with former
disciples like Jung was precisely this skepticism toward spirituality.
In his 1907 essay “Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen” (“Obsessive
Acts and Religious Practices,” later translated as “Obsessive Actions
and Religious Practices”) Freud had already contended that obsessional
neuroses are private religious systems and religions themselves no more
than the obsessional neuroses of mankind. Twenty years later, in Die
Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; The Future of an Illusion), he elaborated
this argument, adding that belief in God is a mythic reproduction of the
universal state of infantile helplessness. Like an idealized father, God
is the projection of childish wishes for an omnipotent protector. If
children can outgrow their dependence, he concluded with cautious
optimism, then humanity may also hope to leave behind its immature
heteronomy.
The simple Enlightenment faith underlying this analysis quickly
elicited critical comment, which led to its modification. In an exchange
of letters with the French novelist Romain Rolland, Freud came to
acknowledge a more intractable source of religious sentiment. The
opening section of his next speculative tract, Das Unbehagen in der
Kultur (1930; Civilization and Its Discontents), was devoted to what
Rolland had dubbed the oceanic feeling. Freud described it as a sense of
indissoluble oneness with the universe, which mystics in particular have
celebrated as the fundamental religious experience. Its origin, Freud
claimed, is nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal infant’s sense of unity with
its mother. Although still rooted in infantile helplessness, religion
thus derives to some extent from the earliest stage of postnatal
development. Regressive longings for its restoration are possibly
stronger than those for a powerful father and thus cannot be worked
through by way of a collective resolution of the Oedipus complex.
Civilization and Its Discontents, written after the onset of Freud’s
struggle with cancer of the jaw and in the midst of the rise of European
Fascism, was a profoundly unconsoling book. Focusing on the prevalence
of human guilt and the impossibility of achieving unalloyed happiness,
Freud contended that no social solution of the discontents of mankind is
possible. All civilizations, no matter how well planned, can provide
only partial relief. For aggression among men is not due to unequal
property relations or political injustice, which can be rectified by
laws, but rather to the death instinct redirected outward.
Even Eros, Freud suggested, is not fully in harmony with
civilization, for the libidinal ties creating collective solidarity are
aim-inhibited and diffuse rather than directly sexual. Thus, there is
likely to be tension between the urge for sexual gratification and the
sublimated love for mankind. Furthermore, because Eros and Thanatos are
themselves at odds, conflict and the guilt it engenders are virtually
inevitable. The best to be hoped for is a life in which the repressive
burdens of civilization are in rough balance with the realization of
instinctual gratification and the sublimated love for mankind. But
reconciliation of nature and culture is impossible, for the price of any
civilization is the guilt produced by the necessary thwarting of man’s
instinctual drives. Although elsewhere Freud had postulated mature,
heterosexual genitality and the capacity to work productively as the
hallmarks of health and urged that “where id is, there shall ego be,” it
is clear that he held out no hope for any collective relief from the
discontents of civilization. He only offered an ethic of resigned
authenticity, which taught the wisdom of living without the possibility
of redemption, either religious or secular.
Social and cultural studies » Last days
Freud’s final major work, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische
Religion (1938; Moses and Monotheism), was more than just the
“historical novel” he had initially thought to subtitle it. Moses had
long been a figure of capital importance for Freud; indeed
Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses had been the subject of an essay
written in 1914. The book itself sought to solve the mystery of Moses’
origins by claiming that he was actually an aristocratic Egyptian by
birth who had chosen the Jewish people to keep alive an earlier
monotheistic religion. Too stern and demanding a taskmaster, Moses was
slain in a Jewish revolt, and a second, more pliant leader, also called
Moses, rose in his place. The guilt engendered by the parricidal act
was, however, too much to endure, and the Jews ultimately returned to
the religion given them by the original Moses as the two figures were
merged into one in their memories. Here Freud’s ambivalence about his
religious roots and his father’s authority was allowed to pervade a
highly fanciful story that reveals more about its author than its
ostensible subject.
Moses and Monotheism was published in the year Hitler invaded
Austria. Freud was forced to flee to England. His books were among the
first to be burned, as the fruits of a “Jewish science,” when the Nazis
took over Germany. Although psychotherapy was not banned in the Third
Reich, where Field Marshall Hermann Göring’s cousin headed an official
institute, psychoanalysis essentially went into exile, most notably to
North America and England. Freud himself died only a few weeks after
World War II broke out, at a time when his worst fears about the
irrationality lurking behind the facade of civilization were being
realized. Freud’s death did not, however, hinder the reception and
dissemination of his ideas. A plethora of Freudian schools emerged to
develop psychoanalysis in different directions. In fact, despite the
relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all
of his ideas, Freud has remained one of the most potent figures in the
intellectual landscape of the 20th century.
Martin Evan Jay
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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
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Type of work: Psychological study
Author: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
First published: 1900
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In March, 1931, in a foreword to the third English edition ofThe
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud expressed the opinion that the volume
contained the most valuable of all the discoveries he had been fortunate
enough to make.
The author's estimation of his work concurs with that of most students
and critics. The ideas that dreams are wish-fulfillments, that the dream
disguises the wishes of the unconscious, that dreams are always
important, always significant, and that they express infantile
wishes—particularly for the death of the parent of the same sex as that
of the dreamer—all appear in this masterpiece of psychological
interpretation. Here the Oedipus complex is first named and explained,
and the method of psychoanalysis is given impetus and credibility by its
application to the analysis of dreams.
It is a common criticism of Freud to say that the father of
psychoanalysis, although inspired in this and other works, went too far
in his generalizations concerning the basic drives of the unconscious.
Freud is charged with regarding every latent wish as having a sexual
object, and he is criticized for supposing that dreams can be understood
as complexes of such universally significant symbols as umbrellas and
boxes.
Although Freud argues that repressed wishes that show themselves in
disguised form in dreams generally have something to do with the
unsatisfied sexual cravings of childhood—for dreams are important and
concern themselves only with matters we cannot resolve by conscious
deliberation and action—he allows for the dream satisfaction of other
wishes that reality has frustrated: the desire for the continued
existence of a loved one already dead, the desire for sleep as a
continuation of the escape from reality, the desire for a return to
childhood, the desire for revenge when revenge is impossible.
As for the charge that Freud regarded dreams as complexes of symbols
having the same significance for all dreamers, this is clearly
unwarranted. Freud explicitly states that "only the context can furnish
the correct meaning" of a dream symbol. He rejects as wholly inadequate
the use of any such simple key as a dream book of symbols. Each dreamer
utilizes the material of his own experience in his own way, and only by
a careful analytical study of associations—obscured by the manifest
content of the dream—is it possible to get at the particular use of
symbols in an individual's dream. It is worth noting, Freud admits, that
many symbols recur with much the same intent in many dreams of different
persons, but this knowledge must be used judiciously. The agreement in
the use of symbols is only partly a matter of cultural tendencies; it is
largely attributable to limitations of the imagination imposed by the
material itself: "To use long, stiff objects and weapons as symbols of
the male genitals, or hollow objects (chests, boxes, etc.) as symbols of
the female genitals, is certainly not permitted by the imagination."
It is not surprising that most of the symbols discussed by Freud, either
as typical symbols or as symbols in individual cases, are sexually
significant. Although Freud did not regard all dreams as the
wish-fulfillments of repressed sexual desires, he did suppose that a
greater number of dreams have a sexual connotation: "The more one is
occupied with the solution of dreams, the readier one becomes to
acknowledge that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual
material and give expression to erotic wishes." Freud adds, "In
dream-interpretation this importance of the sexual complexes must never
be forgotten, though one must not, of course, exaggerate it to the
exclusion of all other factors."
The technique of dream interpretation is certainly not exhausted,
according to Freud, by the technique of symbol interpretation. Dreams
involve the use of the images dreamed, the manifest dream-content, as a
way of disguising the unconscious "dream-thoughts," or latent
dream-content. The significance of a dream may be revealed only after
one has understood the dramatic use of the symbolism of the dream, the
condensation of the material, the displacement of the conventional
meaning of a symbol or utterance, or even a displacement of the "center"
of the dream-thoughts; that is, the manifest dream may center on a
matter removed from the central concern of the latent dream. As Freud
explains the problems of dream interpretation, making numerous
references to dream examples, it becomes clear that dream interpretation
must be at least as ingenious as dream-work—and there is nothing more
ingenious.
Freud begins The Interpretation of Dreams with a history of the
scientific literature of dream problems from ancient times to 1900. He
then proceeds to make his basic claim: that dreams are interpretable as
wish-fulfillments. To illustrate this point, he begins with an involved
dream of his own, justifying his procedure by arguing that self-analysis
is possible and, even when faulty, illustrative.
A problem arises with the consideration of painful dreams. If dreams are
wish-fulfillments, why are some dreams nightmares? Who wishes to be
terrified? Freud's answer is that the problem arises from a confusion
between the manifest and the latent dream. What is painful, considered
as manifest, may, because of its disguised significance, be regarded as
satisfactory to the unconscious. When one realizes, in addition, that
many suppressed wished are desires for punishment, the painful dream
presents itself as a fulfillment of such wishes. To understand the
possibility of painful dreams, it is necessary to consider Freud's
amended formula: "The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a
(suppressed or repressed) wish."
In describing the method most useful in enabling a person to recall his
dream by facilitating memory and by inhabiting the censorship tendency
of the person recounting the dream, Freud presents what has become known
as the psychoanalytic method of free association. He suggests that the
patient be put into a restful position with his eyes closed, that the
patient be told not to criticize his thoughts or to withhold the
expression of them, and that the patient continue to be impartial about
his ideas. This problem of eliminating censorship while recounting the
dream is merely an extension of the problem of dealing with the
censorship imposed by the dreamer while dreaming. The dreamer does not
want to acknowledge his desires; for one reason or another he has
repressed them. The fulfillment of the suppressed desire can be
tolerated by the dreamer only if he leaves out anything which would be
understandable to the waking mind. Consequently, only a laborious
process of undoing the dream-work can result in some understanding of
the meaning the censor tries to hide.
Among the interesting subsidiary ideas of Freud's theory is the idea
that the dream-stimulus is always to be found among the experiences of
the hours prior to sleeping. Some incident from the day becomes the
material of the dream, its provocative image. Yet although the
dream-stimulus is from the day preceding sleep, the repressed wish which
the dream expresses and fulfills is from childhood, at least in the
majority of cases: "The deeper we go into the analysis of dreams, the
more often are we put on to the track of childish experiences which play
the part of dream-sources in the latent dream-content." To explain the
difficulty of getting at the experiences in childhood which provide the
latent dream-content, Freud argues for a conception of dreams as
stratified: In the dream layers of meaning are involved, and it is only
at the lowest stratum that the source in some experience of childhood
may be discovered.
Among the typical dreams mentioned by Freud are the embarrassment dream
of nakedness, interpreted as an exhibition dream, fulfilling a wish to
return to childhood (the time when one ran about naked without upsetting
anyone); the death-wish dream in which one dreams of the death of a
beloved person, interpreted as a dream showing repressed hostility
toward brother or sister, father or mother; and the examination dream in
which one dreams of the disgrace of flunking an examination,
interpreted as reflecting the ineradicable memories of punishments in
childhood.
Of these typical dreams, the death-wish dream directed to the father (by
the son) or to the mother (by the daughter) is explained in terms of the
drama of Oedipus by Sophocles. In the old Greek play, Oedipus
unwittingly murders his own father and marries his mother. When he
discovers his deeds, he blinds himself and exiles himself from Thebes.
The appeal of the drama is explained by Freud as resulting from its role
as a wish-fulfillment. The play reveals the inner self, the self which
directed its first sexual impulses toward the mother and its first
jealous hatred toward the father. These feelings have been repressed
during the course of our developing maturity, but they remain latent,
ready to manifest themselves only in dreams somewhat more obscure than
the Oedipus drama itself. Freud mentions Hamlet as another play in which
the same wish is shown, although in Hamlet the fulfillment is repressed.
Freud accounts for Hamlet's reluctance to complete the task of revenge
by pointing out that Hamlet cannot bring himself to kill a man who
accomplished what he himself wishes he had accomplished: the murder of
his father and marriage to his mother.
In his discussion of the psychology of the dream process, Freud calls
attention to the fact that dreams are quickly forgotten—a natural
consequence, if his theory is correct. This fact creates problems for
the analyst who wishes to interpret dreams in order to discover the root
of neurotic disturbances. Yet, the self that forgets is the same self
that dreamed, and it is possible by following the implications of even
superficial associations to get back to the substance of the dream.
Realizing that many people would be offended by his ideas, Freud
attempted to forestall criticism by insisting on the universal
application of his theory and by claiming that dreams themselves—since
they are not acts—are morally innocent, whatever their content. To a
degree, intellectual historians and scholars accept the universal
application of his theory, but they criticize his attempt to link his
method of dream interpretation to his theory of neurosis. His most
vociferous critics complain that once he fastened on a particular theory
about the meaning of a patient's dream, he demanded very little to
substantiate that theory and, in fact, discounted evidence that might
contradict it. They point to the famous case of Dora to illustrate
Freud's stubborn adherence to his theory.
Dora came to Freud suffering from convulsions and fainting fits,
catarrh, shortness of breath, and a dragging leg. Freud analyzed her
dreams and concluded that all of her symptoms were the result of
hysterical thinking on her part. His critics charge that his failure to
put Dora through a physical examination or to investigate parallel
symptoms in her tubercular and syphilitic father demonstrate the
weakness of Freud's theory and his blind spot with respect to its
application.
There is still little question but that Freud's contribution to
psychology will remain one of the great discoveries of the human mind.
It is more commonly accepted a century later, however, that Freud's
contribution is more to the realm of the philosophic than to the
scientific. It is no longer accepted with certainty that Freud
discovered a cure for neurosis or that he was able to translate the
language of the unconscious. Through his own self analysis, however, he
revealed to the world a mind so brilliant and complex that legions of
analysts follow respectfully, if not blindly, in his footsteps.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
Translated by A. A. Brill (1913)
Originally publish in New York by Macmillan.
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contents:
Preface
Chapter 1 (part 1, 2) The Scientific Literature of Dream-Problems (up to
1900)
Chapter 2 The Method
of Dream Interpretation
Chapter 3 The Dream as
Wish Fulfilment
Chapter 4 Distortion
in Dreams
Chapter 5 (part 1, 2) The
Material and Sources of Dreams
Chapter 6 (part 1,
2, 3, 4) The
Dream-Work
Chapter 7 (part 1, 2)
The Psychology of the Dream Process
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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
Wheras there was a space of nine years between the first and second
editions of this book, the need of a third edition was apparent when
little more than a year had elapsed. I ought to be gratified by this
change; but if I was unwilling previously to attribute the neglect of my
work to its small value, I cannot take the interest which is now making
its appearance as proof of its quality.
The advance of scientific knowledge has not left The Interpretation of
Dreams untouched. When I wrote this book in 1899 there was as yet no
"sexual theory," and the analysis of the more complicated forms of the
psychoneuroses was still in its infancy. The interpretation of dreams
was intended as an expedient to facilitate the psychological analysis of
the neuroses; but since then a profounder understanding of the neuroses
has contributed towards the comprehension of the dream. The doctrine of
dream-interpretation itself has evolved in a direction which was
insufficiently emphasized in the first edition of this book. From my own
experience, and the works of Stekel and other writers, [1] I have since
learned to appreciate more accurately the significance of symbolism in
dreams (or rather, in unconscious thought). In the course of years, a
mass of data has accumulated which demands consideration. I have
endeavored to deal with these innovations by interpolations in the text
and footnotes. If these additions do not always quite adjust themselves
to the framework of the treatise, or if the earlier text does not
everywhere come up to the standard of our present knowledge, I must beg
indulgence for this deficiency, since it is only the result and
indication of the increasingly rapid advance of our science. I will even
venture to predict the directions in which further editions of this
book- should there be a demand for them- may diverge from previous
editions. Dream- interpretation must seek a closer union with the rich
material of poetry, myth, and popular idiom, and it must deal more
faithfully than has hitherto been possible with the relations of dreams
to the neuroses and to mental derangement.
Herr Otto Rank has afforded me valuable assistance in the selection
of supplementary examples, and has revised the proofs of this edition. I
have to thank him and many other colleagues for their contributions and
corrections.
Vienna, 1911 -
[1] Omitted in subsequent editions.
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
That there should have been a demand for a second edition of this
book--a book which cannot be described as easy to read--before the
completion of its first decade is not to be explained by the interest of
the professional circles to which I was addressing myself. My
psychiatric colleagues have not, apparently, attempted to look beyond
the astonishment which may at first have been aroused by my novel
conception of the dream; and the professional philosophers, who are
anyhow accustomed to disposing of the dream in a few sentences- mostly
the same- as a supplement to the states of consciousness, have evidently
failed to realize that precisely in this connection it was possible to
make all manner of deductions, such as must lead to a fundamental
modification of our psychological doctrines. The attitude of the
scientific reviewers was such to lead me to expect that the fate of the
book would be to fall into oblivion; and the little flock of faithful
adherents, who follow my lead in the therapeutic application of
psycho-analysis, and interpret dreams by my method, could not have
exhausted the first edition of this book. I feel, therefore, that my
thanks are due to the wider circle of cultured and inquiring readers
whose sympathy has induced me, after the lapse of nine years, once more
to take up this difficult work, which has so many fundamental bearings.
I am glad to be able to say that I found little in the book that
called for alteration. Here and there I have interpolated fresh
material, or have added opinions based on more extensive experience, or
I have sought to elaborate individual points; but the essential passages
treating of dreams and their interpretation, and the psychological
doctrines to be deduced therefrom, have been left unaltered;
subjectively, at all events, they have stood the test of time. Those who
are acquainted with my other writings (on the aetiology and mechanism of
the psychoneuroses) will know that I never offer unfinished work as
finished, and that I have always endeavoured to revise my conclusions in
accordance with my maturing opinions; but as regards the subject of the
dream-life, I am able to stand by my original text. In my many years'
work upon the problems of the neuroses I have often hesitated, and I
have often gone astray; and then it was always the interpretation of
dreams that restored my self-confidence. My many scientific opponents
are actuated by a wise instinct when they decline to follow me into the
region of oneirology.
Even the material of this book, even my own dreams, defaced by time
or superseded, by means of which I have demonstrated the rules of
dream-interpretation, revealed, when I came to revise these pages, a
continuity that resisted revision. For me, of course, this book has an
additional subjective significance, which I did not understand until
after its completion. It reveals itself to me as a piece of my
self-analysis, as my reaction to the death of my father, that is, to the
most important event, the most poignant loss in a man's life. Once I had
realized this, I felt that I could not obliterate the traces of this
influence. But to my readers the material from which they learn to
evaluate and interpret dreams will be a matter of indifference.
Where an inevitable comment could not be fitted into the old context,
I have indicated by square brackets that it does not occur in the first
edition.[2]
Berchtesgaden, 1908 -
[2] Omitted in subsequent editions.
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INTRODUCTORY NOTE (to the first edition)
In this volume I have attempted to expound the methods and results of
dream-interpretation; and in so doing I do not think I have overstepped
the boundary of neuro-pathological science. For the dream proves on
psychological investigation to be the first of a series of abnormal
psychic formations, a series whose succeeding members- the hysterical
phobias, the obsessions, the delusions- must, for practical reasons,
claim the attention of the physician. The dream, as we shall see, has no
title to such practical importance, but for that very reason its
theoretical value as a typical formation is all the greater, and the
physician who cannot explain the origin of dream-images will strive in
vain to understand the phobias and the obsessive and delusional ideas,
or to influence them by therapeutic methods.
But the very context to which our subject owes its importance must be
held responsible for the deficiencies of the following chapters. The
abundant lacunae in this exposition represent so many points of contact
at which the problem of dream-formation is linked up with the more
comprehensive problems of psycho- pathology; problems which cannot be
treated in these pages, but which, if time and powers suffice and if
further material presents itself, may be elaborated elsewhere.
The peculiar nature of the material employed to exemplify the
interpretation of dreams has made the writing even of this treatise a
difficult task. Consideration of the methods of dream- interpretation
will show why the dreams recorded in the literature on the subject, or
those collected by persons unknown to me, were useless for my purpose; I
had only the choice between my own dreams and those of the patients whom
I was treating by psychoanalytic methods. But this later material was
inadmissible, since the dream-processes were undesirably complicated by
the intervention of neurotic characters. And if I relate my own dreams I
must inevitably reveal to the gaze of strangers more of the intimacies
of my psychic life than is agreeable to me, and more than seems fitting
in a writer who is not a poet but a scientific investigator. To do so is
painful, but unavoidable; I have submitted to the necessity, for
otherwise I could not have demonstrated my psychological conclusions.
Sometimes, of course, I could not resist the temptation to mitigate my
indiscretions by omissions and substitutions; but wherever I have done
so the value of the example cited has been very definitely diminished. I
can only express the hope that my readers will understand my difficult
position, and will be indulgent; and further, that all those persons who
are in any way concerned in the dreams recorded will not seek to forbid
our dream-life at all events to exercise freedom of thought!
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CHAPTER 1 (part 1)
THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF
DREAM-PROBLEMS (UP TO 1900)
In the following pages I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological
technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the
application of this technique every dream will reveal itself as a
psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be
assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking
state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which
underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from
these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or
cooperation is responsible for our dreams. This done, my investigation
will terminate, as it will have reached the point where the problem of
the dream merges into more comprehensive problems, and to solve these we
must have recourse to material of a different kind.
I shall begin by giving a short account of the views of earlier writers
on this subject, and of the status of the dream-problem in contemporary
science; since in the course of this treatise I shall not often have
occasion to refer to either. In spite of thousands of years of
endeavour, little progress has been made in the scientific understanding
of dreams. This fact has been so universally acknowledged by previous
writers on the subject that it seems hardly necessary to quote
individual opinions. The reader will find, in the works listed at the
end of this work, many stimulating observations, and plenty of
interesting material relating to our subject, but little or nothing that
concerns the true nature of the dream, or that solves definitely any of
its enigmas. The educated layman, of course, knows even less of the
matter.
The conception of the dream that was held in prehistoric ages by
primitive peoples, and the influence which it may have exerted on the
formation of their conceptions of the universe, and of the soul, is a
theme of such great interest that it is only with reluctance that I
refrain from dealing with it in these pages. I will refer the reader to
the well-known works of Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Herbert
Spencer, E. B. Tylor, and other writers; I will only add that we shall
not realize the importance of these problems and speculations until we
have completed the task of dream- interpretation that lies before us.
A reminiscence of the concept of the dream that was held in primitive
times seems to underlie the evaluation of the dream which was current
among the peoples of classical antiquity.[1] They took it for granted
that dreams were related to the world of the supernatural beings in whom
they believed, and that they brought inspirations from the gods and
demons. Moreover, it appeared to them that dreams must serve a special
purpose in respect of the dreamer; that, as a rule, they predicted the
future. The extraordinary variations in the content of dreams, and in
the impressions which they produced on the dreamer, made it, of course,
very difficult to formulate a coherent conception of them, and
necessitated manifold differentiations and group-formations, according
to their value and reliability. The valuation of dreams by the
individual philosophers of antiquity naturally depended on the
importance which they were prepared to attribute to manticism in
general.
In the two works of Aristotle in which there is mention of dreams,
they are already regarded as constituting a problem of psychology. We
are told that the dream is not god-sent, that it is not of divine but of
demonic origin. For nature is really demonic, not divine; that is to
say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the
laws of the human spirit, which has, of course, a kinship with the
divine. The dream is defined as the psychic activity of the sleeper,
inasmuch as he is asleep. Aristotle was acquainted with some of the
characteristics of the dream-life; for example, he knew that a dream
converts the slight sensations perceived in sleep into intense
sensations ("one imagines that one is walking through fire, and feels
hot, if this or that part of the body becomes only quite slightly
warm"), which led him to conclude that dreams might easily betray to the
physician the first indications of an incipient physical change which
escaped observation during the day.[2]
As has been said, those writers of antiquity who preceded Aristotle
did not regard the dream as a product of the dreaming psyche, but as an
inspiration of divine origin, and in ancient times the two opposing
tendencies which we shall find throughout the ages in respect of the
evaluation of the dream- life were already perceptible. The ancients
distinguished between the true and valuable dreams which were sent to
the dreamer as warnings, or to foretell future events, and the vain,
fraudulent, and empty dreams whose object was to misguide him or lead
him to destruction.
Gruppe[3] speaks of such a classification of dreams, citing Macrobius
and Artemidorus: "Dreams were divided into two classes; the first class
was believed to be influenced only by the present (or the past), and was
unimportant in respect of the future; it included the enuknia
(insomnia), which directly reproduce a given idea or its opposite; e.g.,
hunger or its satiation; and the phantasmata, which elaborate the given
idea phantastically, as e.g. the nightmare, ephialtes. The second class
of dreams, on the other hand, was determinative of the future. To this
belonged:
1. Direct prophecies received in the dream (chrematismos, oraculum);
2. the foretelling of a future event (orama, visio);
3. the symbolic dream, which requires interpretation (oneiros,
somnium.)
This theory survived for many centuries."
Connected with these varying estimations of the dream was the problem
of "dream-interpretation." Dreams in general were expected to yield
important solutions, but not every dream was immediately understood, and
it was impossible to be sure that a certain incomprehensible dream did
not really foretell something of importance, so that an effort was made
to replace the incomprehensible content of the dream by something that
should be at once comprehensible and significant. In later antiquity
Artemidorus of Daldis was regarded as the greatest authority on
dream-interpretation. His comprehensive works must serve to compensate
us for the lost works of a similar nature[4] The pre-scientific
conception of the dream which obtained among the ancients was, of
course, in perfect keeping with their general conception of the
universe, which was accustomed to project as an external reality that
which possessed reality only in the life of the psyche. Further, it
accounted for the main impression made upon the waking life by the
morning memory of the dream; for in this memory the dream, as compared
with the rest of the psychic content, seems to be something alien,
coming, as it were, from another world. It would be an error to suppose
that theory of the supernatural origin of dreams lacks followers even in
our own times; for quite apart from pietistic and mystical writers- who
cling, as they are perfectly justified in doing, to the remnants of the
once predominant realm of the supernatural until these remnants have
been swept away by scientific explanation- we not infrequently find that
quite intelligent persons, who in other respects are averse from
anything of a romantic nature, go so far as to base their religious
belief in the existence and co-operation of superhuman spiritual powers
on the inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreams (Haffner). The
validity ascribed to the dream-life by certain schools of philosophy-
for example, by the school of Schelling- is a distinct reminiscence of
the undisputed belief in the divinity of dreams which prevailed in
antiquity; and for some thinkers the mantic or prophetic power of dreams
is still a subject of debate. This is due to the fact that the
explanations attempted by psychology are too inadequate to cope with the
accumulated material, however strongly the scientific thinker may feel
that such superstitious doctrines should be repudiated.
To write strongly the history of our scientific knowledge of the
dream- problem is extremely difficult, because, valuable though this
knowledge may be in certain respects, no real progress in a definite
direction is as yet discernible. No real foundation of verified results
has hitherto been established on which future investigators might
continue to build. Every new author approaches the same problems afresh,
and from the very beginning. If I were to enumerate such authors in
chronological order, giving a survey of the opinions which each has held
concerning the problems of the dream, I should be quite unable to draw a
clear and complete picture of the present state of our knowledge on the
subject. I have therefore preferred to base my method of treatment on
themes rather than on authors, and in attempting the solution of each
problem of the dream I shall cite the material found in the literature
of the subject.
But as I have not succeeded in mastering the whole of this
literature- for it is widely dispersed, and interwoven with the
literature of other subjects- I must ask my readers to rest content with
my survey as it stands, provided that no fundamental fact or important
point of view has been overlooked.
Until recently most authors have been inclined to deal with the
subjects of sleep and dreams in conjunction, and together with these
they have commonly dealt with analogous conditions of a
psycho-pathological nature, and other dream-like phenomena, such as
hallucinations, visions, etc. In recent works, on the other hand, there
has been a tendency to keep more closely to the theme, and to consider,
as a special subject, the separate problems of the dream-life. In this
change I should like to perceive an expression of the growing conviction
that enlightenment and agreement in such obscure matters may be attained
only by a series of detailed investigations. Such a detailed
investigation, and one of a special psychological nature, is expounded
in these pages. I have had little occasion to concern myself with the
problem of sleep, as this is essentially a physiological problem,
although the changes in the functional determination of the psychic
apparatus should be included in a description of the sleeping state. The
literature of sleep will therefore not be considered here.
A scientific interest in the phenomena of dreams as such leads us to
propound the following problems, which to a certain extent,
interdependent, merge into one another.
A. The Relation of the Dream to the Waking State
The naive judgment of the dreamer on waking assumes that the dream-
even if it does not come from another world- has at all events
transported the dreamer into another world. The old physiologist,
Burdach, to whom we are indebted for a careful and discriminating
description of the phenomena of dreams, expressed this conviction in a
frequently quoted passage (p. 474): "The waking life, with its trials
and joys, its pleasures and pains, is never repeated; on the contrary,
the dream aims at relieving us of these. Even when our whole mind is
filled with one subject, when our hearts are rent by bitter grief, or
when some task has been taxing our mental capacity to the utmost, the
dream either gives us something entirely alien, or it selects for its
combinations only a few elements of reality; or it merely enters into
the key of our mood, and symbolizes reality." J. H. Fichte (I. 541)
speaks in precisely the same sense of supplementary dreams, calling them
one of the secret, self-healing benefits of the psyche. L. Strumpell
expresses himself to the same effect in his Natur und Entstehung der
Traume, a study which is deservedly held in high esteem. "He who dreams
turns his back upon the world of waking consciousness" (p. 16); "In the
dream the memory of the orderly content of waking consciousness and its
normal behaviour is almost entirely lost" (p. 17); "The almost complete
and unencumbered isolation of the psyche in the dream from the regular
normal content and course of the waking state..." (p. 19).
Yet the overwhelming majority of writers on the subject have adopted
the contrary view of the relation of the dream to waking life. Thus
Haffner (p. 19): "To begin with, the dream continues the waking life.
Our dreams always connect themselves with such ideas as have shortly
before been present in our consciousness. Careful examination will
nearly always detect a thread by which the dream has linked itself to
the experiences of the previous day." Weygandt (p. 6) flatly contradicts
the statement of Burdach. "For it may often be observed, apparently
indeed in the great majority of dreams, that they lead us directly back
into everyday life, instead of releasing us from it." Maury (p. 56)
expresses the same idea in a concise formula: "Nous revons de ce que
nous avons vu, dit, desire, ou fait."[5] Jessen, in his Psychologie,
published in 1855 (p. 530), is rather more explicit: "The content of
dreams is always more or less determined by the personality, the age,
sex, station in life, education and habits, and by the events and
experiences of the whole past life of the individual."
The philosopher, I. G. E. Maas, adopts the most unequivocal attitude
in respect of this question (Uber die Leidenschaften, 1805): "Experience
corroborates our assertion that we dream most frequently of those things
toward which our warmest passions are directed. This shows us that our
passions must influence the generation of our dreams. The ambitious man
dreams of the laurels which he has won (perhaps only in imagination), or
has still to win, while the lover occupies himself, in his dreams, with
the object of his dearest hopes.... All the sensual desires and
loathings which slumber in the heart, if they are stimulated by any
cause, may combine with other ideas and give rise to a dream; or these
ideas may mingle in an already existing dream."[6]
The ancients entertained the same idea concerning the dependence of
the dream-content on life. I will quote Radestock (p. 139): "When
Xerxes, before his expedition against Greece, was dissuaded from his
resolution by good counsel, but was again and again incited by dreams to
undertake it, one of the old, rational dream-interpreters of the
Persians, Artabanus, told him, and very appropriately, that dream-images
for the most part contain that of which one has been thinking in the
waking state."
In the didactic poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (IV. 962),
there occurs this passage:
"Et quo quisque fere studio devinctus adhaeret, aut quibus in rebus
multum sumus ante morati atque in ea ratione fuit contenta magis mens,
in somnis eadem plerumque videmur obire; causidici causas agere et
componere leges, induperatores pugnare ac proelia obire,"... etc.,
etc.[7] Cicero (De Divinatione, II. LXVII) says, in a similar strain, as
does also Maury many centuries later: "Maximeque 'reliquiae' rerum earum
moventur in animis et agitantur, de quibus vigilantes aut cogitavimus
aut egimus."[8]
The contradiction between these two views concerning the relation
between dream life and waking life seems indeed irresolvable. Here we
may usefully cite the opinion of F. W. Hildebrandt (1875), who held that
on the whole the peculiarities of the dream can only be described as "a
series of contrasts which apparently amount to contradictions" (p. 8).
"The first of these contrasts is formed by the strict isolation or
seclusion of the dream from true and actual life on the one hand, and on
the other hand by the continuous encroachment of the one upon the other,
and the constant dependence of the one upon the other. The dream is
something absolutely divorced from the reality experienced during the
waking state; one may call it an existence hermetically sealed up and
insulated from real life by an unbridgeable chasm. It frees us from
reality, blots out the normal recollection of reality, and sets us in
another world and a totally different life, which fundamentally has
nothing in common with real life...." Hildebrandt then asserts that in
falling asleep our whole being, with its forms of existence, disappears
"as through an invisible trapdoor." In one's dream one is perhaps making
a voyage to St. Helena in order to offer the imprisoned Napoleon an
exquisite vintage of Moselle. One is most affably received by the
ex-emperor, and one feels almost sorry when, on waking, the interesting
illusion is destroyed. But let us now compare the situation existing in
the dream with the actual reality. The dreamer has never been a
wine-merchant, and has no desire to become one. He has never made a
sea-voyage, and St. Helena is the last place in the world that he would
choose as the destination of such a voyage. The dreamer feels no
sympathy for Napoleon, but on the contrary a strong patriotic aversion.
And lastly, the dreamer was not yet among the living when Napoleon died
on the island of St. Helena; so that it was beyond the realms of
possibility that he should have had any personal relations with
Napoleon. The dream- experience thus appears as something entirely
foreign, interpolated between two mutually related and successive
periods of time.
"Nevertheless," continues Hildebrandt, "the apparent contrary is just
as true and correct. I believe that side by side with this seclusion and
insulation there may still exist the most intimate interrelation. We may
therefore justly say: Whatever the dream may offer us, it derives its
material from reality, and from the psychic life centered upon this
reality. However extraordinary the dream may seem, it can never detach
itself from the real world, and its most sublime as well as its most
ridiculous constructions must always borrow their elementary material
either from that which our eyes have beheld in the outer world, or from
that which has already found a place somewhere in our waking thoughts;
in other words, it must be taken from that which we have already
experienced, either objectively or subjectively."
B. The Material of Dreams- Memory in Dreams
That all the material composing the content of a dream is somehow
derived from experience, that it is reproduced or remembered in the
dream- this at least may be accepted as an incontestable fact. Yet it
would be wrong to assume that such a connection between the
dream-content and reality will be easily obvious from a comparison
between the two. On the contrary, the connection must be carefully
sought, and in quite a number of cases it may for a long while elude
discovery. The reason for this is to be found in a number of
peculiarities evinced by the faculty of memory in dreams; which
peculiarities, though generally observed, have hitherto defied
explanation. It will be worth our while to examine these characteristics
exhaustively.
To begin with, it happens that certain material appears in the dream-
content which cannot be subsequently recognized, in the waking state, as
being part of one's knowledge and experience. One remembers clearly
enough having dreamed of the thing in question, but one cannot recall
the actual experience or the time of its occurrence. The dreamer is
therefore in the dark as to the source which the dream has tapped, and
is even tempted to believe in an independent productive activity on the
part of the dream, until, often long afterwards, a fresh episode
restores the memory of that former experience, which had been given up
for lost, and so reveals the source of the dream. One is therefore
forced to admit that in the dream something was known and remembered
that cannot be remembered in the waking state.[9]
Delboeuf relates from his own experience an especially impressive
example of this kind. He saw in his dream the courtyard of his house
covered with snow, and found there two little lizards, half-frozen and
buried in the snow. Being a lover of animals he picked them up, warmed
them, and put them back into the hole in the wall which was reserved
especially for them. He also gave them a few fronds of a little fern
which was growing on the wall, and of which he knew they were very fond.
In the dream he knew the name of the plant; Asplenium ruta muralis. The
dream continued returning after a digression to the lizards, and to his
astonishment Delboeuf saw two other little lizards falling upon what was
left of the ferns. On turning his eyes to the open fields he saw a fifth
and a sixth lizard making for the hole in the wall, and finally the
whole road was covered by a procession of lizards, all wandering in the
same direction.
In his waking state Delboeuf knew only a few Latin names of plants,
and nothing of any Asplenium. To his great surprise he discovered that a
fern of this name did actually exist, and that the correct name was
Asplenium ruta muraria, which the dream had slightly distorted. An
accidental coincidence was of course inconceivable; yet where he got his
knowledge of the name Asplenium in the dream remained a mystery to him.
The dream occurred in 1862. Sixteen years later, while at the house
of one of his friends, the philosopher noticed a small album containing
dried plants, such as are sold as souvenirs to visitors in many parts of
Switzerland. A sudden recollection came to him: he opened the herbarium,
discovered therein the Asplenium of his dream, and recognized his own
handwriting in the accompanying Latin name. The connection could now be
traced. In 1860, two years before the date of the lizard dream, one of
his friend's sisters, while on her wedding-journey, had paid a visit to
Delboeuf. She had with her at the time this very album, which was
intended for her brother, and Delboeuf had taken the trouble to write,
at the dictation of a botanist, the Latin name under each of the dried
plants.
The same good fortune which gave this example its unusual value
enabled Delboeuf to trace yet another portion of this dream to its
forgotten source. One day in 1877 he came upon an old volume of an
illustrated periodical, in which he found the whole procession of
lizards pictured, just as he had dreamt of it in 1862. The volume bore
the date 1861, and Delboeuf remembered that he had subscribed to the
journal since its first appearance.
That dreams have at their disposal recollections which are
inaccessible to the waking state is such a remarkable and theoretically
important fact that I should like to draw attention to the point by
recording yet other hypermnesic dreams. Maury relates that for some time
the word Mussidan used to occur to him during the day. He knew it to be
the name of a French city, but that was all. One night he dreamed of a
conversation with a certain person, who told him that she came from
Mussidan, and, in answer to his question as to where the city was, she
replied: "Mussidan is the principal town of a district in the department
of Dordogne." On waking, Maury gave no credence to the information
received in his dream; but the gazetteer showed it to be perfectly
correct. In this case the superior knowledge of the dreamer was
confirmed, but it was not possible to trace the forgotten source of this
knowledge.
Jessen (p. 55) refers to a very similar incident, the period of which
is more remote. "Among others we may here mention the dream of the elder
Scaliger (Hennings, l.c., p. 300), who wrote a poem in praise of the
famous men of Verona, and to whom a man named Brugnolus appeared in a
dream, complaining that he had been neglected. Though Scaliger could not
remember that he had heard of the man, he wrote some verses in his
honour, and his son learned subsequently that a certain Brugnolus had at
one time been famed in Verona as a critic."
A hypermnesic dream, especially remarkable for the fact that a memory
not at first recalled was afterwards recognized in a dream which
followed the first, is narrated by the Marquis d'Hervey de St.
Denis:[10] "I once dreamed of a young woman with fair golden hair, whom
I saw chatting with my sister as she showed her a piece of embroidery.
In my dream she seemed familiar to me; I thought, indeed, that I had
seen her repeatedly. After waking, her face was still quite vividly
before me, but I was absolutely unable to recognize it. I fell asleep
again; the dream-picture repeated itself. In this new dream I addressed
the golden-haired lady and asked her whether I had not had the pleasure
of meeting her somewhere. 'Of course,' she replied; 'don't you remember
the bathing-place at Pornic?' Thereupon I awoke, and I was then able to
recall with certainty and in detail the incidents with which this
charming dream-face was connected."
The same author[11] recorded that a musician of his acquaintance once
heard in a dream a melody which was absolutely new to him. Not until
many years later did he find it in an old collection of musical
compositions, though still he could not remember ever having seen it
before.
I believe that Myers has published a whole collection of such
hypermnesic dreams in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, but these, unfortunately, are inaccessible to me. I think
everyone who occupies himself with dreams will recognize, as a very
common phenomenon, the fact that a dream will give proof of the
knowledge and recollection of matters of which the dreamer, in his
waking state, did not imagine himself to be cognizant. In my analytic
investigations of nervous patients, of which I shall speak later, I find
that it happens many times every week that I am able to convince them,
from their dreams, that they are perfectly well acquainted with
quotations, obscene expressions, etc., and make use of them in their
dreams, although they have forgotten them in their waking state. I shall
here cite an innocent example of dream-hypermnesia, because it was easy
to trace the source of the knowledge which was accessible only in the
dream.
A patient dreamed amongst other things (in a rather long dream) that
he ordered a kontuszowka in a cafe, and after telling me this he asked
me what it could be, as he had never heard the name before. I was able
to tell him that kontuszowka was a Polish liqueur, which he could not
have invented in his dream, as the name had long been familiar to me
from the advertisements. At first the patient would not believe me, but
some days later, after he had allowed his dream of the cafe to become a
reality, he noticed the name on a signboard at a street corner which for
some months he had been passing at least twice a day.
I have learned from my own dreams how largely the discovery of the
origin of individual dream-elements may be dependent on chance. Thus,
for some years before I had thought of writing this book, I was haunted
by the picture of a church tower of fairly simple construction, which I
could not remember ever having seen. I then suddenly recognized it, with
absolute certainty, at a small station between Salzburg and Reichenhall.
This was in the late nineties, and the first time I had travelled over
this route was in 1886. In later years, when I was already busily
engaged in the study of dreams, I was quite annoyed by the frequent
recurrence of the dream-image of a certain peculiar locality. I saw, in
definite orientation to my own person- on my left- a dark space in which
a number of grotesque sandstone figures stood out. A glimmering
recollection, which I did not quite believe, told me that it was the
entrance to a beer-cellar; but I could explain neither the meaning nor
the origin of this dream-picture. In 1907 I happened to go to Padua,
which, to my regret, I had been unable to visit since 1895. My first
visit to this beautiful university city had been unsatisfactory. I had
been unable to see Giotto's frescoes in the church of the Madonna dell'
Arena: I set out for the church, but turned back on being informed that
it was closed for the day. On my second visit, twelve years later, I
thought I would compensate myself for this disappointment, and before
doing anything else I set out for Madonna dell' Arena. In the street
leading to it, on my left, probably at the spot where I had turned back
in 1895, I discovered the place, with its sandstone figures, which I had
so often seen in my dream. It was, in fact, the entrance to a restaurant
garden.
One of the sources from which dreams draw material for reproduction-
material of which some part is not recalled or utilized in our waking
thoughts- is to be found in childhood. Here I will cite only a few of
the authors who have observed and emphasized this fact:
Hildebrandt (p. 23): "It has already been expressly admitted that a
dream sometimes brings back to the mind, with a wonderful power of
reproduction, remote and even forgotten experiences from the earliest
periods of one's life."
Strumpell (p. 40): "The subject becomes more interesting still when
we remember how the dream sometimes drags out, as it were, from the
deepest and densest psychic deposits which later years have piled upon
the earliest experiences of childhood, the pictures of certain persons,
places and things, quite intact, and in all their original freshness.
This is confined not merely to such impressions as were vividly
perceived at the time of their occurrence, or were associated with
intense psychological values, to recur later in the dream as actual
reminiscences which give pleasure to the waking mind. On the contrary,
the depths of the dream-memory rather contain such images of persons,
places, things and early experiences as either possessed but little
consciousness and no psychic value whatsoever, or have long since lost
both, and therefore appear totally strange and unknown, both in the
dream and in the waking state, until their early origin is revealed."
Volkelt (p. 119): "It is especially to be remarked how readily
infantile and youthful reminiscences enter into our dreams. What we have
long ceased to think about, what has long since lost all importance for
us, is constantly recalled by the dream."
The control which the dream exercises over material from our
childhood, most of which, as is well known, falls into the lacunae of
our conscious memory, is responsible for the production of interesting
hypermnesic dreams, of which I shall cite a few more examples.
Maury relates (p. 92) that as a child he often went from his native
city, Meaux, to the neighbouring Trilport, where his father was
superintending the construction of a bridge. One night a dream
transported him to Trilport and he was once more playing in the streets
there. A man approached him, wearing a sort of uniform. Maury asked him
his name, and he introduced himself, saying that his name was C, and
that he was a bridge-guard. On waking, Maury, who still doubted the
actuality of the reminiscence, asked his old servant, who had been with
him in his childhood, whether she remembered a man of this name. "Of
course," was the reply; "he used to be watchman on the bridge which your
father was building then."
Maury records another example, which demonstrates no less clearly the
reliability of the reminiscences of childhood that emerge in our dreams.
M. F., who as a child had lived in Montbrison, decided, after an absence
of twenty-five years, to visit his home and the old friends of his
family. The night before his departure he dreamt that he had reached his
destination, and that near Montbrison he met a man whom he did not know
by sight, and who told him that he was M. F., a friend of his father's.
The dreamer remembered that as a child he had known a gentleman of this
name, but on waking he could no longer recall his features. Several days
later, having actually arrived at Montbrison, he found once more the
locality of his dream, which he had thought was unknown to him, and
there he met a man whom he at once recognized as the M. F. of his dream,
with only this difference, that the real person was very much older than
his dream-image.
Here I might relate one of my own dreams, in which the recalled
impression takes the form of an association. In my dream I saw a man
whom I recognized, while dreaming, as the doctor of my native town. His
face was not distinct, but his features were blended with those of one
of my schoolmasters, whom I still meet from time to time. What
association there was between the two persons I could not discover on
waking, but upon questioning my mother concerning the doctor I learned
that he was a one- eyed man. The schoolmaster, whose image in my dream
obscured that of the physician, had also only one eye. I had not seen
the doctor for thirty- eight years, and as far as I know I had never
thought of him in my waking state, although a scar on my chin might have
reminded me of his professional attentions.
As though to counterbalance the excessive part which is played in our
dreams by the impressions of childhood, many authors assert that the
majority of dreams reveal elements drawn from our most recent
experiences. Robert (p. 46) even declares that the normal dream
generally occupies itself only with the impressions of the last few
days. We shall find, indeed, that the theory of the dream advanced by
Robert absolutely requires that our oldest impressions should be thrust
into the background, and our most recent ones brought to the fore.
However, the fact here stated by Robert is correct; this I can confirm
from my own investigations. Nelson, an American author, holds that the
impressions received in a dream most frequently date from the second day
before the dream, or from the third day before it, as though the
impressions of the day immediately preceding the dream were not
sufficiently weakened and remote.
Many authors who are unwilling to question the intimate connection
between the dream-content and the waking state have been struck by the
fact that the impressions which have intensely occupied the waking mind
appear in dreams only after they have been to some extent removed from
the mental activities of the day. Thus, as a rule, we do not dream of a
beloved person who is dead while we are still overwhelmed with sorrow
(Delage). Yet Miss Hallam, one of the most recent observers, has
collected examples which reveal the very opposite behaviour in this
respect, and upholds the claims of psychological individuality in this
matter.
The third, most remarkable, and at the same time most
incomprehensible, peculiarity of memory in dreams is shown in the
selection of the material reproduced; for here it is not, as in the
waking state, only the most significant things that are held to be worth
remembering, but also the most indifferent and insignificant details. In
this connection I will quote those authors who have expressed their
surprise in the most emphatic language.
Hildebrandt (p. 11): "For it is a remarkable fact that dreams do not,
as a rule, take their elements from important and far-reaching events,
or from the intense and urgent interests of the preceding day, but from
unimportant incidents, from the worthless odds and ends of recent
experience or of the remoter past. The most shocking death in our
family, the impressions of which keep us awake long into the night, is
obliterated from our memories until the first moment of waking brings it
back to us with distressing force. On the other hand, the wart on the
forehead of a passing stranger, to whom we did not give a moment's
thought once he was out of sight, finds a place in our dreams."
Strumpell (p. 39) speaks of "cases in which the analysis of a dream
brings to light elements which, although derived from the experiences of
yesterday or the day before yesterday, were yet so unimportant and
worthless for the waking state that they were forgotten soon after they
were experienced. Some experiences may be the chance-heard remarks of
other persons, or their superficially observed actions, or, fleeting
perceptions of things or persons, or isolated phrases that we have read,
etc."
Havelock Ellis (p. 727): "The profound emotions of waking life, the
questions and problems on which we spend our chief voluntary mental
energy, are not those which usually present themselves at once to dream-
consciousness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly
the trifling, the incidental, the 'forgotten' impressions of daily life
which reappear in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most
intensely are those that sleep most profoundly."
It is precisely in connection with these characteristics of memory in
dreams that Binz (p. 45) finds occasion to express dissatisfaction with
the explanations of dreams which he himself had favoured: "And the
normal dream raises similar questions. Why do we not always dream of
mental impressions of the day before, instead of going back, without any
perceptible reason, to the almost forgotten past, now lying far behind
us? Why, in a dream, does consciousness so often revive the impression
of indifferent memory- pictures, while the cerebral cells that bear the
most sensitive records of experience remain for the most part inert and
numb, unless an acute revival during the waking state has quite recently
excited them?"
We can readily understand how the strange preference shown by the
dream- memory for the indifferent and therefore disregarded details of
daily experience must commonly lead us altogether to overlook the
dependence of dreams on the waking state, or must at least make it
difficult for us to prove this dependence in any individual case. Thus
it happened that in the statistical treatment of her own and her
friend's dream, Miss Whiton Calkins found that 11 per cent of the entire
number showed no relation to the waking state. Hildebrandt was certainly
correct in his assertion that all our dream-images could be genetically
explained if we devoted enough time and material to the tracing of their
origin. To be sure, he calls this "a most tedious and thankless job. For
most often it would lead us to ferret out all sorts of psychically
worthless things from the remotest corners of our storehouse of
memories, and to bring to light all sorts of quite indifferent events of
long ago from the oblivion which may have overtaken them an hour after
their occurrence." I must, however, express my regret that this
discerning author refrained from following the path which at first sight
seemed so unpromising, for it would have led him directly to the central
point of the explanation of dreams.
The behaviour of memory in dreams is surely most significant for any
theory of memory whatsoever. It teaches us that "nothing which we have
once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost" (Scholz, p. 34); or as
Delboeuf puts it, "que toute impression, meme la plus insignificante,
laisse une trace inalterable, indifiniment susceptible de reparaitre au
jour";[12] a conclusion to which we are urged by so many other
pathological manifestations of mental life. Let us bear in mind this
extraordinary capacity of the memory in dreams, in order the more keenly
to realize the contradiction which has to be put forward in certain
dream-theories to be mentioned later, which seek to explain the
absurdities and incoherences of dreams by a partial forgetting of what
we have known during the day.
It might even occur to one to reduce the phenomenon of dreaming to
that of remembering, and to regard the dream as the manifestation of a
reproductive activity, unresting even at night, which is an end in
itself. This would seem to be in agreement with statements such as those
made by Pilcz, according to which definite relations between the time of
dreaming and the contents of a dream may be demonstrated, inasmuch as
the impressions reproduced by the dream in deep sleep belong to the
remote past, while those reproduced towards morning are of recent
origin. But such a conception is rendered improbable from the outset by
the manner in which the dream deals with the material to be remembered.
Strumpell rightly calls our attention to the fact that repetitions of
experiences do not occur in dreams. It is true that a dream will make a
beginning in that direction, but the next link is wanting; it appears in
a different form, or is replaced by something entirely novel. The dream
gives us only fragmentary reproductions; this is so far the rule that it
permits of a theoretical generalization. Still, there are exceptions in
which an episode is repeated in a dream as completely as it can be
reproduced by our waking memory. Delboeuf relates of one of his
university colleagues that a dream of his repeated, in all its details,
a perilous drive in which he escaped accident as if by miracle. Miss
Calkins mentions two dreams the contents of which exactly reproduced an
experience of the previous day, and in a later chapter I shall have
occasion to give an example that came to my knowledge of a childish
experience which recurred unchanged in a dream.[13]
C. Dream-Stimuli and Sources
What is meant by dream-stimuli and dream-sources may be explained by
a reference to the popular saying: "Dreams come from the stomach." This
notion covers a theory which conceives the dream as resulting from a
disturbance of sleep. We should not have dreamed if some disturbing
element had not come into play during our sleep, and the dream is the
reaction against this disturbance.
The discussion of the exciting causes of dreams occupies a great deal
of space in the literature of dreams. It is obvious that this problem
could have made its appearance only after dreams had become an object of
biological investigation. The ancients, who conceived of dreams as
divine inspirations, had no need to look for stimuli; for them a dream
was due to the will of divine or demonic powers, and its content was the
product of their special knowledge and intention. Science, however,
immediately raised the question whether the stimuli of dreams were
single or multiple, and this in turn led to the consideration whether
the causal explanation of dreams belonged to the region of psychology or
to that of physiology. Most authors appear to assume that disturbance of
sleep, and hence dreams, may arise from various causes, and that
physical as well as mental stimuli may play the part of dream-excitants.
Opinions differ widely in preferring this or the other factor as the
cause of dreams, and in classifying them in the order of importance.
Whenever the sources of dreams are completely enumerated they fall
into the following four categories, which have also been employed in the
classification of dreams: (1) external (objective) sensory stimuli; (2)
internal (subjective) sensory stimuli; (3) internal (organic) physical
stimuli; (4) Purely psychical sources of excitation.
1. External sensory stimuli
The younger Strumpell, the son of the philosopher, whose work on
dreams has already more than once served us as a guide in considering
the problems of dreams, has, as is well known, recorded his observations
of a patient afflicted with general anaesthesia of the skin and with
paralysis of several of the higher sensory organs. This man would laps
into sleep whenever the few remaining sensory paths between himself and
the outer world were closed. When we wish to fall asleep we are
accustomed to strive for a condition similar to that obtaining in
Strumpell's experiment. We close the most important sensory portals, the
eyes, and we endeavour to protect the other senses from all stimuli or
from any change of the stimuli already acting upon them. We then fall
asleep, although our preparations are never wholly successful. For we
can never completely insulate the sensory organs, nor can we entirely
abolish the excitability of the sensory organs themselves. That we may
at any time be awakened by intenser stimuli should prove to us "that the
mind has remained in constant communication with the external world even
during sleep." The sensory stimuli that reach us during sleep may easily
become the source of dreams.
There are a great many stimuli of this nature, ranging from those
unavoidable stimuli which are proper to the state of sleep or
occasionally admitted by it, to those fortuitous stimuli which are
calculated to wake the sleeper. Thus a strong light may fall upon the
eyes, a noise may be heard, or an odour may irritate the mucous
membranes of the nose. In our unintentional movements during sleep we
may lay bare parts of the body, and thus expose them to a sensation of
cold, or by a change of position we may excite sensations of pressure
and touch. A mosquito may bite us, or a slight nocturnal mischance may
simultaneously attack more than one sense- organ. Observers have called
attention to a whole series of dreams in which the stimulus ascertained
on waking and some part of the dream-content corresponded to such a
degree that the stimulus could be recognized as the source of the dream.
I shall here cite a number of such dreams, collected by Jessen (p.
527), which are traceable to more or less accidental objective sensory
stimuli. Every noise indistinctly perceived gives rise to corresponding
dream- representations; the rolling of thunder takes us into the thick
of battle, the crowing of a cock may be transformed into human shrieks
of terror, and the creaking of a door may conjure up dreams of burglars
breaking into the house. When one of our blankets slips off us at night
we may dream that we are walking about naked, or falling into water. If
we lie diagonally across the bed with our feet extending beyond the
edge, we may dream of standing on the brink of a terrifying precipice,
or of falling from a great height. Should our head accidentally get
under the pillow we may imagine a huge rock overhanging us and about to
crush us under its weight. An accumulation of semen produces voluptuous
dreams, and local pains give rise to ideas of suffering ill-treatment,
of hostile attacks, or of accidental bodily injuries....
"Meier (Versuch einer Erklarung des Nachtwandelns, Halle, 1758, p.
33) once dreamed of being attacked by several men who threw him flat on
the ground and drove a stake into the earth between his first and second
toes. While imagining this in his dream he suddenly awoke and felt a
piece of straw sticking between his toes. The same author, according to
Hemmings (Von den Traumen und Nachtwandlern, Weimar, 1784, p. 258),
"dreamed on another occasion, when his nightshirt was rather too tight
round his neck, that he was being hanged. In his youth Hoffbauer dreamed
of having fallen from a high wall, and found, on waking, that the
bedstead had come apart, and that he had actually fallen on to the
floor.... Gregory relates that he once applied a hot-water bottle to his
feet, and dreamed of taking a trip to the summit of Mount Etna, where he
found the heat of the soil almost unbearable. After having a blister
applied to his head, another man dreamed of being scalped by Indians;
still another, whose shirt was damp, dreamed that he was dragged through
a stream. An attack of gout caused a patient to believe that he was in
the hands of the Inquisition, and suffering the pains of torture
(Macnish)."
The argument that there is a resemblance between the dream-stimulus
and the dream-content would be confirmed if, by a systematic induction
of stimuli, we should succeed in producing dreams corresponding to these
stimuli. According to Macnish such experiments had already been made by
Giron de Buzareingues. "He left his knee exposed and dreamed of
travelling on a mail- coach by night. He remarked, in this connection,
that travellers were well aware how cold the knees become in a coach at
night. On another occasion he left the back of his head uncovered, and
dreamed that he was taking part in a religious ceremony in the open air.
In the country where he lived it was customary to keep the head always
covered except on occasions of this kind."
Maury reports fresh observation on self-induced dreams of his own. (A
number of other experiments were unsuccessful.)
1. He was tickled with a feather on his lips and on the tip of his
nose. He dreamed of an awful torture, viz., that a mask of pitch was
stuck to his face and then forcibly torn off, bringing the skin with it.
2. Scissors were whetted against a pair of tweezers. He heard bells
ringing, then sounds of tumult which took him back to the days of the
Revolution of 1848.
3. Eau de Cologne was held to his nostrils. He found himself in
Cairo, in the shop of Johann Maria Farina. This was followed by
fantastic adventures which he was not able to recall.
4. His neck was lightly pinched. He dreamed that a blister was being
applied, and thought of a doctor who had treated him in childhood.
5. A hot iron was brought near his face. He dreamed that
chauffeurs[14] had broken into the house, and were forcing the occupants
to give up their money by thrusting their feet into braziers. The
Duchesse d'Abrantes, whose secretary he imagined himself to be then
entered the room.
6. A drop of water was allowed to fall on to his forehead. He
imagined himself in Italy, perspiring heavily, and drinking the white
wine of Orvieto.
7. When the light of a candle screened with red paper was allowed to
fall on his face, he dreamed of thunder, of heat, and of a storm at sea
which he once witnessed in the English Channel.
Hervey, Weygandt, and others have made attempts to produce dreams
experimentally.
Many have observed the striking skill of the dream in interweaving
into its structure sudden impressions from the outer world, in such a
manner as to represent a gradually approaching catastrophe
(Hildebrandt). "In former years," this author relates, "I occasionally
made use of an alarm-clock in order to wake punctually at a certain hour
in the morning. It probably happened hundreds of times that the sound of
this instrument fitted into an apparently very long and connected dream,
as though the entire dream had been especially designed for it, as
though it found in this sound its appropriate and logically
indispensable climax, its inevitable denouement."
I shall presently have occasion to cite three of these alarm-clock
dreams in a different connection.
Volkelt (p. 68) relates: "A composer once dreamed that he was
teaching a class, and was just explaining something to his pupils. When
he had finished he turned to one of the boys with the question: 'Did you
understand me?' The boy cried out like one possessed 'Oh, ja!' Annoyed
by this, he reprimanded his pupil for shouting. But now the entire class
was screaming 'Orja,' then 'Eurjo,' and finally 'Feuerjo.' He was then
aroused by the actual fire alarm in the street."
Garnier (Traite des facultes de l'ame, 1865), on the authority of
Radestock, relates that Napoleon I, while sleeping in a carriage, was
awakened from a dream by an explosion which took him back to the
crossing of the Tagliamento and the bombardment of the Austrians, so
that he started up, crying, "We have been undermined."
The following dream of Maury's has become celebrated: He was ill in
bed; his mother was sitting beside him. He dreamed of the Reign of
Terror during the Revolution. He witnessed some terrible scenes of
murder, and finally he himself was summoned before the Tribunal. There
he saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, and all the sorry heroes
of those terrible days; he had to give an account of himself, and after
all manner of incidents which did not fix themselves in his memory, he
was sentenced to death. Accompanied by an enormous crowd, he was led to
the place of execution. He mounted the scaffold; the executioner tied
him to the plank, it tipped over, and the knife of the guillotine fell.
He felt his head severed from his trunk, and awakened in terrible
anxiety, only to find that the head-board of the bed had fallen, and had
actually struck the cervical vertebrae just where the knife of the
guillotine would have fallen.
This dream gave rise to an interesting discussion, initiated by Le
Lorrain and Egger in the Revue Philosophique, as to whether, and how, it
was possible for the dreamer to crowd together an amount of
dream-content apparently so large in the short space of time elapsing
between the perception of the waking stimulus and the moment of actual
waking.
Examples of this nature show that objective stimuli occurring in
sleep are among the most firmly-established of all the sources of
dreams; they are, indeed, the only stimuli of which the layman knows
anything whatever. If we ask an educated person who is not familiar with
the literature of dreams how dreams originate, he is certain to reply by
a reference to a case known to him in which a dream has been explained
after waking by a recognized objective stimulus. Science, however,
cannot stop here, but is incited to further investigation by the
observation that the stimulus influencing the senses during sleep does
not appear in the dream at all in its true form, but is replaced by some
other representation, which is in some way related to it. But the
relation existing between the stimulus and the resulting dream is,
according to Maury, "une affinite quelconque mais qui n'est pas unique
et exclusive"[15] (p. 72). If we read, for example, three of
Hildebrandt's "alarm-clock dreams," we shall be compelled to ask why the
same casual stimulus evoked so many different results, and why just
these results and no others.
(p. 37): "I am taking a walk on a beautiful spring morning. I stroll
through the green meadows to a neighbouring village, where I see numbers
of the inhabitants going to church, wearing their best clothes and
carrying their hymn-books under their arms. I remember that it is
Sunday, and that the morning service will soon begin. I decide to attend
it, but as I am rather overheated I think I will wait in the churchyard
until I am cooler. While reading the various epitaphs, I hear the sexton
climbing the church- tower, and I see above me the small bell which is
about to ring for the beginning of service. For a little while it hangs
motionless; then it begins to swing, and suddenly its notes resound so
clearly and penetratingly that my sleep comes to an end. But the notes
of the bell come from the alarm-clock."
"A second combination. It is a bright winter day; the streets are
deep in snow. I have promised to go on a sleigh-ride, but I have to wait
some time before I am told that the sleigh is at the door. Now I am
preparing to get into the sleigh. I put on my furs, the foot-warmer is
put in, and at last I have taken my seat. But still my departure is
delayed. At last the reins are twitched, the horses start, and the
sleigh bells, now violently shaken, strike up their familiar music with
a force that instantly tears the gossamer of my dream. Again it is only
the shrill note of my alarm-clock."
"Yet a third example. I see the kitchen-maid walking along the
passage to the dining-room, with a pile of several dozen plates. The
porcelain column in her arms seems to me to be in danger of losing its
equilibrium. 'Take care,' I exclaim, 'you will drop the whole pile!' The
usual retort is naturally made- that she is used to such things, etc.
Meanwhile I continue to follow her with my anxious gaze, and behold, at
the threshold the fragile plates fall and crash and roll across the
floor in hundreds of pieces. But I soon perceive that the endless din is
not really a rattling but a true ringing, and with this ringing the
dreamer now becomes aware that the alarm-clock has done its duty."
The question why the dreaming mind misjudges the nature of the
objective sensory stimulus has been answered by Strumpell, and in an
almost identical fashion by Wundt; their explanation is that the
reaction of the mind to the stimulus attacking sleep is complicated and
confused by the formation of illusions. A sensory impression is
recognized by us and correctly interpreted- that is, it is classed with
the memory-group to which it belongs according to all previous
experience if the impression is strong, clear, and sufficiently
prolonged, and if we have sufficient time to submit it to those mental
processes. But if these conditions are not fulfilled we mistake the
object which gives rise to the impression, and on the basis of this
impression we construct an illusion. "If one takes a walk in an open
field and perceives indistinctly a distant object, it may happen that
one will at first take it for a horse." On closer inspection the image
of a cow, resting, may obtrude itself, and the picture may finally
resolve itself with certainty into a group of people sitting on the
ground. The impressions which the mind receives during sleep from
external stimuli are of a similarly indistinct nature; they give rise to
illusions because the impression evokes a greater or lesser number of
memory-images, through which it acquires its psychic value. As for the
question, in which of the many possible spheres of memory the
corresponding images are aroused, and which of the possible associative
connections are brought into play, that- to quote Strumpell again- is
indeterminable, and is left, as it were, to the caprices of the mind.
Here we may take our choice. We may admit that the laws of
dream-formation cannot really be traced any further, and so refrain from
asking whether or not the interpretation of the illusion evoked by the
sensory impression depends upon still other conditions; or we may assume
that the objective sensory stimulus encroaching upon sleep plays only a
modest role as a dream- source, and that other factors determine the
choice of the memory-image to be evoked. Indeed, on carefully examining
Maury's experimentally produced dreams, which I have purposely cited in
detail, one is inclined to object that his investigations trace the
origin of only one element of the dreams, and that the rest of the
dream-content seems too independent and too full of detail to be
explained by a single requirement, namely, that it must correspond with
the element experimentally introduced. Indeed, one even begins to doubt
the illusion theory, and the power of objective impressions to shape the
dream, when one realizes that such impressions are sometimes subjected
to the most peculiar and far-fetched interpretations in our dreams. Thus
M. Simon tells of a dream in which he saw persons of gigantic
stature[16] seated at a table, and heard distinctly the horrible
clattering produced by the impact of their jaws as they chewed their
food. On waking he heard the clatter of a horse's hooves as it galloped
past his window. If in this case the sound of the horse's hooves had
revived ideas from the memory-sphere of Gulliver's Travels, the sojourn
with the giants of Brobdingnag, and the virtuous horse-like creatures-
as I should perhaps interpret the dream without any assistance on the
author's part- ought not the choice of a memory-sphere so alien to the
stimulus to be further elucidated by other motives?
2. Internal (subjective) sensory stimuli
All objections to the contrary notwithstanding, we must admit that
the role of the objective sensory stimuli as producers of dreams has
been indisputably established, and if, having regard to their nature and
their frequency, these stimuli seem perhaps insufficient to explain all
dream- pictures, this indicates that we should look for other
dream-sources which act in a similar fashion. I do not know where the
idea first arose that together with the external sensory stimuli the
internal (subjective) stimuli should also be considered, but as a matter
of fact this has been done more or less explicitly in all the more
recent descriptions of the aetiology of dreams. "I believe," says Wundt
(p. 363), "that an important part is played in dream-illusions by those
subjective sensations of sight and hearing which are familiar to us in
the waking state as a luminous chaos in the dark field of the vision,
and a ringing, buzzing, etc., of the ears, and in especial, subjective
irritations of the retina. This explains the remarkable tendency of
dreams to delude the eyes with numbers of similar or identical objects.
Thus we see outspread before our eyes innumerable birds, butterflies,
fishes, coloured beads, flowers, etc. Here the luminous dust in the dark
field of vision has assumed fantastic forms, and the many luminous
points of which it consists are embodied in our dreams in as many single
images, which, owing to the mobility of the luminous chaos, are seen as
moving objects. This is perhaps the reason of the dream's decided
preference for the most varied animal forms, for owing to the
multiplicity of such forms they can readily adapt themselves to the
subjective luminous images."
The subjective sensory stimuli as a source of dreams have the obvious
advantage that, unlike objective stimuli, they are independent of
external accidents. They are, so to speak, at the disposal of the
interpretation whenever they are required. But they are inferior to the
objective sensory stimuli by the fact that their claim to the role of
dream-inciters- which observation and experiment have established in the
case of objective stimuli- can in their case be verified with difficulty
or not at all. The main proof of the dream-inciting power of subjective
sensory stimuli is afforded by the so-called hypnogogic hallucinations,
which have been described by Johann Muller as "phantastic visual
manifestations." They are those very vivid and changeable pictures which
with many people occur constantly during the period of falling asleep,
and which may linger for a while even after the eyes have been opened.
Maury, who was very subject to these pictures, made a thorough study of
them, and maintained that they were related to or rather identical with
dream-images. This had already been asserted by Johann Muller. Maury
maintains that a certain psychic passivity is necessary for their
origin; that it requires a relaxation of the intensity of attention (p.
59). But one may perceive a hypnogogic hallucination in any frame of
mind if one falls into such a lethargy for a moment, after which one may
perhaps wake up, until this oft-repeated process terminates in sleep.
According to Maury, if one wakes up shortly after such an experience, it
is often possible to trace in the dream the images which one has
perceived before falling asleep as hypnogogic hallucinations (p. 134).
Thus Maury on one occasion saw a series of images of grotesque figures
with distorted features and curiously dressed hair, which obtruded
themselves upon him with incredible importunity during the period of
falling asleep, and which, upon waking, he recalled having seen in his
dream. On another occasion, while suffering from hunger, because he was
subjecting himself to a rather strict diet, he saw in one of his
hypnogogic states a plate, and a hand armed with a fork taking some food
from the plate. In his dream he found himself at a table abundantly
supplied with food, and heard the clatter of the diner's forks. On yet
another occasion, after falling asleep with strained and painful eyes,
he had a hypnogogic hallucination of microscopically small characters,
which he was able to decipher, one by one, only with a great effort; and
on waking from sleep an hour later he recalled a dream in which there
was an open book with very small letters, which he was obliged to read
through with laborious effort.
Not only pictures, but auditory hallucinations of words, names, etc.,
may also occur hypnogogically, and then repeat themselves in the dream,
like an overture announcing the principal motif of the opera which is to
follow.
A more recent observer of hypnogogic hallucinations, G. Trumbull
Ladd, follows the same lines as Johann Muller and Maury. By dint of
practice he succeeded in acquiring the faculty of suddenly arousing
himself, without opening his eyes, two to five minutes after gradually
falling asleep. This enabled him to compare the disappearing retinal
sensations with the dream- images remaining in his memory. He assures us
that an intimate relation between the two can always be recognized,
inasmuch as the luminous dots and lines of light spontaneously perceived
by the retina produce, so to speak, the outline or scheme of the
psychically perceived dream-images. For example, a dream in which he saw
before him clearly printed lines, which he read and studied,
corresponded with a number of luminous spots arranged in parallel lines;
or, to express it in his own words: The clearly printed page resolved
itself into an object which appeared to his waking perception like part
of an actual printed page seen through a small hole in a sheet of paper,
but at a distance too great to permit of its being read. Without in any
way underestimating the central element of the phenomenon, Ladd believes
that hardly any visual dream occurs in our minds that is not based on
material furnished by this internal condition of retinal irritability.
This is particularly true of dreams which occur shortly after falling
asleep in a dark room, while dreams occurring in the morning, near the
period of waking, receive their stimulus from the objective light
penetrating the eye in a brightly-lit room. The shifting and infinitely
variable character of the spontaneous luminous excitations of the retina
exactly corresponds with the fitful succession of images presented to us
in our dreams. If we attach any importance to Ladd's observations, we
cannot underrate the productiveness of this subjective source of
stimuli; for visual images, as we know, are the principal constituents
of our dreams. The share contributed by the other senses, excepting,
perhaps, the sense of hearing, is relatively insignificant and
inconstant.
3. Internal (organic) physical stimuli
If we are disposed to look for the sources of dreams not outside but
inside the organism, we must remember that almost all our internal
organs, which in a state of health hardly remind us of their existence,
may, in states of excitation- as we call them- or in disease, become a
source of the most painful sensations, and must therefore be put on a
par with the external excitants of pain and sensation. Strumpell, for
example, gives expression to a long-familiar experience when he declares
that "during sleep the psyche becomes far more deeply and broadly
conscious of its coporality than in the waking state, and it is
compelled to receive and to be influenced by certain stimulating
impressions originating in parts of the body, and in alterations of the
body, of which it is unconscious in the waking state." Even Aristotle
declares it to be quite possible that a dream may draw our attention to
incipient morbid conditions which we have not noticed in the waking
state (owing to the exaggerated intensity of the impressions experienced
in the dream; and some medical authors, who certainly did not believe in
the prophetic nature of dreams, have admitted the significance of
dreams, at least in so far as the predicting of disease is concerned.
[Cf. M. Simon, p. 31, and many earlier writers.][17]
Among the Greeks there were dream oracles, which were vouchsafed to
patients in quest of recovery. The patient betook himself to the temple
of Apollo or Aesculapius; there he was subjected to various ceremonies,
bathed, rubbed and perfumed. A state of exaltation having been thus
induced, he was made to lie down in the temple on the skin of a
sacrificial ram. He fell asleep and dreamed of remedies, which he saw in
their natural form, or in symbolic images which the priests afterwards
interpreted.
For further references concerning the remedial dreams of the Greeks,
cf. Lehmann, i, 74; Bouche-Leclerq; Hermann, Gottesd. Altert. d. Gr., SS
41; Privataltert. SS 38, 16; Bottinger in Sprengel's Beitr. z. Gesch. d.
Med., ii, p. 163, et seq.; W. Lloyd, Magnetism and Mesmerism in
Antiquity, London, 1877; Dollinger, Heidentum und Judentum, p. 130.
Even in our days there seems to be no lack of authenticated examples
of such diagnostic achievements on the part of dreams. Thus Tissie cites
from Artigues (Essai sur la valeur semeiologique des Reves) the history
of a woman of forty-three, who, during several years of apparently
perfect health, was troubled with anxiety-dreams, and in whom a medical
examination subsequently revealed an incipient affection of the heart,
to which she presently succumbed.
Serious derangements of the internal organs clearly excite dreams in
quite a number of persons. The frequency of anxiety-dreams in diseases
of the heart and lungs has been generally realized; indeed, this
function of the dream-life is emphasized by so many writers that I shall
here content myself with a reference to the literature of the subject
(Radestock, Spitta, Maury, M. Simon, Tissie). Tissie even believes that
the diseased organs impress upon the dream-content its characteristic
features. The dreams of persons suffering from diseases of the heart are
generally very brief, and end in a terrified awakening; death under
terrible circumstances almost always find a place in their content.
Those suffering from diseases of the lungs dream of suffocation, of
being crushed, and of flight, and a great many of them are subject to
the familiar nightmare- which, by the way, Borner has succeeded in
inducing experimentally by lying on the face and covering the mouth and
nostrils. In digestive disturbances the dream contains ideas from the
sphere of gustatory enjoyment and disgust. Finally, the influence of
sexual excitement on the dream-content is obvious enough in everyone's
experience, and provides the strongest confirmation of the whole theory
of dream-instigation by organic sensation.
Moreover, if we study the literature of dreams it becomes quite
evident that some writers (Maury, Weygandt) have been led to the study
of dream- problems by the influence their own pathological state has had
on the content of their dreams.
The enlargement of the number of dream-sources by such undeniably
established facts is, however, not so important as one might be led to
suppose; for dreams are, after all, phenomena which occur in healthy
persons- perhaps in all persons, and every night- and a pathological
state of the organs is evidently not one of the indispensable
conditions. For us, however, the question is not whence particular
dreams originate, but rather: what is the exciting cause of ordinary
dreams in normal people?
But we have only to go a step farther to find a source of dreams
which is more prolific than any of those mentioned above, and which
promises indeed to be inexhaustible. If it is established that the
bodily organs become, in sickness, an exciting source of dreams, and if
we admit that the mind, when diverted during sleep from the outer world,
can devote more of its attention to the interior of the body, we may
readily assume that the organs need not necessarily become diseased in
order to permit stimuli, which in one way or another grow into
dream-images, to reach the sleeping mind. What in the waking state we
vaguely perceive as a general sensation, perceptible by its quality
alone- a sensation to which, in the opinion of physicians, all the
organic systems contribute their share- this general sensation would at
night attain a greater potency, and, acting through its individual
components, would constitute the most prolific as well as the most usual
source of dream-representations. We should then have to discover the
laws by which organic stimuli are translated into dream-
representations.
This theory of the origin of dreams is the one most favoured by all
medical writers. The obscurity which conceals the essence of our being-
the "moi splanchnique" as Tissie terms it- from our knowledge, and the
obscurity of the origin of dreams, correspond so closely that it was
inevitable that they should be brought into relation with one another.
The theory according to which the organic sensations are responsible for
dreams has, moreover, another attraction for the physician, inasmuch as
it favours the aetiological union of the dream with mental derangement,
both of which reveal so many points of agreement in their
manifestations, since changes in the general organic massive sensation
and in the stimuli emanating from the internal organs are also
considered to have a far-reaching significance as regards the origin of
the psychoses. It is therefore not surprising that the organic stimulus
theory can be traced to several writers who have propounded this theory
independently.
A number of writers have followed the train of thought developed by
Schopenhauer in 1851. Our conception of the universe has its origin in
the recasting by the intellect of the impressions which reach it from
without in the moulds of time, space and causality. During the day the
stimuli proceeding from the interior of the organism, from the
sympathetic nervous system, exert at most an unconscious influence on
our mood. At night, however, when the overwhelming effect of the
impressions of the day is no longer operative, the impressions that
surge upward from within are able to force themselves on our attention-
just as in the night we hear the rippling of the brook that was drowned
in the clamour of the day. But how else can the intellect react to these
stimuli than by transforming them in accordance with its own function
into things which occupy space and time and follow the lines of
causality?- and so a dream originates. Thus Scherner, and after him
Volkelt, endeavoured to discover the more intimate relations between
physical sensations and dream-pictures; but we shall reserve the
discussion of this point for our chapter on the theory of dreams.
As a result of a singularly logical analysis, the psychiatrist Krauss
referred the origin of dreams, and also of deliria and delusions, to the
same element, namely, to organically determined sensations. According to
him, there is hardly any part of the organism which might not become the
starting-point of a dream or a delusion. Organically determined
sensations, he says, "may be divided into two classes: (1) general
sensations- those affecting the whole system; (2) specific sensations-
those that are immanent in the principal systems of the vegetative
organism, and which may in turn be subdivided into five groups: (a) the
muscular, (b) the pneumatic, (c) the gastric, (d) the sexual, (e) the
peripheral sensations (p. 33 of the second article)."
The origin of the dream-image from physical sensations is conceived
by Krauss as follows: The awakened sensation, in accordance with some
law of association, evokes an idea or image bearing some relation to it,
and combines with this idea or image, forming an organic structure,
towards which, however, the consciousness does not maintain its normal
attitude. For it does not bestow any attention on the sensation, but
concerns itself entirely with the accompanying ideas; and this explains
why the facts of the case have been so long misunderstood (p. 11 ff.).
Krauss even gives this process the special name of "transubstantiation
of the sensations into dream-images" (p. 24).
The influence of organic physical stimuli on the formation of dreams
is today almost universally admitted, but the question as to the nature
of the law underlying this relation is answered in various ways, and
often obscurely. On the basis of the theory of physical excitation the
special task of dream-interpretation is to trace back the content of a
dream to the causative organic stimulus, and if we do not accept the
rules of interpretation advanced by Scherner, we shall often find
ourselves confronted by the awkward fact that the organic source of
excitation reveals itself only in the content of the dream.
A certain agreement, however, appears in the interpretation of the
various forms of dreams which have been designated as "typical," because
they recur in so many persons with almost the same content. Among these
are the well- known dreams of falling from a height, of the dropping out
of teeth, of flying, and of embarrassment because one is naked or
scantily clad. This last type of dream is said to be caused simply by
the dreamer's perception, felt in his sleep, that he has thrown off the
bedclothes and is uncovered. The dream that one's teeth are dropping out
is explained by "dental irritation," which does not, however, of
necessity imply a morbid condition of irritability in the teeth.
According to Strumpell, the flying dream is the adequate image employed
by the mind to interpret the quantum of stimulus emanating from the
rising and sinking of the pulmonary lobes when the cutaneous sensation
of the thorax has lapsed into insensibility. This latter condition
causes the sensation which gives rise to images of hovering in the air.
The dream of falling from a height is said to be due to the fact that an
arm falls away from the body, or a flexed knee is suddenly extended,
after unconsciousness of the sensation of cutaneous pressure has
supervened, whereupon this sensation returns to consciousness, and the
transition from unconsciousness to consciousness embodies itself
psychically as a dream of falling (Strumpell, p. 118). The weakness of
these fairly plausible attempts at explanation clearly lies in the fact
that without any further elucidation they allow this or that group of
organic sensations to disappear from psychic perception, or to obtrude
themselves upon it, until the constellation favourable for the
explanation has been established. Later on, however, I shall have
occasion to return to the subject of typical dreams and their origin.
From a comparison of a series of similar dreams, M. Simon endeavoured
to formulate certain rules governing the influence of organic sensations
on the nature of the resulting dream. He says (p. 34): "If during sleep
any organic apparatus, which normally participates in the expression of
an affect, for any reason enters into the state of excitation to which
it is usually aroused by the affect, the dream thus produced will
contain representations which harmonize with that affect."
Another rule reads as follows (p. 35): "If, during sleep, an organic
apparatus is in a state of activity, stimulation, or disturbance, the
dream will present ideas which correspond with the nature of the organic
function performed by that apparatus."
Mourly Vold has undertaken to prove the supposed influence of bodily
sensation on the production of dreams by experimenting on a single
physiological territory. He changed the positions of a sleeper's limbs,
and compared the resulting dreams with these changes. He recorded the
following results:
1. The position of a limb in a dream corresponds approximately to
that of reality, i.e., we dream of a static condition of the limb which
corresponds with the actual condition.
2. When one dreams of a moving limb it always happens that one of the
positions occurring in the execution of this movement corresponds with
the actual position.
3. The position of one's own limb may in the dream be attributed to
another person.
4. One may also dream that the movement in question is impeded.
5. The limb in any particular position may appear in the dream as an
animal or monster, in which case a certain analogy between the two is
established.
6. The behaviour of a limb may in the dream incite ideas which bear
some relation or other to this limb. Thus, for example, if we are using
our fingers we dream of numerals.
Results such as these would lead me to conclude that even the theory
of organic stimulation cannot entirely abolish the apparent freedom of
the determination of the dream-picture which will be evoked.[18]
4. Psychic sources of excitation
When considering the relation of dreams to waking life, and the
provenance of the material of dreams, we learned that the earliest as
well as the most recent investigators are agreed that men dream of what
they do during the day, and of the things that interest them in the
waking state. This interest, continued from waking life into sleep, is
not only a psychic bond, joining the dream to life, but it is also a
source of dreams whose importance must not be underestimated, and which,
taken together with those stimuli which become active and of interest
during sleep, suffices to explain the origin of all dream-images. Yet we
have also heard the very contrary of this asserted; namely, that dreams
bear the sleeper away from the interests of the day, and that in most
cases we do not dream of things which have occupied our attention during
the day until after they have lost, for our waking life, the stimulating
force of belonging to the present. Hence in the analysis of dream-life
we are reminded at every step that it is inadmissible to frame general
rules without making provision for qualifications by introducing such
terms as "frequently," "as a rule," "in most cases," and without being
prepared to admit the validity of exceptions.
If interest during the waking state together with the internal and
external stimuli that occur during sleep, sufficed to cover the whole
aetiology of dreams, we should be in a position to give a satisfactory
account of the origin of all the elements of a dream; the problem of the
dream-sources would then be solved, leaving us only the task of
discriminating between the part played by the psychic and that played by
the somatic dream-stimuli in individual dreams. But as a matter of fact
no such complete solution of a dream has ever been achieved in any case,
and everyone who has attempted such a solution has found that components
of the dream- and usually a great many of them- are left whose source he
is unable to trace. The interests of the day as a psychic source of
dreams are obviously not so influential as to justify the confident
assertion that every dreamer continues the activities of his waking life
in his dreams.
Other dream-sources of a psychic nature are not known. Hence, with
the exception perhaps of the explanation of dreams given by Scherner, to
which reference will be made later on, all the explanations found in the
literature of the subject show a considerable hiatus whenever there is a
question of tracing the images and ideas which are the most
characteristic material of dreams. In this dilemma the majority of
authors have developed a tendency to belittle as far as possible the
share of the psychic factor, which is so difficult to determine, in the
evocation of dreams. To be sure, they distinguish as major divisions the
nerve-stimulus dream and the association-dream, and assert that the
latter has its source exclusively in reproduction (Wundt, p. 365), but
they cannot dismiss the doubt as to "whether they appear without any
impulsion from organic stimuli" (Volkelt, p. 127). And even the
characteristic quality of the pure association-dream disappears. To
quote Volkelt (p. 118): "In the association-dream proper, there is no
longer any question of such a stable nucleus. Here the loose grouping
penetrates even to the very centre of the dream. The imaginative life,
already released from the control of reason and intellect, is here no
longer held together by the more important psychical and physical
stimuli, but is left to its own uncontrolled and confused divagations."
Wundt, too, attempts to belittle the psychic factor in the evocation of
dreams by asserting that "the phantasms of the dream are perhaps
unjustly regarded as pure hallucinations. Probably most
dream-representations are really illusions, inasmuch as they emanate
from the slight sensory impressions which are never extinguished during
sleep" (p. 359, et seq.). Weygandt has adopted this view, and
generalizes upon it. He asserts that "the most immediate causes of all
dream-representations are sensory stimuli to which reproductive
associations then attach themselves" (p. 17). Tissie goes still further
in suppressing the psychic sources of excitation (p. 183): "Les reves
d'origine absolument psychique n'existent pas";[19] and elsewhere (p.
6), "Les pensees de nos reves nous viennent de dehors...."[20]
Those writers who, like the eminent philosopher Wundt, adopt a middle
course, do not hesitate to assert that in most dreams there is a
cooperation of the somatic stimuli and psychic stimuli which are either
unknown or are identified with the interests of the day.
We shall learn later that the problem of dream-formation may be
solved by the disclosure of an entirely unsuspected psychic source of
excitation. In the meanwhile we shall not be surprised at the
over-estimation of the influence of those stimuli which do not originate
in the psychic life. It is not merely because they alone may easily be
found, and even confirmed by experiment, but because the somatic
conception of the origin of dreams entirely corresponds with the mode of
thought prevalent in modern psychiatry. Here, it is true, the mastery of
the brain over the organism is most emphatically stressed; but
everything that might show that the psychic life is independent of
demonstrable organic changes, or spontaneous in its manifestations, is
alarming to the contemporary psychiatrist, as though such an admission
must mean a return to the old-world natural philosophy and the
metaphysical conception of the nature of the soul. The distrust of the
psychiatrist has placed the psyche under tutelage, so to speak; it
requires that none of the impulses of the psyche shall reveal an
autonomous power. Yet this attitude merely betrays a lack of confidence
in the stability of the causal concatenation between the physical and
the psychic. Even where on investigation the psychic may be recognized
as the primary cause of a phenomenon, a more profound comprehension of
the subject will one day succeed in following up the path that leads to
the organic basis of the psychic. But where the psychic must, in the
present state of our knowledge, be accepted as the terminus, it need not
on that account be disavowed.
D. Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking
That a dream fades away in the morning is proverbial. It is, indeed,
possible to recall it. For we know the dream, of course, only by
recalling it after waking; but we very often believe that we remember it
incompletely, that during the night there was more of it than we
remember. We may observe how the memory of a dream which in the morning
was still vivid fades in the course of the day, leaving only a few
trifling remnants. We are often aware that we have been dreaming, but we
do not know of what we have dreamed; and we are so well used to this
fact- that the dream is liable to be forgotten- that we do not reject as
absurd the possibility that we may have been dreaming even when, in the
morning, we know nothing either of the content of the dream or of the
fact that we have dreamed. On the other hand, it often happens that
dreams manifest an extraordinary power of maintaining themselves in the
memory. I have had occasion to analyse, with my patients, dreams which
occurred to them twenty-five years or more previously, and I can
remember a dream of my own which is divided from the present day by at
least thirty-seven years, and yet has lost nothing of its freshness in
my memory. All this is very remarkable, and for the present
incomprehensible.
The forgetting of dreams is treated in the most detailed manner by
Strumpell. This forgetting is evidently a complex phenomenon; for
Strumpell attributes it not to a single cause, but to quite a number of
causes.
In the first place, all those factors which induce forgetfulness in
the waking state determine also the forgetting of dreams. In the waking
state we commonly very soon forget a great many sensations and
perceptions because they are too slight to remember, and because they
are charged with only a slight amount of emotional feeling. This is true
also of many dream-images; they are forgotten because they are too weak,
while the stronger images in their neighbourhood are remembered.
However, the factor of intensity is in itself not the only determinant
of the preservation of dream-images; Strumpell, as well as other authors
(Calkins), admits that dream-images are often rapidly forgotten although
they are known to have been vivid, whereas, among those that are
retained in the memory, there are many that are very shadowy and
unmeaning. Besides, in the waking state one is wont to forget rather
easily things that have happened only once, and to remember more readily
things which occur repeatedly. But most dream-images are unique
experiences,[21] and this peculiarity would contribute towards the
forgetting of all dreams equally. Of much greater significance is a
third cause of forgetting. In order that feelings, representations,
ideas and the like should attain a certain degree of memorability, it is
important that they should not remain isolated, but that they should
enter into connections and associations of an appropriate nature. If the
words of a verse of poetry are taken and mixed together, it will be very
difficult to remember them. "Properly placed, in a significant sequence,
one word helps another, and the whole, making sense, remains and is
easily and lastingly fixed in the memory. Contradictions, as a rule, are
retained with just as much difficulty and just as rarely as things that
are confused and disorderly." Now dreams, in most cases, lack sense and
order. Dream-compositions, by their very nature, are insusceptible of
being remembered, and they are forgotten because as a rule they fall to
pieces the very next moment. To be sure, these conclusions are not
entirely consistent with Radestock's observation (p. 168), that we most
readily retain just those dreams which are most peculiar.
According to Strumpell, other factors, deriving from the relation of
the dream to the waking state, are even more effective in causing us to
forget our dreams. The forgetfulness of dreams manifested by the waking
consciousness is evidently merely the counterpart of the fact already
mentioned, namely, that the dream hardly ever takes over an orderly
series of memories from the waking state, but only certain details of
these memories, which it removes from the habitual psychic connections
in which they are remembered in the waking state. The dream-composition,
therefore, has no place in the community of the psychic series which
fill the mind. It lacks all mnemonic aids. "In this manner the
dream-structure rises, as it were, from the soil of our psychic life,
and floats in psychic space like a cloud in the sky, quickly dispelled
by the first breath of reawakening life" (p. 87). This situation is
accentuated by the fact that on waking the attention is immediately
besieged by the inrushing world of sensation, so that very few
dream-images are capable of withstanding its force. They fade away
before the impressions of the new day like the stars before the light of
the sun.
Finally, we should remember that the fact that most people take but
little interest in their dreams is conducive to the forgetting of
dreams. Anyone who for some time applies himself to the investigation of
dreams, and takes a special interest in them, usually dreams more during
that period than at any other; he remembers his dreams more easily and
more frequently.
Two other reasons for the forgetting of dreams, which Bonatelli
(cited by Benini) adds to those adduced by Strumpell, have already been
included in those enumerated above; namely, (1) that the difference of
the general sensation in the sleeping and the waking state is
unfavourable to mutual reproduction, and (2) that the different
arrangement of the material in the dream makes the dream untranslatable,
so to speak, for the waking consciousness.
It is therefore all the more remarkable, as Strumpell himself
observes, that, in spite of all these reasons for forgetting the dream,
so many dreams are retained in the memory. The continual efforts of
those who have written on the subject to formulate laws for the
remembering of dreams amount to an admission that here, too, there is
something puzzling and unexplained. Certain peculiarities relating to
the remembering of dreams have attracted particular attention of late;
for example, the fact that the dream which is believed to be forgotten
in the morning may be recalled in the course of the day on the occasion
of some perception which accidentally touches the forgotten content of
the dream (Radestock, Tissie). But the whole recollection of dreams is
open to an objection which is calculated greatly to depreciate its value
in critical eyes. One may doubt whether our memory, which omits so much
from the dream, does not falsify what it retains.
This doubt as to the exactness of the reproduction of dreams is
expressed by Strumpell when he says: "It may therefore easily happen
that the waking consciousness involuntarily interpolates a great many
things in the recollection of the dream; one imagines that one has
dreamt all sorts of things which the actual dream did not contain."
Jessen (p. 547) expresses himself in very decided terms:
"Moreover, we must not lose sight of the fact, hitherto little
heeded, that in the investigation and interpretation of coherent and
logical dreams we almost always take liberties with the truth when we
recall a dream to memory. Unconsciously and unintentionally we fill up
the gaps and supplement the dream-images. Rarely, and perhaps never, has
a connected dream been as connected as it appears to us in memory. Even
the most truth-loving person can hardly relate a dream without
exaggerating and embellishing it in some degree. The human mind so
greatly tends to perceive everything in a connected form that it
intentionally supplies the missing links in any dream which is in some
degree incoherent."
The observations of V. Eggers, though of course independently
conceived, read almost like a translation of Jessen's words:
"...L'observation des reves a ses difficultes speciales et le seul
moyen d'eviter toute erreur en pareille matiere est de confier au papier
sans le moindre retard ce que l'on vient d'eprouver et de remarquer;
sinon, l'oubli vient vite ou total ou partiel; l'oubli total est sans
gravite; mais l'oubli partiel est perfide: car si l'on se met ensuite a
raconter ce que l'on n'a pas oublie, on est expose a completer par
imagination les fragments incoherents et disjoints fourni par la
memoire... on devient artiste a son insu, et le recit, periodiquement
repete s'impose a la creance de son auteur, qui, de bonne foi, le
presente comme un fait authentique, dument etabli selon les bonnes
methodes...."[22]
Similarly Spitta, who seems to think that it is only in the attempt
to reproduce the dream that we bring order and arrangement into loosely
associated dream-elements--"turning juxtaposition into concatenation;
that is, adding the process of logical connection which is absent in the
dream."
Since we can test the reliability of our memory only by objective
means, and since such a test is impossible in the case of dreams, which
are our own personal experience, and for which we know no other source
than our memory, what value do our recollections of our dreams possess?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes
1The following remarks are based on Buchsenschutz's careful essay, Traum
und Traumdeutung im Altertum (Berlin 1868).
2The relationship between dreams and disease is discussed by
Hippocrates in a chapter of his famous work.
3Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, p. 390.
4For the later history of dream-interpretation in the Middle Ages
consult Diepgen, and the special investigations of M. Forster, Gotthard,
and others. The interpretation of dreams among the Jews has been studied
by Amoli, Amram, and Lowinger, and recently, with reference to the
psycho- analytic standpoint, by Lauer. Details of the Arabic methods of
dream- interpretation are furnished by Drexl, F. Schwarz, and the
missionary Tfinkdji. The interpretation of dreams among the Japanese has
been investigated by Miura and Iwaya, among the Chinese by Secker, and
among the Indians by Negelein.
5We dream of what we have seen, said, desired, or done.
6Communicated by Winterstein to the Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse.
7And whatever be the pursuit to which one clings with devotion,
whatever the things on which we have been occupied much in the past, the
mind being thus more intent upon that pursuit, it is generally the same
things that we seem to encounter in dreams; pleaders to plead their
cause and collate laws, generals to contend and engage battle.
8And especially the "remnant" of our waking thoughts and deeds move
and stir within the soul.
9Vaschide even maintains that it has often been observed that in
one's dreams one speaks foreign languages more fluently and with greater
purity than in the waking state.
10See Vaschide, p. 232.
11Vaschide, p. 233
12That every impression, even the most insignificant, leaves an
ineradicable mark, indefinitely capable of reappearing by day.
13From subsequent experience I am able to state that it is not at all
rare to find in dreams reproductions of simple and unimportant
occupations of everyday life, such as packing trunks, preparing food in
the kitchen, etc., but in such dreams the dreamer himself emphasizes not
the character of the recollection but its "reality"- "I really did this
during the day."
14Chauffeurs were bands of robbers in the Vendee who resorted to this
form of torture.
15A sort of relation which is, however, neither unique nor exclusive.
16Gigantic persons in a dream justify the assumption that the dream
is dealing with a scene from the dreamer's childhood. This
interpretation of the dream as a reminiscence of Gulliver's Travels is,
by the way, a good example of how an interpretation should not be made.
The dream-interpreter should not permit his own intelligence to operate
in disregard of the dreamer's impressions.
17In addition to the diagnostic valuation of dreams (e.g., by
Hippocrates) mention must also be made of their therapeutic significance
in antiquity.
18See below for a further discussion of the two volumes of records of
dreams since published by this writer.
19Dreams do not exist whose origin is totally psychic.
20The thoughts of our dreams come from outside.
21Periodically recurrent dreams have been observed repeatedly.
Compare the collection made by Chabaneix.
22 ...The observation of dreams has its special difficulties, and the
only way to avoid all error in such matter is to put on paper without
the least delay what has just been experienced and noticed; otherwise,
totally or partially the dream is quickly forgotten; total forgetting is
without seriousness; but partial forgetting is treacherous: for, if one
then starts to recount what has not been forgotten, one is likely to
supplement from the imagination the incoherent and disjointed fragments
provided by the memory.... unconsciously one becomes an artist, and the
story, repeated from time to time, imposes itself on the belief of its
author, who, in good faith, tells it as authentic fact, regularly
established according to proper methods....
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contents:
Preface
Chapter 1 (part 1, 2) The Scientific Literature of Dream-Problems (up to
1900)
Chapter 2 The Method
of Dream Interpretation
Chapter 3 The Dream as
Wish Fulfilment
Chapter 4 Distortion
in Dreams
Chapter 5 (part 1, 2) The
Material and Sources of Dreams
Chapter 6 (part 1,
2, 3, 4) The
Dream-Work
Chapter 7 (part 1, 2)
The Psychology of the Dream Process
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CHAPTER 1 (part 2)
THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF
DREAM-PROBLEMS (UP TO 1900)
E. The Psychological Peculiarities of Dreams
In our scientific investigation of dreams we start with the assumption
that dreams are a phenomenon of our own psychic activity; yet the
completed dream appears to us as something alien, whose authorship we
are so little inclined to recognize that we should be just as willing to
say "A dream came to me," as "I dreamed." Whence this "psychic
strangeness" of dreams? According to our exposition of the sources of
dreams, we must assume that it is not determined by the material which
finds its way into the dream-content, since this is for the most part
common both to dream-life and waking life. We might ask ourselves
whether this impression is not evoked by modifications of the psychic
processes in dreams, and we might even attempt to suggest that the
existence of such changes is the psychological characteristic of dreams.
No one has more strongly emphasized the essential difference between
dream-life and waking life and drawn more far reaching conclusions from
this difference than G. Th. Fechner in certain observations contained in
his Elemente der Psychophysik (Part II, p. 520). He believes that
"neither the simple depression of conscious psychic life under the main
threshold," nor the distraction of the attention from the influences of
the outer world, suffices to explain the peculiarities of dream-life as
compared with waking life. He believes, rather, that the arena of dreams
is other than the arena of the waking life of the mind. "If the arena of
psychophysical activity were the same during the sleeping and the waking
state, the dream, in my opinion, could only be a continuation of the
waking ideational life at a lower degree of intensity, so that it would
have to partake of the form and material of the latter. But this is by
no means the case."
What Fechner really meant by such a transposition of the psychic
activity has never been made clear, nor has anybody else, to my
knowledge, followed the path which he indicates in this remark. An
anatomical interpretation in the sense of physiological localization in
the brain, or even a histological stratification of the cerebral cortex,
must of course be excluded. The idea might, however, prove ingenious and
fruitful if it could refer to a psychical apparatus built up of a number
of successive and connected systems.
Other authors have been content to give prominence to this or that
palpable psychological peculiarity of the dream-life, and even to take
this as a starting-point for more comprehensive attempts at explanation.
It has been justly remarked that one of the chief peculiarities of
dream-life makes its appearance even in the state of falling asleep, and
may be defined as the sleep-heralding phenomenon. According to
Schleiermacher (p. 351), the distinguishing characteristic of the waking
state is the fact that its psychic activity occurs in the form of ideas
rather than in that of images. But the dream thinks mainly in visual
images, and it may be noted that with the approach of sleep the
voluntary activities become impeded in proportion as involuntary
representations make their appearance, the latter belonging entirely to
the category of images. The incapacity for such ideational activities as
we feel to be deliberately willed, and the emergence of visual images,
which is regularly connected with this distraction- these are two
constant characteristics of dreams, and on psychological analysis we are
compelled to recognize them as essential characteristics of dream-life.
As for the images themselves the hypnogogic hallucinations- we have
learned that even in their content they are identical with
dream-images.[23]
Dreams, then, think preponderantly, but not exclusively, in visual
images. They make use also of auditory images, and, to a lesser extent,
of the other sensory impressions. Moreover, in dreams, as in the waking
state, many things are simply thought or imagined (probably with the
help of remnants of verbal conceptions). Characteristic of dreams,
however, are only those elements of their contents which behave like
images, that is, which more closely resemble perceptions than mnemonic
representations. Without entering upon a discussion of the nature of
hallucinations- a discussion familiar to every psychiatrist- we may say,
with every well-informed authority, that the dream hallucinates- that
is, that it replaces thoughts by hallucinations. In this respect visual
and acoustic impressions behave in the same way. It has been observed
that the recollection of a succession of notes heard as we are falling
asleep becomes transformed, when we have fallen asleep, into a
hallucination of the same melody, to give place, each time we wake, to
the fainter and qualitatively different representations of the memory,
and resuming, each time we doze off again, its hallucinatory character.
The transformation of an idea into a hallucination is not the only
departure of the dream from the more or less corresponding waking
thought. From these images the dream creates a situation; it represents
something as actually present; it dramatizes an idea, as Spitta (p. 145)
puts it. But the peculiar character of this aspect of the dream-life is
completely intelligible only if we admit that in dreaming we do not as a
rule (the exceptions call for special examination) suppose ourselves to
be thinking, but actually experiencing; that is, we accept the
hallucination in perfectly good faith. The criticism that one has
experienced nothing, but that one has merely been thinking in a peculiar
manner- dreaming- occurs to us only on waking. It is this characteristic
which distinguishes the genuine dream from the day-dream, which is never
confused with reality.
The characteristics of the dream-life thus far considered have been
summed up by Burdach (p. 476) as follows: "As characteristic features of
the dream we may state (a) that the subjective activity of our psyche
appears as objective, inasmuch as our perceptive faculties apprehend the
products of phantasy as though they were sensory activities... (b) that
sleep abrogates our voluntary action; hence falling asleep involves a
certain degree of passivity... The images of sleep are conditioned by
the relaxation of our powers of will."
It now remains to account for the credulity of the mind in respect to
the dream-hallucinations which are able to make their appearance only
after the suspension of certain voluntary powers. Strumpell asserts that
in this respect the psyche behaves correctly and in conformity with its
mechanism. The dream-elements are by no means mere representations, but
true and actual experiences of the psyche, similar to those which come
to the waking state by way of the senses (p. 34). Whereas in the waking
state the mind thinks and imagines by means of verbal images and
language, in dreams it thinks and imagines in actual perceptual images
(p. 35). Dreams, moreover, reveal a spatial consciousness, inasmuch as
in dreams, just as in the waking state, sensations and images are
transposed into outer space (p. 36). It must therefore be admitted that
in dreams the mind preserves the same attitude in respect of images and
perceptions as in the waking state (p. 43). And if it forms erroneous
conclusions in respect of these images and perceptions, this is due to
the fact that in sleep it is deprived of that criterion which alone can
distinguish between sensory perceptions emanating from within and those
coming from without. It is unable to subject its images to those tests
which alone can prove their objective reality. Further, it neglects to
differentiate between those images which can be exchanged at will and
those in respect of which there is no free choice. It errs because it
cannot apply the law of causality to the content of its dreams (p. 58).
In brief, its alienation from the outer world is the very reason for its
belief in its subjective dream-world.
Delboeuf arrives at the same conclusion through a somewhat different
line of argument. We believe in the reality of dream-pictures because in
sleep we have no other impressions with which to compare them; because
we are cut off from the outer world. But it is not because we are
unable, when asleep, to test our hallucinations that we believe in their
reality. Dreams can make us believe that we are applying such tests-
that we are touching, say, the rose that we see in our dream; and yet we
are dreaming. According to Delboeuf there is no valid criterion that can
show whether something is a dream or a waking reality, except- and that
only pragmatically- the fact of waking. "I conclude that all that has
been experienced between falling asleep and waking is a delusion, if I
find on waking that I am lying undressed in bed" (p. 84). "I considered
the images of my dream real while I was asleep on account of the
unsleeping mental habit of assuming an outer world with which I can
contrast my ego."[24]
If the turning-away from the outer world is accepted as the decisive
cause of the most conspicuous characteristics of our dreams, it will be
worth our while to consider certain subtle observations of Burdach's,
which will throw some light on the relation of the sleeping psyche to
the outer world, and at the same time serve to prevent our
over-estimating the importance of the above deductions. "Sleep," says
Burdach, "results only under the condition that the mind is not excited
by sensory stimuli... yet it is not so much a lack of sensory stimuli
that conditions sleep as a lack of interest in them;[25] some sensory
impressions are even necessary in so far as they serve to calm the mind;
thus the miller can fall asleep only when he hears the clatter of his
mill, and he who finds it necessary, as a matter of precaution, to burn
a light at night, cannot fall asleep in the dark" (p. 457).
"During sleep the psyche isolates itself from the outer world, and
withdraws from the periphery.... Nevertheless, the connection is not
entirely broken; if one did not hear and feel during sleep, but only
after waking, one would assuredly never be awakened at all. The
continuance of sensation is even more plainly shown by the fact that we
are not always awakened by the mere force of the sensory impression, but
by its relation to the psyche. An indifferent word does not arouse the
sleeper, but if called by name he wakes... so that even in sleep the
psyche discriminates between sensations.... Hence one may even be
awakened by the obliteration of a sensory stimulus, if this is related
to anything of imagined importance. Thus one man wakes when the
nightlight is extinguished, and the miller when his mill comes to a
standstill; that is, waking is due to the cessation of a sensory
activity, and this presupposes that the activity has been perceived, but
has not disturbed the mind, its effect being indifferent, or actually
reassuring" (p. 46, etc.).
Even if we are willing to disregard these by no means trifling
objections, we must yet admit that the qualities of dream-life hitherto
considered, which are attributed to withdrawal from the outer world,
cannot fully account for the strangeness of dreams. For otherwise it
would be possible to reconvert the hallucinations of the dream into
mental images, and the situations of the dream into thoughts, and thus
to achieve the task of dream-interpretation. Now this is precisely what
we do when we reproduce a dream from memory after waking, and no matter
whether we are fully or only partially successful in this retranslation,
the dream still remains as mysterious as before.
Furthermore, all writers unhesitatingly assume that still other and
profounder changes take place in the plastic material of waking life.
Strumpell seeks to isolate one of these changes as follows: (p. 17)
"With the cessation of active sensory perception and of normal
consciousness, the psyche is deprived of the soil in which its feelings,
desires, interests, and activities are rooted. Those psychic states,
feelings, interests, and valuations, which in the waking state adhere to
memory-images, succumb to an obscuring pressure, in consequence of which
their connection with these images is severed; the perceptual images of
things, persons, localities, events and actions of the waking state are,
individually, abundantly reproduced, but none of these brings with it
its psychic value. Deprived of this, they hover in the mind dependent on
their own resources..."
This annihilation of psychic values, which is in turn referred to a
turning away from the outer world, is, according to Strumpell, very
largely responsible for the impression of strangeness with which the
dream is coloured in our memory.
We have seen that the very fact of falling asleep involves a
renunciation of one of the psychic activities- namely, the voluntary
guidance of the flow of ideas. Thus the supposition obtrudes itself
(though it is in any case a natural one) that the state of sleep may
extend even to the psychic functions. One or another of these functions
is perhaps entirely suspended; we have now to consider whether the rest
continue to operate undisturbed, whether they are able to perform their
normal work under the circumstances. The idea occurs to us that the
peculiarities of the dream may be explained by the restricted activity
of the psyche during sleep, and the impression made by the dream upon
our waking judgment tends to confirm this view. The dream is incoherent;
it reconciles, without hesitation, the worst contradictions; it admits
impossibilities; it disregards the authoritative knowledge of the waking
state, and it shows us as ethically and morally obtuse. He who should
behave in the waking state as his dreams represent him as behaving would
be considered insane. He who in the waking state should speak as he does
in his dreams, or relate such things as occur in his dreams, would
impress us as a feeble-minded or muddle-headed person. It seems to us,
then, that we are merely speaking in accordance with the facts of the
case when we rate psychic activity in dreams very low, and especially
when we assert that in dreams the higher intellectual activities are
suspended or at least greatly impaired.
With unusual unanimity (the exceptions will be dealt with elsewhere)
the writers on the subject have pronounced such judgments as lead
immediately to a definite theory or explanation of dream-life. It is now
time to supplement the resume which I have just given by a series of
quotations from a number of authors- philosophers and physicians-
bearing upon the psychological characteristics of the dream.
According to Lemoine, the incoherence of the dream-images is the sole
essential characteristic of the dream.
Maury agrees with him (Le Sommeil, p. 163): "Il n'y a pas des reves
absolument raisonnables et qui ne contiennent quelque incoherence,
quelque absurdite."[26]
According to Hegel, quoted by Spitta, the dream lacks any
intelligible objective coherence.
Dugas says: "Les reve, c'est l'anarchie psychique, affective et
mentale, c'est le jeu des fonctions livrees a elles-memes et s'exercant
sans controle et sans but; dans le reve l'esprit est un automate
spirituel."[27]
"The relaxation, dissolution, and promiscuous confusion of the world
of ideas and images held together in waking life by the logical power of
the central ego" is conceded even by Volkelt (p. 14), according to whose
theory the psychic activity during sleep appears to be by no means
aimless.
The absurdity of the associations of ideas which occur in dreams can
hardly be more strongly stigmatized than it was by Cicero (De
Divinatione, II. lxxi): "Nihil tam praepostere, tam incondite, tam
monstruose cogitari potest, quod non possimus somniare."[28]
Fechner says (p. 522): "It is as though the psychological activity of
the brain of a reasonable person were to migrate into that of a fool."
Radestock (p. 145): "It seems indeed impossible to recognize any
stable laws in this preposterous behaviour. Withdrawing itself from the
strict policing of the rational will that guides our waking ideas, and
from the processes of attention, the dream, in crazy sport, whirls all
things about in kaleidoscopic confusion."
Hildebrandt (p. 45): "What wonderful jumps the dreamer permits
himself, for instance, in his chain of reasoning! With what unconcern he
sees the most familiar laws of experience turned upside down! What
ridiculous contradictions he is able to tolerate in the order of nature
and of society, before things go too far, and the very excess of
nonsense leads to an awakening! Sometimes we quite innocently calculate
that three times three make twenty; and we are not in the least
surprised if a dog recites poetry to us, if a dead person walks to his
grave, or if a rock floats on the water. We solemnly go to visit the
duchy of Bernburg or the principality of Liechtenstein in order to
inspect its navy; or we allow ourselves to be recruited as a volunteer
by Charles XII just before the battle of Poltava."
Binz (p. 33), referring to the theory of dreams resulting from these
impressions, says: "Of ten dreams nine at least have an absurd content.
We unite in them persons or things which do not bear the slightest
relation to one another. In the next moment, as in a kaleidoscope, the
grouping changes to one, if possible, even more nonsensical and
irrational than before; and so the shifting play of the drowsy brain
continues, until we wake, put a hand to our forehead, and ask ourselves
whether we still really possess the faculty of rational imagination and
thought."
Maury, Le Sommeil (p. 50) makes, in respect of the relation of the
dream-image to the waking thoughts, a comparison which a physician will
find especially impressive: "La production de ces images que chez
l'homme eveille fait le plus souvent naitre la volonte, correspond, pour
l'intelligence, a ce que sont pour la motilite certains mouvements que
nous offrent la choree et les affections paralytiques...."[29] For the
rest, he considers the dream "toute une serie de degradations de la
faculte pensante et raisonnante"[30] (p. 27).
It is hardly necessary to cite the utterances of those authors who
repeat Maury's assertion in respect of the higher individual psychic
activities.
According to Strumpell, in dreams- and even, of course, where the
nonsensical nature of the dream is not obvious- all the logical
operations of the mind, based on relations and associations, recede into
the background (p. 26). According to Spitta (p. 148) ideas in dreams are
entirely withdrawn from the laws of causality; while Radestock and
others emphasize the feebleness of judgment and logical inference
peculiar to dreams. According to Jodl (p. 123), there is no criticism in
dreams, no correcting of a series of perceptions by the content of
consciousness as a whole. The same author states that "All the
activities of consciousness occur in dreams, but they are imperfect,
inhibited, and mutually isolated." The contradictions of our conscious
knowledge which occur in dreams are explained by Stricker and many
others on the ground that facts are forgotten in dreams, or that the
logical relations between ideas are lost (p. 98), etc., etc.
Those authors who, in general, judge so unfavourably of the psychic
activities of the dreamer nevertheless agree that dreams do retain a
certain remnant of psychic activity. Wundt, whose teaching has
influenced so many other investigators of dream-problems, expressly
admits this. We may ask, what are the nature and composition of the
remnants of normal psychic life which manifest themselves in dreams? It
is pretty generally acknowledged that the reproductive faculty, the
memory, seems to be the least affected in dreams; it may, indeed, show a
certain superiority over the same function in waking life (see chapter
I, B), even though some of the absurdities of dreams are to be explained
by the forgetfulness of dream-life. According to Spitta, it is the
sentimental life of the psyche which is not affected by sleep, and which
thus directs our dreams. By sentiment (Gemut) he means "the constant sum
of the emotions as the inmost subjective essence of the man" (p. 84).
Scholz (p. 37) sees in dreams a psychic activity which manifests
itself in the "allegorizing interpretation" to which the dream-material
is subjected. Siebeck (p. 11) likewise perceives in dreams a
"supplementary interpretative activity" of the psyche, which applies
itself to all that is observed and perceived. Any judgment of the part
played in dreams by what is presumed to be the highest psychical
function, i.e., consciousness, presents a peculiar difficulty. Since it
is only through consciousness that we can know anything of dreams, there
can be no doubt as to its being retained. Spitta, however, believes that
only consciousness is retained in the dream, but not self-consciousness.
Delboeuf confesses that he is unable to comprehend this distinction.
The laws of association which connect our mental images hold good
also for what is represented in dreams; indeed, in dreams the dominance
of these laws is more obvious and complete than in the waking state.
Strumpell (p. 70) says: "Dreams would appear to proceed either
exclusively in accordance with the laws of pure representation, or in
accordance with the laws of organic stimuli accompanied by such
representations; that is, without being influenced by reflection,
reason, aesthetic taste, or moral judgment." The authors whose opinions
I here reproduce conceive the formation of the dream somewhat as
follows: The sum of sensory stimuli of varying origin (discussed
elsewhere) that are operative in sleep at first awaken in the psyche a
number of images which present themselves as hallucinations (according
to Wundt, it is more correct to say "as illusions," because of their
origin in external and internal stimuli). These combine with one another
in accordance with the known laws of association, and, in accordance
with the same laws, they in turn evoke a new series of representations
(images). The whole of this material is then elaborated as far as
possible by the still active remnant of the thinking and organizing
faculties of the psyche (cf. Wundt and Weygandt). Thus far, however, no
one has been successful in discerning the motive which would decide what
particular law of association is to be obeyed by those images which do
not originate in external stimuli.
But it has been repeatedly observed that the associations which
connect the dream-images with one another are of a particular kind,
differing from those found in the activities of the waking mind. Thus
Volkelt (p. 15): "In dreams the ideas chase and seize upon one another
on the strength of accidental similarities and barely perceptible
connections. All dreams are pervaded by casual and unconstrained
associations of this kind." Maury attaches great value to this
characteristic of the connection of ideas, for it allows him to draw a
closer analogy between the dream-life and certain mental derangements.
He recognizes two main characteristics of "deliria": "(1) une action
spontanee et comme automatique de l'esprit; (2) une association vicieuse
et irreguliere des idees"[31] (p. 126). Maury gives us two excellent
examples from his own dreams, in which the mere similarity of sound
decides the connection between the dream-representations. Once he
dreamed that he was on a pilgrimage (pelerinage) to Jerusalem, or to
Mecca. After many adventures he found himself in the company of the
chemist Pelletier; the latter, after some conversation, gave him a
galvanized shovel (pelle) which became his great broadsword in the next
portion of the dream (p. 137). In another dream he was walking along a
highway where he read the distances on the kilometre-stones; presently
he found himself at a grocer's who had a large pair of scales; a man put
kilogramme weights into the scales, in order to weigh Maury; the grocer
then said to him: "You are not in Paris, but on the island Gilolo." This
was followed by a number of pictures, in which he saw the flower
lobelia, and then General Lopez, of whose death he had read a little
while previously. Finally he awoke as he was playing a game of
lotto.[32]
We are, indeed, quite well aware that this low estimate of the
psychic activities of the dream has not been allowed to pass without
contradiction from various quarters. Yet here contradiction would seem
rather difficult. It is not a matter of much significance that one of
the depreciators of dream-life, Spitta (p. 118), should assure us that
the same psychological laws which govern the waking state rule the dream
also, or that another (Dugas) should state: "Le reve n'est pas deraison
ni meme irraison pure,"[33] so long as neither of them has attempted to
bring this opinion into harmony with the psychic anarchy and dissolution
of all mental functions in the dream which they themselves have
described. However, the possibility seems to have dawned upon others
that the madness of the dream is perhaps not without its method- that it
is perhaps only a disguise, a dramatic pretence, like that of Hamlet, to
whose madness this perspicacious judgment refers. These authors must
either have refrained from judging by appearances, or the appearances
were, in their case, altogether different.
Without lingering over its superficial absurdity, Havelock Ellis
considers the dream as "an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect
thoughts," the study of which may acquaint us with the primitive stages
of the development of mental life. J. Sully (p. 362) presents the same
conception of the dream in a still more comprehensive and penetrating
fashion. His statements deserve all the more consideration when it is
added that he, perhaps more than any other psychologist, was convinced
of the veiled significance of the dream. "Now our dreams are a means of
conserving these successive personalities. When asleep we go back to the
old ways of looking at things and of feeling about them, to impulses and
activities which long ago dominated us." A thinker like Delboeuf
asserts- without, indeed, adducing proof in the face of contradictory
data, and hence without real justification- "Dans le sommeil, hormis la
perception, toutes les facultes de l'esprit, intelligence, imagination,
memoire, volonte, moralite, restent intactes dans leur essence;
seulement, elles s'appliquent a des objets imaginaires et mobiles. Le
songeur est un acteur qui joue a volonte les fous et les sages, les
bourreaux et les victimes, les nains et les geants, les demons et les
anges"[34] (p. 222). The Marquis Hervey,[35] who is flatly contradicted
by Maury, and whose essay I have been unable to obtain despite all my
efforts, appears emphatically to protest against the under-estimation of
the psychic capacity in the dream. Maury speaks of him as follows (p.
19): "M. le Marquis Hervey prete a l'intelligence durant le sommeil
toute sa liberte d'action et d'attention, et il ne semble faire
consister le sommeil que dans l'occlusion des sens, dans leur fermeture
au monde exterieur; en sorte que l'homme qui dort ne se distingue guere,
selon sa maniere de voir, de l'homme qui laisse vaguer sa pensee en se
bouchant les sens; toute la difference qui separe alors la pensee
ordinaire du celle du dormeur c'est que, chez celui-ci, l'idee prend une
forme visible, objective, et ressemble, a s'y meprendre, a la sensation
determinee par les objets exterieurs; le souvenir revet l'apparence du
fait present."[36]
Maury adds, however, "qu'il y a une difference de plus et capitale a
savoir que les facultes intellectuelles de l'homme endormi n'offrent pas
l'equilibre qu'elles gardent chez l'homme eveille."[37]
In Vaschide, who gives us fully information as to Hervey's book, we
find that this author expresses himself as follows, in respect to the
apparent incoherence of dreams: "L'image du reve est la copie de l'idee.
Le principal est l'idee; la vision n'est pas qu'accessoire. Ceci etabli,
il faut savoir suivre la marche des idees, il faut savoir analyser le
tissu des reves; l'incoherence devient alors comprehensible, les
conceptions les plus fantasques deviennent des faits simples et
parfaitement logiques"[38] (p. 146). And (p. 147): "Les reves les plus
bizarres trouvent meme une explication des plus logiques quand on sait
les analyser."[39]
J. Starke has drawn attention to the fact that a similar solution of
the incoherence of dreams was put forward in 1799 by an old writer, Wolf
Davidson, who was unknown to me (p. 136): "The peculiar leaps of our
imaginings in the dream-state all have their cause in the laws of
association, but this connection often occurs very obscurely in the
soul, so that we frequently seem to observe a leap of the imagination
where none really exists."
The evaluation of the dream as a psychic product in the literature of
the subject varies over a very wide scale; it extends from the extreme
of under-estimation, as we have already seen, through premonitions that
it may have a value as yet unrevealed, to an exaggerated
over-estimation, which sets the dream-life far above the capacities of
waking life. In his psychological characterization of dream-life,
Hildebrandt, as we know, groups it into three antinomies, and he
combines in the third of these antinomies the two extreme points of this
scale of values (p. 19): "It is the contrast between, on the one hand,
an enhancement, an increase of potentiality, which often amounts to
virtuosity, and on the other hand a decided diminution and enfeeblement
of the psychic life, often to a sub-human level."
"As regards the first, who is there that cannot confirm from his own
experience the fact that in the workings and weavings of the genius of
dreams, there are sometimes exhibited a profundity and sincerity of
emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clearness of view, a subtlety of
observation and a readiness of wit, such as we should have modestly to
deny that we always possessed in our waking life? Dreams have a
wonderful poetry, an apposite allegory, an incomparable sense of humour,
a delightful irony. They see the world in the light of a peculiar
idealization, and often intensify the effect of their phenomena by the
most ingenious understanding of the reality underlying them. They show
us earthly beauty in a truly heavenly radiance, the sublime in its
supremest majesty, and that which we know to be terrible in its most
frightful form, while the ridiculous becomes indescribably and
drastically comical. And on waking we are sometimes still so full of one
of these impressions that it will occur to us that such things have
never yet been offered to us by the real world."
One might here ask oneself: do these depreciatory remarks and these
enthusiastic praises really refer to the self-same phenomenon? Have some
writers overlooked the foolish and others the profound and sensitive
dreams? And if both kinds of dreams do occur- that is, dreams that merit
both these judgments- does it not seem idle to seek a psychological
characterization of the dream? Would it not suffice to state that
everything is possible in the dream, from the lowest degradation of the
psychic life to its flight to heights unknown in the waking state?
Convenient as such a solution might be, it has this against it: that
behind the efforts of all the investigators of dreams there seems to
lurk the assumption that there is in dreams some characteristic which is
universally valid in its essential features, and which must eliminate
all these contradictions.
It is unquestionably true that the mental capacities of dreams found
readier and warmer recognition in the intellectual period now lying
behind us, when philosophy rather than exact natural science ruled the
more intelligent minds. Statements like that of Schubert, to the effect
that the dream frees the mind from the power of external nature, that it
liberates the soul from the chains of sensory life, together with
similar opinions expressed by the younger Fichte[40] and others, who
represent dreams as a soaring of the mind to a higher plane- all these
seem hardly conceivable to us today; they are repeated at present only
by mystics and devotees.[41] With the advance of a scientific mode of
thought a reaction took place in the estimation of dreams. It is the
medical writers who are most inclined to underrate the psychic activity
in dreams, as being insignificant and valueless; while philosophers and
unprofessional observers- amateur psychologists- whose contributions to
the subject in especial must not be overlooked, have for the most part,
in agreement with popular belief, laid emphasis on the psychological
value of dreams. Those who are inclined to underrate the psychic
activity of dreams naturally show a preference for the somatic sources
of excitation in the aetiology of the dream; those who admit that the
dreaming mind may retain the greater part of its waking faculties
naturally have no motive for denying the existence of autonomous
stimulations
Among the superior accomplishments which one may be tempted, even on
a sober comparison, to ascribe to the dream-life, that of memory is the
most impressive. We have fully discussed the by no means rare
experiences which prove this superiority. Another privilege of the
dream-life, often extolled by the older writers- namely, the fact that
it can overstep the limitations of time and space- is easily recognized
as an illusion. This privilege, as Hildebrandt remarks, is merely
illusory; dreams disregard time and space only as does waking thought,
and only because dreaming is itself a form of thinking. Dreams are
supposed to enjoy a further advantage in respect of time- to be
independent of the passage of time in yet another sense. Dreams like
Maury's dream of his execution (p. 147 above) seem to show that the
perceptual content which the dream can compress into a very short space
of time far exceeds that which can be mastered by our psychic activity
in its waking thoughts. These conclusions have, however, been disputed.
The essays of Le Lorrain and Egger on The Apparent Duration of Dreams
gave rise to a long and interesting discussion, which in all probability
has not yet found the final explanation of this profound and delicate
problem.[42]
That dreams are able to continue the intellectual activities of the
day and to carry them to a point which could not be arrived at during
the day, that they may resolve doubts and problems, and that they may be
the source of fresh inspiration in poets and composers, seems, in the
light of numerous records, and of the collection of instances compiled
by Chabaneix, to be proved beyond question. But even though the facts
may be beyond dispute, their interpretation is subject to many doubts on
wider grounds.[43]
Finally, the alleged divinatory power of the dream has become a
subject of contention in which almost insuperable objections are
confronted by obstinate and reiterated assertions. It is, of course,
right that we should refrain from denying that this view has any basis
whatever in fact, since it is quite possible that a number of such cases
may before long be explained on purely natural psychological grounds.
F. The Ethical Sense in Dreams
For reasons which will be intelligible only after a consideration of
my own investigations of dreams, I have isolated from the psychology of
the dream the subsidiary problem as to whether and to what extent the
moral dispositions and feelings of waking life extend into dream-life.
The same contradictions which we were surprised to observe in the
descriptions by various authors of all the other psychic activities will
surprise us again here. Some writers flatly assert that dreams know
nothing of moral obligations; others as decidedly declare that the moral
nature of man persists even in his dream-life.
Our ordinary experience of dreams seems to confirm beyond all doubt
the correctness of the first assertion. Jessen says (p. 553): "Nor does
one become better or more virtuous during sleep; on the contrary, it
seems that conscience is silent in our dreams, inasmuch as one feels no
compassion and can commit the worst crimes, such as theft, murder, and
homicide, with perfect indifference and without subsequent remorse."
Radestock (p. 146) says: "It is to be noted that in dreams
associations are effected and ideas combined without being in any way
influenced by reflection, reason, aesthetic taste, and moral judgment;
the judgment is extremely weak, and ethical indifference reigns
supreme."
Volkelt (p. 23) expresses himself as follows: "As every one knows,
dreams are especially unbridled in sexual matters. Just as the dreamer
himself is shameless in the extreme, and wholly lacking in moral feeling
and judgment, so likewise does he see others, even the most respected
persons, doing things which, even in his thoughts, he would blush to
associate with them in his waking state."
Utterances like those of Schopenhauer, that in dreams every man acts
and talks in complete accordance with his character, are in sharpest
contradiction to those mentioned above. R. Ph. Fischer[44] maintains
that the subjective feelings and desires, or affects and passions,
manifest themselves in the wilfulness of the dream-life, and that the
moral characteristics of a man are mirrored in his dreams.
Haffner says (p. 25): "With rare exceptions... a virtuous man will be
virtuous also in his dreams; he will resist temptation, and show no
sympathy for hatred, envy, anger, and all other vices; whereas the
sinful man will, as a rule, encounter in his dreams the images which he
has before him in the waking state."
Scholz (p. 36): "In dreams there is truth; despite all camouflage of
nobility or degradation, we recognize our own true selves.... The honest
man does not commit a dishonouring crime even in his dreams, or, if he
does, he is appalled by it as by something foreign to his nature. The
Roman emperor who ordered one of his subjects to be executed because he
dreamed that he had cut off the emperor's head was not far wrong in
justifying his action on the ground that he who has such dreams must
have similar thoughts while awake. Significantly enough, we say of
things that find no place even in our intimate thoughts: 'I would never
even dream of such a thing.'"
Plato, on the other hand, considers that they are the best men who
only dream the things which other men do.
Plaff,[45] varying a familiar proverb, says: "Tell me your dreams for
a time and I will tell you what you are within."
The little essay of Hildebrandt's from which I have already taken so
many quotations (the best-expressed and most suggestive contribution to
the literature of the dream-problem which I have hitherto discovered),
takes for its central theme the problem of morality in dreams. For
Hildebrandt, too, it is an established rule that the purer the life, the
purer the dream; the impurer the life, the impurer the dream.
The moral nature of man persists even in dreams. "But while we are
not offended or made suspicious by an arithmetical error, no matter how
obvious, by a reversal of scientific fact, no matter how romantic, or by
an anachronism, no matter how ridiculous, we nevertheless do not lose
sight of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, virtue
and vice. No matter how much of that which accompanies us during the day
may vanish in our hours of sleep, Kant's categorical imperative dogs our
steps as an inseparable companion, of whom we cannot rid ourselves even
in our slumber.... This can be explained only by the fact that the
fundamental element of human nature, the moral essence, is too firmly
fixed to be subjected to the kaleidoscopic shaking-up to which phantasy,
reason, memory, and other faculties of the same order succumb in our
dreams" (p. 45, etc.).
In the further discussion of the subject we find in both these groups
of authors remarkable evasions and inconsequences. Strictly speaking,
all interest in immoral dreams should be at an end for those who assert
that the moral personality of the individual falls to pieces in his
dreams. They could as coolly reject all attempts to hold the dreamer
responsible for his dreams, or to infer from the immorality of his
dreams that there is an immoral strain in his nature, as they have
rejected the apparently analogous attempt to prove from the absurdity of
his dreams the worthlessness of his intellectual life in the waking
state. The others, according to whom the categorical imperative extends
even into the dream, ought to accept in toto the notion of full
responsibility for immoral dreams; and we can only hope that their own
reprehensible dreams do not lead them to abandon their otherwise firm
belief in their own moral worth.
As a matter of fact, however, it would seem that although no one is
positively certain just how good or how bad he is, he can hardly deny
that he can recollect immoral dreams of his own. That there are such
dreams no one denies; the only question is: how do they originate? So
that, in spite of their conflicting judgments of dream-morality, both
groups of authors are at pains to explain the genesis of the immoral
dream; and here a new conflict arises, as to whether its origin is to be
sought in the normal functions of the psychic life, or in the
somatically conditioned encroachments upon this life. The nature of the
facts compels both those who argue for and those who argue against moral
responsibility in dream-life to agree in recognizing a special psychic
source for the immorality of dreams.
Those who maintain that morality continues to function in our
dream-life nevertheless refrain from assuming full responsibility for
their dreams. Haffner says (p. 24): "We are not responsible for our
dreams, because that basis which alone gives our life truth and reality
is withdrawn from our thoughts and our will. Hence the wishes and
actions of our dreams cannot be virtuous or sinful." Yet the dreamer is
responsible for the sinful dream in so far as indirectly he brings it
about. Thus, as in waking life, it is his duty, just before going to
sleep, morally to cleanse his mind.
The analysis of this admixture of denial and recognition of
responsibility for the moral content of dreams is carried much further
by Hildebrandt. After arguing that the dramatic method of representation
characteristic of dreams, the condensation of the most complicated
processes of reflection into the briefest periods of time, and the
debasement and confusion of the imaginative elements of dreams, which
even he admits must be allowed for in respect of the immoral appearance
of dreams, he nevertheless confesses that there are the most serious
objections to flatly denying all responsibility for the lapses and
offenses of which we are guilty in our dreams.
(p. 49): "If we wish to repudiate very decisively any sort of unjust
accusation, and especially one which has reference to our intentions and
convictions, we use the expression: 'We should never have dreamt of such
a thing.' By this, it is true, we mean on the one hand that we consider
the region of dreams the last and remotest place in which we could be
held responsible for our thoughts, because there these thoughts are so
loosely and incoherently connected with our real being that we can,
after all, hardly regard them as our own; but inasmuch as we feel
impelled expressly to deny the existence of such thoughts even in this
region, we are at the same time indirectly admitting that our
justification would not be complete unless it extended even thus far.
And I believe that here, although unconsciously, we are speaking the
language of truth."
(p. 52): "No dream-action can be imagined whose first beginnings have
not in some shape already passed through the mind during our waking
hours, in the form of wish, desire, or impulse." Concerning this
original impulse we must say: The dream has not discovered it- it has
only imitated and extended it; it has only elaborated into dramatic form
a scrap of historical material which it found already existing within
us; it brings to our mind the words of the Apostle that he who hates his
brother is a murderer. And though, after we wake, being conscious of our
moral strength, we may smile at the whole widely elaborated structure of
the depraved dream, yet the original material out of which we formed it
cannot be laughed away. One feels responsible for the transgressions of
one's dreaming self; not for the whole sum of them, but yet for a
certain percentage. "In short, if in this sense, which can hardly be
impugned, we understand the words of Christ, that out of the heart come
evil thoughts, then we can hardly help being convinced that every sin
committed in our dreams brings with it at least a vague minimum of
guilt."
Thus Hildebrandt finds the source of the immorality of dreams in the
germs and hints of evil impulses which pass through our minds during the
day as mental temptations, and he does not hesitate to include these
immoral elements in the ethical evaluation of the personality. These
same thoughts, and the same evaluation of these thoughts, have, as we
know, caused devout and holy men of all ages to lament that they were
wicked sinners.[46]
The general occurrence of these contrasting thoughts in the majority
of men, and even in other regions than the ethical, is of course
established beyond a doubt. They have sometimes been judged in a less
serious spirit. Spitta quotes a relevant passage from A. Zeller (Article
"Irre," in the Allgemeine Encyklopadie der Wissenschaften, Ersch and
Gruber, p. 144): "An intellect is rarely so happily organized as to be
in full command of itself at all times and seasons, and never to be
disturbed in the lucid and constant processes of thought by ideas not
merely unessential, but absolutely grotesque and nonsensical; indeed,
the greatest thinkers have had cause to complain of this dream-like,
tormenting and distressing rabble of ideas, which disturbs their
profoundest contemplations and their most pious and earnest
meditations."
A clearer light is thrown on the psychological meaning of these
contrasting thoughts by a further observation of Hildebrandt's, to the
effect that dreams permit us an occasional glimpse of the deepest and
innermost recesses of our being, which are generally closed to us in our
waking state (p. 55). A recognition of this fact is betrayed by Kant in
his Anthropology, when he states that our dreams may perhaps be intended
to reveal to us not what we are but what we might have been if we had
had another upbringing; and by Radestock (p. 84), who suggests that
dreams disclose to us what we do not wish to admit to ourselves, and
that we therefore unjustly condemn them as lying and deceptive. J. E.
Erdmann asserts: "A dream has never told me what I ought to think of a
person, but, to my great surprise, a dream has more than once taught me
what I do really think of him and feel about him." And J. H. Fichte
expresses himself in a like manner: "The character of our dreams gives a
far truer reflection of our general disposition than anything that we
can learn by self-observation in the waking state." Such remarks as this
of Benini's call our attention to the fact that the emergence of
impulses which are foreign to our ethical consciousness is merely
analogous to the manner, already familiar to us, in which the dream
disposes of other representative material: "Certe nostre inclinazioni
che si credevano soffocate e spente da un pezzo, si ridestano; passioni
vecchie e sepolte revivono; cose e persone a cui non pensiamo mai, ci
vengono dinanzi" (p. 149). Volkelt expresses himself in a similar
fashion: "Even ideas which have entered into our consciousness almost
unnoticed, and which, perhaps, it has never before called out of
oblivion, often announce their presence in the mind through a dream" (p
105). Finally, we may remember that according to Schleiermacher the
state of falling asleep is accompanied by the appearance of undesired
imaginings.
We may include in such "undesired imaginings" the whole of that
imaginative material the occurrence of which surprises us in immoral as
well as in absurd dreams. The only important difference consists in the
fact that the undesired imaginings in the moral sphere are in opposition
to our usual feelings, whereas the others merely appear strange to us.
So far nothing has been done to enable us to reconcile this difference
by a profounder understanding. But what is the significance of the
emergence of undesired representations in dreams? What conclusions can
the psychology of the waking and dreaming mind draw from these nocturnal
manifestations of contrasting ethical impulses? Here we find a fresh
diversity of opinion, and also a different grouping of the authors who
have treated of the subject. The line of thought followed by
Hildebrandt, and by others who share his fundamental opinion, cannot be
continued otherwise than by ascribing to the immoral impulses, even in
the waking state, a latent vitality, which is indeed inhibited from
proceeding to action, and by asserting that during sleep something falls
away from us which, having the effect of an inhibition, has kept us from
becoming aware of the existence of such impulses. Dreams therefore,
reveal the true, if not the whole, nature of the dreamer, and are one
means of making the hidden life of the psyche accessible to our
understanding. It is only on such hypotheses that Hildebrandt can
attribute to the dream the role of a monitor who calls our attention to
the secret mischief in the soul, just as, according to the physicians,
it may announce a hitherto unobserved physical disorder. Spitta, too,
must be influenced by this conception when he refers, for example, to
the stream of excitations which flow in upon the psyche during puberty,
and consoles the dreamer by assuring him that he has done all that is in
his power to do if he has led a strictly virtuous life during his waking
state, if he has made an effort to suppress the sinful thoughts as often
as they arise, and has kept them from maturing and turning into action.
According to this conception, we might designate as "undesired
imaginings" those that are suppressed during the day, and we must
recognize in their emergence a genuine psychic phenomenon.
According to certain other authors, we have no right to draw this
last inference. For Jessen (p. 360) the undesired ideas and images, in
the dream as in the waking state, and also in the delirium of fever,
etc., possess "the character of a voluntary activity laid to rest, and
of a procession, to some extent mechanical, of images and ideas evoked
by inner impulses." An immoral dream proves nothing in respect of the
psychic life of the dreamer except that he has somehow become cognizant
of the imaginative content in question; it is certainly no proof of a
psychic impulse of his own mind. Another writer, Maury, makes us wonder
whether he, too, does not ascribe to the dream-state the power of
dividing the psychic activity into its components, instead of aimlessly
destroying it. He speaks as follows of dreams in which one oversteps the
bounds of morality: "Ce sont nos penchants qui parlent et qui nous font
agir, sans que la conscience nous retienne, bien que parfois elle nous
avertisse. J'ai mes defauts et mes penchants vicieux; a l'etat de
veille, je tache de lutter contre eux, et il m'arrive assez souvent de
n'y pas succomber. Mais dans mes songes j'y succombe toujours, ou pour
mieux dire j'agis par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans remords....
Evidemment les visions qui se deroulent devant ma pensee, et qui
constituent le reve, me sont suggerees par les incitations que je
ressens et que ma volonte absente ne cherche pas a refouler."[47] Le
Sommeil (p. 113).
If one believed in the power of the dream to reveal an actually
existing, but suppressed or concealed, immoral disposition of the
dreamer, one could not express one's opinion more emphatically than in
the words of Maury (p. 115): "En reve l'homme se revele donc tout entier
a soi-meme dans sa nudite et sa misere natives. Des qu'il suspend
l'exercise de sa volonte, il devient le jouet de toutes les passions
contre lesquelles, a l'etat de veille, la conscience, le sentiment
d'honneur, la crainte nous defendent."[48] In another place makes the
striking assertion (p. 462): "Dans le reve, c'est surtout l'homme
instinctif que se revele.... L'homme revient pour ainsi dire l'etat de
nature quand il reve; mais moins les idees acquises ont penetre dans son
esprit, plus 'les penchants en desaccord' avec elles conservent encore
sur lui d'influence dans le rive."[49] He then mentions, as an example,
that his own dreams often reveal him as a victim of just those
superstitions which he has most vigorously attacked in his writings.
The value of all these acute observations is, however, impaired in
Maury's case, because he refuses to recognize in the phenomena which he
has so accurately observed anything more than a proof of the automatisme
psychologique which in his own opinion dominates the dream-life. He
conceives this automatism as the complete opposite of psychic activity.
A passage in Stricker's Studien uber das Bewusstsein reads: "Dreams
do not consist purely and simply of delusions; for example, if one is
afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers indeed are imaginary, but the
fear is real." Our attention is here called to the fact that the
affective development of a dream does not admit of the judgment which
one bestows upon the rest of the dream-content, and the problem then
arises: What part of the psychic processes in a dream may be real? That
is to say, what part of them may claim to be enrolled among the psychic
processes of the waking state?
G. Dream-Theories and the Function of the Dream
A statement concerning the dream which seeks to explain as many as
possible of its observed characteristics from a single point of view,
and which at the same time defines the relation of the dream to a more
comprehensive sphere of phenomena, may be described as a theory of the
dream. The individual theories of the dream will be distinguished from
one another by their designating as essential this or that
characteristic of dreams, and relating thereto their data and their
explanations. It is not absolutely necessary that we should deduce from
the theory of the dream a function, i.e., a use or any such similar
role, but expectation, being as a matter of habit teleologically
inclined, will nevertheless welcome those theories which afford us some
insight into a function of dreams.
We have already become acquainted with many conceptions of the dream,
which in this sense are more or less deserving of the name of
dream-theories. The belief of the ancients that dreams were sent by the
gods in order to guide the actions of man was a complete theory of the
dream, which told them all that was worth knowing about dreams. Since
dreams have become an object of biological research we have a greater
number of theories, some of which, however, are very incomplete.
Provided we make no claim to completeness, we might venture on the
following rough grouping of dream-theories, based on their fundamental
conception of the degree and mode of the psychic activity in dreams:
1. Theories, like those of Delboeuf, which allow the full psychic
activity of the waking state to continue in our dreams. Here the psyche
does not sleep; its apparatus remains intact; but under the conditions
of the sleeping state, which differ from those of the waking state, it
must in its normal functioning give results which differ from those of
the waking state. As regards these theories, it may be questioned
whether their authors are in a position to derive the distinction
between dreaming and waking thought entirely from the conditions of the
sleeping state. Moreover, they lack one possible access to a function of
dreams; one does not understand to what purpose one dreams- why the
complicated mechanism of the psychic apparatus should continue to
operate even when it is placed under conditions to which it does not
appear to be adapted. There are only two purposeful reactions in the
place of the reaction of dreaming: to sleep dreamlessly, or to wake when
affected by disturbing stimuli.
2. Theories which, on the contrary, assume for the dream a diminution
of the psychic activity, a loosening of connections, and an
impoverishment of the available material. In accordance with these
theories, one must assume for sleep a psychological character entirely
different from that given by Delboeuf. Sleep encroaches widely upon the
psyche; it does not consist in the mere shutting it off from the outer
world; on the contrary, it enters into its mechanism, and makes it for
the time being unserviceable. If I may draw a comparison from
psychiatry, I would say that the first group of theories construes the
dream like a paranoia, while the second represents it as a type of
mental deficiency or amentia.
The theory that only a fragment of the psychic activity paralysed by
sleep finds expression in dreams is that by far the most favoured by
medical writers, and by scientists in general. In so far as one may
presuppose a general interest in dream-interpretation, one may indeed
describe it as the most popular theory of dreams. It is remarkable how
nimbly this particular theory avoids the greatest danger that threatens
every dream-interpretation; that is, shipwreck on one of the contrasts
incorporated in dreams. Since this theory regards dreams as the result
of a partial waking (or, as Herbart puts it in his Psychologie uber den
Traum, "a gradual, partial, and at the same time very anomalous
waking"), it is able to cover the whole series, from the inferior
activities of dreams, which betray themselves by their absurdity, to
fully concentrated intellectual activity, by a series of states of
progressive awakening, ending in complete wakefulness.
Those who find the physiological mode of expression indispensable, or
who deem it more scientific, will find this theory of dreams summarized
in Binz's description (p. 43):
"This state (of torpor), however, gradually comes to an end in the
hours of early morning. The accumulated products of fatigue in the
albumen of the brain gradually diminish. They are slowly decomposed, or
carried away by the constantly flowing blood-stream. Here and there
individual groups of cells can be distinguished as being awake, while
around them all is still in a state of torpidity. The isolated work of
the individual groups now appears before our clouded consciousness,
which is still powerless to control other parts of the brain, which
govern the associations. Hence the pictures created, which for the most
part correspond to the objective impressions of the immediate past,
combine with one another in a wild and uncontrolled fashion. As the
number of brain-cells set free constantly increases, the irrationality
of the dream becomes constantly less."
The conception of the dream as an incomplete, partial waking state,
or traces of the influence of this conception, will of course be found
in the works of all the modern physiologists and philosophers. It is
most completely represented by Maury. It often seems as though this
author conceives the state of being awake or asleep as susceptible of
shifting from one anatomical region to another; each anatomical region
seeming to him to be connected with a definite psychic function. Here I
will merely suggest that even if the theory of partial waking were
confirmed, its finer superstructure would still call for exhaustive
consideration.
No function of dreams, of course, can emerge from this conception of
the dream-life. On the contrary, Binz, one of the chief proponents of
this theory, consistently enough denies that dreams have any status or
importance. He says (p. 357): "All the facts, as we see them, urge us to
characterize the dream as a physical process, in all cases useless, and
in many cases definitely morbid."
The expression physical in reference to dreams (the word is
emphasized by the author) points, of course, in more than one direction.
In the first place, it refers to the aetiology of dreams, which was of
special interest to Binz, as he was studying the experimental production
of dreams by the administration of drugs. It is certainly in keeping
with this kind of dream-theory to ascribe the incitement to dreaming,
whenever possible, exclusively to somatic origins. Presented in the most
extreme form the theory is as follows: After we have put ourselves to
sleep by the banishment of stimuli, there would be no need to dream, and
no reason for dreaming until the morning, when the gradual awakening
through the fresh invasion of stimuli might be reflected in the
phenomenon of dreaming. But, as a matter of fact, it is not possible to
protect our sleep from stimuli; like the germs of life of which
Mephistopheles complained, stimuli come to the sleeper from all
directions- from without, from within, and even from all those bodily
regions which never trouble us during the waking state. Thus our sleep
is disturbed; now this, now that little corner of the psyche is jogged
into the waking state, and the psyche functions for a while with the
awakened fraction, yet is thankful to fall asleep again. The dream is
the reaction to the disturbance of sleep caused by the stimulus, but it
is, when all is said, a purely superfluous reaction.
The description of the dream- which, after all, remains an activity
of the psychic organ- as a physical process has yet another connotation.
So to describe it is to deny that the dream has the dignity of a psychic
process. The old simile of "the ten fingers of a person ignorant of
music running over the keyboard of an instrument" perhaps best
illustrates in what esteem the dream is commonly held by the
representatives of exact science. Thus conceived, it becomes something
wholly insusceptible of interpretation. How could the ten fingers of a
player ignorant of music perform a musical composition?
The theory of partial wakefulness did not escape criticism even by
the earlier writers. Thus Burdach wrote in 1830: "If we say that
dreaming is a partial waking, then, in the first place, neither the
waking nor the sleeping state is explained thereby; secondly, this
amounts only to saying that certain powers of the mind are active in
dreams while others are at rest. But such irregularities occur
throughout life..." (p. 482).
The prevailing dream-theory which conceives the dream as a "physical"
process finds a certain support in a very interesting conception of the
dream which was first propounded by Robert in 1866, and which is
seductive because it assigns to the dream a function or a useful result.
As the basis of his theory Robert takes two objectively observable facts
which we have already discussed in our consideration of dream-material
(chapter I., B). These facts are: (1) that one very often dreams about
the most insignificant impressions of the day; and (2) that one rarely
carries over into the dream the absorbing interests of the day. Robert
asserts as an indisputable fact that those matters which have been fully
settled and solved never evoke dreams, but only such as lie incompleted
in the mind, or touch it merely in passing (p. 10). "For this reason we
cannot usually explain our dreams, since their causes are to be found in
sensory impressions of the preceding day which have not attained
sufficient recognition on the part of the dreamer." The condition
permitting an impression to reach the dream is, therefore, that this
impression has been disturbed in its elaboration, or that it was too
insignificant to lay claim to such elaboration.
Robert therefore conceives the dream "as a physical process of
elimination which in its psychic reaction reaches the consciousness."
Dreams are eliminations of thoughts nipped in the bud. "A man deprived
of the capacity for dreaming would in time become mentally unbalanced,
because an immense number of unfinished and unsolved thoughts and
superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain, under the
pressure of which all that should be incorporated in the memory as a
completed whole would be stifled." The dream acts as a safety-valve for
the over-burdened brain. Dreams possess a healing and unburdening power
(p. 32).
We should misunderstand Robert if we were to ask him how
representation in the dream could bring about an unburdening of the
mind. The writer apparently concluded from these two peculiarities of
the dream-material that during sleep such an elimination of worthless
impressions is effected somehow as a somatic process; and that dreaming
is not a special psychic process, but only the information which we
receive of such elimination. Moreover, elimination is not the only thing
that takes place in the mind during sleep. Robert himself adds that the
stimuli of the day are likewise elaborated, and "what cannot be
eliminated from the undigested thought-material lying in the mind is
bound up into a completed whole by mental clues borrowed from the
imagination, and is thus enrolled in the memory as a harmless
phantasy-picture" (p. 23).
But it is in his criticism of the sources of dreams that Robert is
most flatly opposed to the prevailing theory. Whereas according to this
theory there would be no dream if the external and internal sensory
stimuli did not repeatedly wake the mind, according to Robert the
impulse to dream lies in the mind itself. It lies in the overloading of
the mind, which demands discharge, and Robert considers, quite
consistently, that those causes conditioning the dream which depend on
the physical condition assume a subordinate rank, and could not incite
dreams in a mind which contained no material for dream-formation derived
from the waking consciousness. It is admitted, however, that the
phantasy-images originating in the depths of the mind may be influenced
by nervous stimuli (p. 48). Thus, according to Robert, dreams are not,
after all, wholly dependent on the somatic element. Dreaming is, of
course, not a psychic process, and it has no place among the psychic
processes of the waking state; it is a nocturnal somatic process in the
apparatus of mental activity, and has a function to perform, viz., to
guard this apparatus against excessive strain, or, if we may be allowed
to change the comparison, to cleanse the mind.
Another author, Yves Delage, bases his theory on the same
characteristics of the dream- characteristics which are perceptible in
the selection of the dream-material, and it is instructive to observe
how a trifling twist in the conception of the same things gives a final
result entirely different in its bearings. Delage, having lost through
death a person very dear to him, found that we either do not dream at
all of what occupies us intently during the day, or that we begin to
dream of it only after it is overshadowed by the other interests of the
day. His investigations in respect of other persons corroborated the
universality of this state of affairs. Concerning the dreams of
newly-married people, he makes a comment which is admirable if it should
prove to be generally true: "S'ils ont ete fortement epris, presque
jamais ils n'ont reve l'un de l'autre avant le mariage ou pendant la
lune de miel; et s'ils ont reve d'amour c'est pour etre infideles avec
quelque personne indifferente ou odieuse."[50] But of what does one
dream? Delage recognizes that the material of our dreams consists of
fragments and remnants of impressions, both from the last few days and
from earlier periods. All that appears in our dreams, all that we may at
first be inclined to consider the creation of the dream-life, proves on
closer investigation to be unrecognized reproduction, "souvenir
inconscient." But this representative material reveals one common
characteristic; it originates from impressions which have probably
affected our senses more forcibly than our mind, or from which the
attention has been deflected soon after their occurrence. The less
conscious, and at the same time the stronger an impression, the greater
the prospect of its playing a part in our next dream.
These two categories of impressions- the insignificant and the
undisposed-of- are essentially the same as those which were emphasized
by Robert, but Delage gives them another significance, inasmuch as he
believes that these impressions are capable of exciting dreams not
because they are indifferent, but because they are not disposed of. The
insignificant impressions also are, in a sense, not fully disposed of;
they, too, owing to their character of new impressions, are "autant de
ressorts tendus,"[51] which will be relaxed during sleep. Still more
entitled to a role in the dream than a weak and almost unnoticed
impression is a vivid impression which has been accidentally retarded in
its elaboration, or intentionally repressed. The psychic energy
accumulated during the day by inhibition or suppression becomes the
mainspring of the dream at night. In dreams psychically suppressed
material achieves expression.[52]
Unfortunately Delage does not pursue this line of thought any
farther; he is able to ascribe only the most insignificant role in our
dreams to an independent psychic activity, and thus, in his theory of
dreams, he reverts to the prevailing doctrine of a partial slumber of
the brain: "En somme le reve est le produit de la pensee errante, sans
but et sans direction, se fixant successivement sur les souvenirs, qui
ont garde assez d'intensite pour se placer sur sa route et l'arreter au
passage, etablissant entre eux un lien tantot faible et indecis, tantot
plus fort et plus serre, selon que l'activite actuelle du cerveau est
plus ou moins abolie par le sommeil."[53]
3. In a third group we may include those dream-theories which ascribe
to the dreaming mind the capacity for and propensity to special psychic
activities, which in the waking state it is able to exert either not at
all or imperfectly. In most cases the manifestation of these activities
is held to result in a useful function of dreams. The evaluations of
dreams by the earlier psychologists fall chiefly within this category. I
shall content myself, however, with quoting in their stead the assertion
of Burdach, to the effect that dreaming "is the natural activity of the
mind, which is not limited by the power of the individuality, nor
disturbed by self-consciousness, nor directed by self-determination, but
is the vitality of the sensible focus indulging in free play" (p. 486).
Burdach and others evidently consider this revelling in the free use
of its own powers as a state in which the mind refreshes itself and
gathers fresh strength for the day's work; something, indeed, after the
fashion of a vacation. Burdach therefore cites with approval the
admirable words in which the poet Novalis lauds the power of the dream:
"The dream is a bulwark against the regularity and commonplace character
of life, a free recreation of the fettered phantasy, in which it
intermingles all the images of life and interrupts the constant
seriousness of the adult by the joyful play of the child. Without the
dream we should surely grow old earlier, so that the dream may be
considered, if not precisely as a gift from above, yet as a delightful
exercise, a friendly companion on our pilgrimage to the grave."
The refreshing and healing activity of dreams is even more
impressively described by Purkinje (p. 456). "The productive dreams in
particular would perform these functions. These are the unconstrained
play of the imagination, and have no connection with the events of the
day. The mind is loth to continue the tension of the waking life, but
wishes to relax it and recuperate from it. It creates, in the first
place conditions opposed to those of the waking state. It cures sadness
by joy, worry by hope and cheerfully distracting images, hatred by love
and friendliness, and fear by courage and confidence; it appeases doubt
by conviction and firm belief, and vain expectation by realization.
Sleep heals many sore spots in the mind, which the day keeps continually
open, by covering them and guarding them against fresh irritation. On
this depends in some degree the consoling action of time." We all feel
that sleep is beneficial to the psychic life, and the vague surmise of
the popular consciousness is apparently loth to surrender the notion
that dreaming is one of the ways in which sleep bestows its benefits.
The most original and most comprehensive attempt to explain dreaming
as a special activity of the mind, which can freely unfold itself only
in the sleeping state, is that made by Scherner in 1861. Scherner's book
is written in a heavy and bombastic style and is inspired by an almost
intoxicated enthusiasm for the subject, which is bound to repel us
unless it can carry us away with it. It places so many difficulties in
the way of an analysis that we gladly resort to the clearer and conciser
presentation of Scherner's theories made by the philosopher Volkelt:
"From these mystical conglomerations, from all these outbursts of
splendour and radiance, there indeed flashes and shines an ominous
semblance of meaning; but the path of the philosopher is not illumined
thereby." Such is the criticism of Scherner's exposition by one of his
own followers.
Scherner is not one of those writers for whom the mind carries its
undiminished faculties into the dream-life. He even explains how, in our
dreams, the centrality and spontaneous energy of the ego become
enervated; how cognition, feeling, will, and imagination are transformed
by this decentralization; how the remnant of these psychic forces has
not a truly intellectual character, but is rather of the nature of a
mechanism. But, on the other hand, that activity of the psyche which may
be described as phantasy, freed from all rational governance, and hence
no longer strictly controlled, rises to absolute supremacy in our
dreams. To be sure, it borrows all its building-material from the memory
of the waking state, but with this material it builds up structures
which differ from those of the waking state as day differs from night.
In our dreams it reveals itself as not only reproductive but also
productive. Its peculiarities give the dream-life its singular
character. It shows a preference for the unlimited, the exaggerated, the
prodigious; but by its liberation from the inhibiting categories of
thought, it gains a greater flexibility and agility, and indulges in
pleasurable turns. It is excessively sensitive to the delicate emotional
stimuli of the mind, to its stirring and disturbing affects, and it
rapidly recasts the inner life into an external, plastic visibility. The
dream-phantasy lacks the language of concepts. What it wishes to say it
must express in visible form; and since in this case the concept does
not exert an inhibitory control, it depicts it in all the fulness,
power, and breadth of visible form. But hereby its language, plain
though it is, becomes cumbersome, awkward, and prolix. Plain speaking is
rendered especially difficult by the fact that it dislikes expressing an
object by its actual image, but prefers to select an alien image, if
only the latter is able to express that particular aspect of the object
which it is anxious to represent. Such is the symbolizing activity of
the phantasy.... It is, moreover, very significant that the
dream-phantasy reproduces objects not in detail, but only in outline,
and in the freest possible manner. Its paintings, therefore, are like
light and brilliant sketches. The dream-phantasy, however, does not stop
at the mere representation of the object, but feels an internal urge to
implicate the dream-ego to some extent with the object, and thus to give
rise to action. The visual dream, for example, depicts gold coins lying
in the street; the dreamer picks them up, rejoices, and carries them
away.
According to Scherner, the material upon which the dream-phantasy
exerts its artistic activity consists preponderantly of the organic
sensory stimuli which are so obscure during the day (cf. p. 151 above);
hence it is that the over-fantastic theory of Scherner, and perhaps too
matter-of-fact theories of Wundt and other physiologists, though
otherwise diametrically opposed to each other, are in perfect agreement
in their assumptions with regard to dream-sources and dream-stimuli. But
whereas, according to the physiological theory, the psychic reaction to
the inner physical stimuli becomes exhausted with the arousing of any of
the ideas appropriate to these stimuli (as these ideas then, by way of
association, call to their aid other ideas, so that on reaching this
stage the chain of psychic processes appears to terminate), according to
Scherner, on the other hand, the physical stimuli merely supply the
psyche with material which it may utilize in fulfilling its phantastic
intentions. For Scherner dream-formation begins where, according to the
views of other writers, it comes to an end.
What the dream-phantasy does with the physical stimuli cannot, of
course, be regarded as purposeful. The phantasy plays a tantalizing game
with them, and represents the organic source of the stimuli of the dream
in question by any sort of plastic symbolism. Indeed, Scherner holds-
though here Volkelt and others differ from him- that the dream-phantasy
has a certain favourite symbol for the organism as a whole: namely, the
house. Fortunately, however, for its representations, it does not seem
to limit itself to this material; it may also employ a whole series of
houses to designate a single organ; for example, very long streets of
houses for the intestinal stimulus. In other dreams particular parts of
the house may actually represent particular regions of the body, as in
the headache-dream, when the ceiling of the room (which the dream sees
covered with disgusting toad-like spiders) represents the head.
Quite apart from the symbol of the house, any other suitable object
may be employed to represent those parts of the body which excite the
dream. "Thus the breathing lungs find their symbol in the flaming stove
with its windy roaring, the heart in hollow chests and baskets, the
bladder in round, ball-shaped, or simply hollow objects. The man's
dreams, when due to the sexual stimulus, make the dreamer find in the
street the upper portion of a clarinet, or the mouthpiece of a
tobacco-pipe, or, again, a piece of fur. The clarinet and tobacco-pipe
represent the approximate form of the male sexual organ, while the fur
represents the pubic hair. In the sexual dreams of the female, the
tightness of the closed thighs may be symbolized by a narrow courtyard
surrounded by houses, and the vagina by a very narrow, slippery and soft
footpath, leading through the courtyard, upon which the dreamer is
obliged to walk, in order perhaps to carry a letter to a man" (Volkelt,
p. 39). It is particularly noteworthy that at the end of such a
physically stimulated dream the phantasy, as it were, unmasks itself by
representing the exciting organ or its function unconcealed. Thus the
"tooth-excited dream" usually ends with the dreamer taking a tooth out
of his mouth.
The dream-phantasy may, however, direct its attention not merely to
the form of the exciting organ, but may even make the substance
contained therein the object of symbolization. Thus, for example, the
dream excited by the intestinal stimuli may lead us through muddy
streets, the dream due to stimuli from the bladder to foaming water. Or
the stimulus as such, the nature of its excitation, and the object which
it covets, are represented symbolically. Or, again, the dream-ego enters
into a concrete association with the symbolization of its own state; as,
for example, when in the case of painful stimuli we struggle desperately
with vicious dogs or raging bulls, or when in a sexual dream the dreamer
sees herself pursued by a naked man. Disregarding all the possible
prolixity of elaboration, a phantastic symbolizing activity remains as
the central force of every dream. Volkelt, in his fine and enthusiastic
essay, attempted to penetrate still further into the character of this
phantasy, and to assign to the psychic activity thus recognized its
position in a system of philosophical ideas, which, however, remains
altogether too difficult of comprehension for anyone who is not prepared
by previous training for the intuitive comprehension of philosophical
modes of thought.
Scherner attributes no useful function to the activity of the
symbolizing phantasy in dreams. In dreams the psyche plays with the
stimuli which are offered to it. One might conjecture that it plays in a
mischievous fashion. And we might be asked whether our detailed
consideration of Scherner's dream-theory, the arbitrariness of which,
and its deviation from the rules of all forms of research are only too
obvious, can lead to any useful results. We might fitly reply that to
reject Scherner's theory without previous examination would be imposing
too arrogant a veto. This theory is based on the impressions produced by
his dreams on a man who paid close attention to them, and who would
appear to be personally very well equipped for tracing obscure psychic
phenomena. Furthermore, it treats of a subject which (though rich in its
contents and relations) has for thousands of years appeared mysterious
to humanity, and to the elucidation of which science, strictly so
called, has, as it confesses, contributed nothing beyond attempting- in
uncompromising opposition to popular sentiment- to deny its content and
significance. Finally, let us frankly admit that it seems as though we
cannot very well avoid the phantastical in our attempts to explain
dreams. We must remember also that there is such a thing as a phantasy
of ganglion cells; the passage cited (p. 87) from a sober and exact
investigator like Binz, which describes how the dawn of awakening floods
the dormant cell-masses of the cerebral cortex, is not a whit less
fanciful and improbable than Scherner's attempts at interpretation. I
hope to be able to demonstrate that there is something real underlying
these attempts, though the phenomena which he describes have been only
vaguely recognized, and do not possess the character of universality
that should entitle them to be the basis of a theory of dreams. For the
present, Scherner's theory of dreams, in contrast to the medical theory,
may perhaps lead us to realize between what extremes the explanation of
dream-life is still unsteadily vacillating.
H. The Relation between Dreams and Mental Diseases
When we speak of the relation of dreams to mental derangement, we may
mean three different things: (1) aetiological and clinical relations, as
when a dream represents or initiates a psychotic condition, or occurs
subsequently to such a condition; (2) changes which the dream-life
undergoes in cases of mental disease; (3) inner relations between dreams
and psychoses, analogies which point to an intimate relationship. These
manifold relations between the two series of phenomena were in the early
days of medical science- and are once more at the present time- a
favourite theme of medical writers, as we may learn from the literature
on the subject collated by Spitta, Radestock, Maury, and Tissie.
Recently Sante de Sanctis has directed his attention to this
relationship.[54] For the purposes of our discussion it will suffice
merely to glance at this important subject.
As to the clinical and aetiological relations between dreams and the
psychoses, I will report the following observations as examples:
Hohnbaum asserts (see Krauss) that the first attack of insanity is
frequently connected with a terrifying anxiety-dream, and that the
predominating idea is related to this dream. Sante de Sanctis adduces
similar observations in respect of paranoiacs, and declares the dream to
be, in some of them, "la vraie cause determinante de la folie."[55] The
psychosis may come to life quite suddenly, simultaneously with the dream
that contains its effective and delusive explanation, or it may develop
slowly through subsequent dreams that have still to struggle against
doubt. In one of de Sanctis's cases an intensively moving dream was
accompanied by slight hysterical attacks, which, in their turn, were
followed by an anxious melancholic state. Fere (cited by Tissie) refers
to a dream which was followed by hysterical paralysis. Here the dream is
presented as the aetiology of mental derangement, although we should be
making a statement equally consistent with the facts were we to say that
the first manifestation of the mental derangement occurred in the
dream-life, that the disorder first broke through in the dream. In other
instances, the morbid symptoms are included in the dream-life, or the
psychosis remains confined to the dream-life. Thus Thomayer calls our
attention to anxiety-dreams which must be conceived as the equivalent of
epileptic attacks. Allison has described cases of nocturnal insanity
(see Radestock), in which the subjects are apparently perfectly well in
the day-time, while hallucinations, fits of frenzy, and the like
regularly make their appearance at night. De Sanctis and Tissie record
similar observations (the equivalent of a paranoic dream in an
alcoholic, voices accusing a wife of infidelity). Tissie records many
observations of recent date in which behaviour of a pathological
character (based on delusory hypotheses, obsessive impulses) had their
origin in dreams. Guislain describes a case in which sleep was replaced
by an intermittent insanity.
We cannot doubt that one day the physician will concern himself not
only with the psychology, but also with the psycho-pathology of dreams.
In cases of convalescence from insanity, it is often especially
obvious that while the functions may be healthy by day the dream-life
may still partake of the psychosis. Gregory is said to have been the
first to call attention to such cases (see Krauss). Macario (cited by
Tissie) gives an account of a maniac who, a week after his complete
recovery, once more experienced in dreams the flux of ideas and the
unbridled impulses of his disease.
Concerning the changes which the dream-life undergoes in chronic
psychotics, little research has been undertaken as yet. On the other
hand, early attention was given to the inner relationship between dreams
and mental disturbances, a relationship which is demonstrated by the
complete agreement of the manifestations occurring in each. According to
Maury, Cabanis, in his Rapports du Physique et du Moral, was the first
to call attention to this relationship; he was followed by Lelut, J.
Moreau, and more particularly the philosopher Maine de Biran. The
comparison between the two is of course older still. Radestock begins
the chapter in which he deals with the subject by citing a number of
opinions which insist on the analogy between insanity and dreaming. Kant
says somewhere: "The lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state."
According to Krauss, "Insanity is a dream in which the senses are
awake." Schopenhauer terms the dream a brief insanity, and insanity a
long dream. Hagen describes delirium as a dream-life which is inducted
not by sleep but by disease. Wundt, in his Physiologische Psychologie,
declares: "As a matter of fact we ourselves may in dreams experience
almost all the manifestations which we observe in the asylums for the
insane."
The specific points of agreement in consequence of which such a
comparison commends itself to our judgment are enumerated by Spitta, who
groups them (very much as Maury has done) as follows: "(1) Suspension,
or at least retardation of self-consciousness, and consequently
ignorance of the condition as such, the impossibility of astonishment,
and a lack of moral consciousness. (2) Modified perception of the
sensory organs; that is, perception is as a rule diminished in dreams,
and greatly enhanced in insanity. (3) Mutual combination of ideas
exclusively in accordance with the laws of association and reproduction,
hence automatic series-formations: hence again a lack of proportion in
the relations between ideas (exaggerations, phantasms); and the results
of all this: (4) Changes in- for example, inversions of- the
personality, and sometimes of the idiosyncrasies of the character
(perversities)."
Radestock adds a few additional data concerning the analogous nature
of the material of dreams and of mental derangement: "The greatest
number of hallucinations and illusions are found in the sphere of the
senses of sight and hearing and general sensation. As in dreams, the
fewest elements are supplied by the senses of smell and taste. The
fever-patient, like the dreamer, is assailed by reminiscences from the
remote past; what the waking and healthy man seems to have forgotten is
recollected in sleep and in disease." The analogy between dreams and the
psychoses receives its full value only when, like a family resemblance,
it is extended to the subtler points of mimicry, and even the individual
peculiarities of facial expression.
"To him who is tortured by physical and mental sufferings the dream
accords what has been denied him by reality, to wit, physical
well-being, and happiness; so, too, the insane see radiant images of
happiness, eminence, and wealth. The supposed possession of estates and
the imaginary fulfilment of wishes, the denial or destruction of which
have actually been a psychic cause of the insanity, often form the main
content of the delirium. The woman who has lost a dearly beloved child
experiences in her delirium the joys of maternity; the man who has
suffered reverses of fortune deems himself immensely wealthy; and the
jilted girl sees herself tenderly beloved."
(This passage from Radestock is an abstract of a brilliant exposition
of Griesinger's (p. 111), which reveals, with the greatest clarity,
wish-fulfilment as a characteristic of the imagination common to dreams
and to the psychoses. My own investigations have taught me that here is
to be found the key to a psychological theory of dreams and of the
psychoses.)
"Absurd combinations of ideas and weakness of judgment are the main
characteristics of the dream and of insanity." The over-estimation of
one's own mental capacity, which appears absurd to sober judgment, is
found alike in both, and the rapid flux of imaginings in the dream
corresponds to the flux of ideas in the psychoses. Both are devoid of
any measure of time. The splitting of the personality in dreams, which,
for instance, distributes one's own knowledge between two persons, one
of whom, the strange person, corrects one's own ego in the dream,
entirely corresponds with the well-known splitting of the personality in
hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer, too, hears his own thoughts
expressed by strange voices. Even the constant delusive ideas find their
analogy in the stereotyped and recurring pathological dream (reve
obsedant). After recovering from delirium, patients not infrequently
declare that the whole period of their illness appeared to them like an
uncomfortable dream; indeed, they inform us that sometimes during their
illness they have suspected that they were only dreaming, just as often
happens in the sleep-dream.
In view of all this, it is not surprising that Radestock should
summarize his own opinion, and that of many others, in the following
words: "Insanity, an abnormal morbid phenomenon, is to be regarded as an
enhancement of the periodically recurring normal dream-state" (p. 228).
Krauss attempted to base the relationship between the dream and
insanity upon their aetiology (or rather upon the sources of
excitation), thus, perhaps, making the relationship even more intimate
than was possible on the basis of the analogous nature of the phenomena
manifested. According to him, the fundamental element common to both is,
as we have already learned, the organically conditioned sensation, the
sensation of physical stimuli, the general sensation arising out of
contributions from all the organs (cf. Peisse, cited by Maury, p. 52).
The undeniable agreement between dreams and mental derangement,
extending even to characteristic details, constitutes one of the
strongest confirmations of the medical theory of dream-life, according
to which the dream is represented as a useless and disturbing process,
and as the expression of a diminished psychic activity. One cannot
expect, for the present, to derive the final explanation of the dream
from the psychic derangements, since, as is well known, our
understanding of the origin of the latter is still highly
unsatisfactory. It is very probable, however, that a modified conception
of the dream must also influence our views regarding the inner mechanism
of mental disorders, and hence we may say that we are working towards
the explanation of the psychoses when we endeavour to elucidate the
mystery of dreams.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADDENDUM 1909
I shall have to justify myself for not extending my summary of the
literature of dream-problems to cover the period between the first
appearance of this book and the publication of the second edition. This
justification may not seem very satisfactory to the reader; none the
less, to me it was decisive. The motives which induced me to summarize
the treatment of dreams in the literature of the subject have been
exhausted by the foregoing introduction; to have continued this would
have cost me a great deal of effort and would not have been particularly
useful or instructive. For the interval in question- a period of nine
years- has yielded nothing new or valuable as regards the conception of
dreams, either in actual material or in novel points of view. In most of
the literature which has appeared since the publication of my own work
the latter has not been mentioned or discussed; it has, of course,
received the least attention from the so-called "research-workers on
dreams," who have thus afforded a brilliant example of the aversion to
learning anything new so characteristic of the scientist. "Les savants
ne sont pas curieux,"[56] said the scoffer Anatole France. If there were
such a thing in science as the right of revenge, I in my turn should be
justified in ignoring the literature which has appeared since the
publication of this book. The few reviews which have appeared in the
scientific journals are so full of misconceptions and lack of
comprehension that my only possible answer to my critics would be a
request that they should read this book over again- or perhaps merely
that they should read it!
In the works of those physicians who make use of the psycho-analytic
method of treatment a great many dreams have been recorded and
interpreted in accordance with my directions. In so far as these works
go beyond the confirmation of my own assertions, I have noted their
results in the context of my exposition. A supplementary bibliography at
the end of this volume comprises the most important of these new
publications. The comprehensive work on the dream by Sante de Sanctis,
of which a German translation appeared soon after its publication, was
produced simultaneously with my own, so that I could not review his
results, nor could he comment upon mine. I am sorry to have to express
the opinion that this laborious work is exceedingly poor in ideas, so
poor that one could never divine from it the possibility of the problems
which I have treated in these pages.
I can think of only two publications which touch on my own treatment
of the dream-problems. A young philosopher, H. Swoboda, who has ventured
to extend W. Fliess's discovery of biological periodicity (in series of
twenty-three and twenty-eight days) to the psychic field, has produced
an imaginative essay,[57] in which, among other things, he has used this
key to solve the riddle of dreams. Such a solution, however, would be an
inadequate estimate of the significance of dreams. The material content
of dreams would be explained by the coincidence of all those memories
which, on the night of the dream, complete one of these biological
periods for the first or the nth time. A personal communication of the
author's led me to assume that he himself no longer took this theory
very seriously. But it seems that I was mistaken in this conclusion: I
shall record in another place some observations made with reference to
Swoboda's thesis, which did not, however, yield convincing results. It
gave me far greater pleasure to find by chance, in an unexpected
quarter, a conception of the dream which is in complete agreement with
the essence of my own. The relevant dates preclude the possibility that
this conception was influenced by reading my book: I must therefore hail
this as the only demonstrable concurrence with the essentials of my
theory of dreams to be found in the literature of the subject. The book
which contains the passage that I have in mind was published (in its
second edition) in 1910, by Lynkeus, under the title Phantasien eines
Realisten.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADDENDUM 1914
The above apologia was written in 1909. Since then, the state of
affairs has certainly undergone a change; my contribution to the
"interpretation of dreams" is no longer ignored in the literature of the
subject. But the new situation makes it even more impossible to continue
the foregoing summary. The Interpretation of Dreams has evoked a whole
series of new contentions and problems, which have been expounded by the
authors in the most varied fashions. But I cannot discuss these works
until I have developed the theories to which their authors have
referred. Whatever has appeared to me as valuable in this recent
literature I have accordingly reviewed in the course of the following
exposition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes
23Silberer has shown by excellent examples how in the state of falling
asleep even abstract thoughts may be changed into visible plastic
images, which, of course, express them. (Jahrbuch, Bleuler-Freud, vol.
i, 1900.) I shall return to the discussion of his findings later on.
24Haffner, like Delboeuf, has attempted to explain the act of
dreaming by the alteration which an abnormally introduced condition must
have upon the otherwise correct functioning of the intact psychic
apparatus; but he describes this condition in somewhat different terms.
He states that the first distinguishing mark of dreams is the abolition
of time and space, i.e., the emancipation of the representation from the
individual's position in the spatial and temporal order. Associated with
this is the second fundamental character of dreams, the mistaking of the
hallucinations, imaginations, and phantasy-combinations for objective
perceptions. "The sum-total of the higher psychic functions,
particularly the formation of concepts, judgments, and conclusions on
the one hand, and free self-determination on the other hand, combine
with the sensory phantasy-images, and at all times have these as a
substratum. These activities too, therefore, participate in the erratic
nature of the dream-representations. We say they participate, for our
faculties of judgment and will are in themselves unaltered during sleep.
As far as their activity is concerned, we are just as shrewd and just as
free as in the waking state. A man cannot violate the laws of thought;
that is, even in a dream he cannot judge things to be identical which
present themselves to him as opposites. He can desire in a dream only
that which he regards as a good (sub ratione boni). But in this
application of the laws of thought and will the human intellect is led
astray in dreams by confusing one notion with another. Thus it happens
that in dreams we formulate and commit the greatest of contradictions,
while, on the other hand, we display the shrewdest judgment and arrive
at the most logical conclusions, and are able to make the most virtuous
and sacred resolutions. The lack of orientation is the whole secret of
our flights of phantasy in dreams, and the lack of critical reflection
and agreement with other minds is the main source of the reckless
extravagances of our judgments, hopes and wishes in dreams" (p. 18).
25Compare with this the element of "Desinteret," in which Claparede
(1905) finds the mechanism of falling asleep.
26There are no dreams which are absolutely reasonable which do not
contain some incoherence, some absurdity.
27The dream is psychic anarchy, emotional and intellectual, the
playing of functions, freed of themselves and performing without control
and without end; in the dream, the mind is a spiritual automaton.
28There is no imaginable thing too absurd, too involved, or too
abnormal for us to dream about.
29The production of those images which, in the waking man, most often
excite the will, correspond, for the mind, to those which are, for the
motility, certain movements that offer St. Vitus' dance and paralytic
affections...
30A whole series of degradations of the faculty of thinking and
reasoning.
31An action of the mind spontaneous and as though automatic; (2) a
defective and irregular association of ideas.
32Later on we shall be able to understand the meaning of dreams like
these which are full of words with similar sounds or the same initial
letters.
33The dream is neither pure derangement nor pure irrationality.
34In sleep, excepting perception, all the faculties of the mind
intellect, imagination, memory, will, morality- remain intact in their
essence; only, they are applied to imaginary and variable objects. The
dreamer is an actor who plays at will the mad and the wise, executioner
and victim, dwarf and giant, devil and angel.
35Hervey de St. Denys.
36The Marquis Hervey attributes to the intelligence during sleep all
its freedom of action and attention, and he seems to make sleep consist
only of the shutting of the senses, of their closing to the outside
world; except for his manner of seeing, the man asleep is hardly
distinguishable from the man who allows his mind to wander while he
obstructs his senses; the whole difference, then, between ordinary
thought and that of the sleeper, is that with the latter the idea takes
an objective and visible shape, which resembles, to all appearances,
sensation determined by exterior objects; memory takes on the appearance
of present fact.
37That there is a further and important difference in that the mental
faculties of the sleeping man do not offer the equilibrium which they
keep in the waking state.
38The image in a dream is a copy of an idea. The main thing is the
idea; the vision is only accessory. This established, it is necessary to
know how to follow the progression of ideas, how to analyse the texture
of the dreams; incoherence then is understandable, the most fantastic
concepts become simple and perfectly logical facts.
39Even the most bizarre dreams find a most logical explanation when
one knows how to analyse them.
40Cf. Haffner and Spitta.
41That brilliant mystic, Du Prel, one of the few writers for the
omission of whose name in earlier editions of this book I should like to
apologize, has said that, so far as the human mind is concerned, it is
not the waking state but dreams which are the gateway to metaphysics
(Philosophie der Mystik, p. 59).
42For the further literature of the subject, and a critical
discussion of these problems, the reader is referred to Tobowolska's
dissertation (Paris, 1900).
43Compare Havelock Ellis's criticism in The World of Dreams, p. 268.
44Grundzuge des Systems der Anthropologie. Erlangen, 1850 (quoted by
Spitta).
45Das Traumleben und seine Deutung, 1868 (cited by Spitta, p. 192).
46It is not uninteresting to consider the attitude of the Inquisition
to this problem. In the Tractatus de Officio sanctissimae Inquisitionis
of Thomas Carena (Lyons edit., 1659) one finds the following passage:
"Should anyone utter heresies in his dreams, the inquisitors shall
consider this a reason for investigating his conduct in life, for that
is wont to return in sleep which occupies a man during the day" (Dr.
Ehniger, St. Urban, Switzerland).
47Our tendencies speak and make us act, without being restrained by
our conscience, although it sometimes warns us. I have my faults and
vicious tendencies; awake I try to fight against them, and often enough
I do not succumb to them. But in my dreams I always succumb, or, rather,
I act at their direction, without fear or remorse.... Evidently, the
visions which unfold in my thoughts, and which constitute the dream, are
suggested by the stimuli which I feel and which my absent will does not
try to repel.
48In a dream, a man is totally revealed to himself in his naked and
wretched state. As he suspends the exercise of his will, he becomes the
toy of all the passions from which, when awake, our conscience, horror,
and fear defend us.
49In a dream, it is above all the instinctive man who is revealed....
Man returns, so to speak, to the natural state when he dreams; but the
less acquired ideas have penetrated into his mind, the more his
"tendencies to disagreement" with them keep their hold on him in his
dreams.
50If they are very much in love, they have almost never dreamed of
each other before the marriage or during the honeymoon; and if they have
dreamed of love, it was to be unfaithful with someone unimportant or
distasteful.
51So many taut lines.
52A novelist, Anatole France, expresses himself to a similar effect
(Le Lys Rouge): "Ce que nous voyons la nuit ce sont les restes
malheureux que nous avons neglige dans la veille. Le reve est souvent la
revanche des choses qu'on meprise ou le reproche des etres abandonnes."
[What we see at night are the unhappy relics that we neglected while
awake. The dream is often the revenge of things scorned or the reproach
of beings deserted.]
53In short, the dream is the product of wandering thought, without
end or direction, successively fixing on memories which have retained
sufficient intensity to put themselves in the way and block the passage,
establishing between themselves a connection sometimes weak and loose,
sometimes stronger and closer, according to whether the actual work of
the brain is more or less suppressed by sleep.
54Among the more recent authors who have occupied themselves with
these relations are: Fere, Ideler, Lasegue, Pichon, Regis Vespa,
Giessler, Kazodowsky, Pachantoni, and others.
55The real determining cause of the madness.
56The learned are not inquisitive.
57H. Swoboda, Die Perioden des Menschlichen Organismus, 1904.
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