Freud - Complete Works (187 page)

   Frau E. L. is the daughter of a
man to whom I was once
in debt
. I could not help noticing
that this revealed an unsuspected connection between parts of the
content of the dream and my associations. If one follows the train
of association starting out from one element of a dream’s
content, one is soon brought back to another of its elements. My
associations to the dream were bringing to light connections which
were not visible in the dream itself.

   If a person expects one to keep
an eye on his interests without any advantage to oneself, his
artlessness is apt to provoke the scornful question: ‘Do you
suppose I’m going to do this or that for the sake of your
beaux yeux
[
beautiful eyes
]?’ That being so,
Frau E. L.’s speech in the dream, ‘You’ve always
had such beautiful eyes’, can only have meant: ‘People
have always done everything for you for love; you have always had
everything
without paying for it
.’ The truth is, of
course, just the contrary: I have always paid dearly for whatever
advantage I have had from other people. The fact that my friend
took me home yesterday in a cab
without my paying for it
must, after all, have made an impression on me.

On Dreams

1057

   Incidentally, the friend whose
guests we were yesterday has often put me in his debt. Only
recently I allowed an opportunity of repaying him to slip by. He
has had only one present from me - an antique bowl, round which
there are
eyes
painted: what is known as an
‘
occhiale
’, to avert the
evil eye
.
Moreover he is an
eye surgeon
. The same evening I asked him
after a woman patient, whom I had sent on to him for a consultation
to fit her with
spectacles
.

   As I now perceived, almost all
the elements of the dream’s content had been brought into the
new context. For the sake of consistency, however, the further
question might be asked of why
spinach
, of all things, was
being served in the dream. The answer was that
spinach
reminded me of an episode which occurred not long ago at our family
table, when one of the children - and precisely the one who really
deserves to be admired for his
beautiful eyes
- refused to
eat any spinach. I myself behaved in just the same way when I was a
child; for a long time I detested spinach, till eventually my taste
changed and promoted that vegetable into one of my favourite foods.
My own early life and my child’s were thus brought together
by the mention of this dish. ‘You ought to be glad to have
spinach’, the little
gourmet
’
s
mother
exclaimed; ‘there are children who would be only too pleased
to have spinach.’ Thus I was reminded of the duties of
parents to their children. Goethe’s words

                                                               
‘Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,

                                                               
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden.’

gained a fresh meaning in this connection.

On Dreams

1058

   I will pause here to survey the
results I had so far reached in my dream-analysis. By following the
associations which arose from the separate elements of the dream
divorced from their context, I arrived at a number of thoughts and
recollections, which I could not fail to recognize as important
products of my mental life. This material revealed by the analysis
of the dream was intimately connected with the dream’s
content, yet the connection was of such a kind that I could never
have inferred the fresh material from that content. The dream was
unemotional, disconnected and unintelligible; but while I was
producing the thoughts behind the dream, I was aware of intense and
well-founded affective impulses; the thoughts themselves fell at
once into logical chains, in which certain central ideas made their
appearance more than once. Thus, the contrast between
‘selfish’ and ‘unselfish’, and the elements
‘being in debt’ and ‘without paying for it’
were central ideas of this kind, not represented in the dream
itself. I might draw closer together the threads in the material
revealed by the analysis, and I might then show that they converge
upon a single nodal point, but considerations of a personal and not
of a scientific nature prevent my doing so in public. I should be
obliged to betray many things which had better remain my secret,
for on my way to discovering the solution of the dream all kinds of
things were revealed which I was unwilling to admit even to myself.
Why then, it will be asked, have I not chosen some other dream,
whose analysis is better suited for reporting, so that I could
produce more convincing evidence of the meaning and connectedness
of the material uncovered by analysis? The answer is that
every
dream with which I might try to deal would lead to
things equally hard to report and would impose an equal discretion
upon me. Nor should I avoid this difficulty by bringing up someone
else’s dream for analysis, unless circumstances enabled me to
drop all disguise without damage to the person who had confided in
me.

   At the point which I have now
reached, I am led to regard the dream as a sort of
substitute
for the thought-processes, full of meaning and
emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis.
We do not yet know the nature of the process which has caused the
dream to be generated from these thoughts, but we can see that it
is wrong to regard it as purely physical and without psychical
meaning, as a process which has arisen from the isolated activity
of separate groups of brain cells aroused from sleep.

   Two other things are already
clear. The content of the dream is very much shorter than the
thoughts for which I regard it as a substitute; and analysis has
revealed that the instigator of the dream was an unimportant event
of the evening before I dreamt it.

On Dreams

1059

   I should, of course, not draw
such far-reaching conclusions if only a single dream-analysis was
at my disposal. If experience shows me, however, that by
uncritically pursuing the associations arising from
any
dream I can arrive at a similar train of thoughts, among the
elements of which the constituents of the dream re-appear and which
are interconnected in a rational and intelligible manner, then it
will be safe to disregard the slight possibility that the
connections observed in a first experiment might be due to chance.
I think I am justified, therefore, in adopting a terminology which
will crystallize our new discovery. In order to contrast the dream
as it is retained in my memory with the relevant material
discovered by analysing it, I shall speak of the former as the
‘
manifest
content of the dream’ and the latter -
without, in the first instance, making any further distinction - as
the ‘
latent
content of the dream.’ I am now
faced by two new problems which have not hitherto been formulated.
(1) What is the psychical process which has transformed the latent
content of the dream into the manifest one which is known to me
from my memory? (2) What are the motive or motives which have
necessitated this transformation? I shall describe the process
which transforms the latent into the manifest content of dreams as
the ‘dream-work.’ The counterpart to this activity -
one which brings about a transformation in the opposite direction -
is already known to us as the work of analysis. The remaining
problems arising out of dreams - questions as to the instigators of
dreams, as to the origin of their material, as to their possible
meaning, as to the possible function of dreaming, and as to the
reasons for dreams being forgotten - all these problems will be
discussed by me on the basis, not of the manifest, but of the newly
discovered latent dream-content. Since I attribute all the
contradictory and incorrect views upon dream-life which appear in
the literature of the subject to ignorance of the latent content of
dreams as revealed by analysis, I shall be at the greatest pains
henceforward to avoid confusing the
manifest dream
with the
latent dream-thoughts
.

On Dreams

1060

III

   The transformation of the latent
dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content deserves all our
attention, since it is the first instance known to us of psychical
material being changed over from one mode of expression to another,
from a mode of expression which is immediately intelligible to us
to another which we can only come to understand with the help of
guidance and effort, though it too must be recognized as a function
of our mental activity.

   Dreams can be divided into three
categories in respect of the relation between their latent and
manifest content. In the first place, we may distinguish those
dreams which
make sense
and are at the same time
intelligible
, which, that is to say, can be inserted without
further difficulty into the context of our mental life. We have
numbers of such dreams. They are for the most part short and appear
to us in general to deserve little attention, since there is
nothing astonishing or strange about them. Incidentally, their
occurrence constitutes a powerful argument against the theory
according to which dreams originate from the isolated activity of
separate groups of brain cells. They give no indication of reduced
or fragmentary psychical activity, but nevertheless we never
question the fact of their being dreams, and do not confuse them
with the products of waking life. A second group is formed by those
dreams which, though they are connected in themselves and have a
clear sense, nevertheless have a
bewildering
effect, because
we cannot see how to fit that sense into our mental life. Such
would be the case if we were to dream, for instance, that a
relative of whom we were fond had died of the plague, when we had
no reason for expecting, fearing or assuming any such thing; we
should ask in astonishment: ‘How did I get hold of such an
idea?’ The third group, finally, contains those dreams which
are without either sense or intelligibility, which seem
disconnected, confused
, and
meaningless
. The
preponderant majority of the products of our dreaming exhibit these
characteristics, which are the basis of the low opinion in which
dreams are held and of the medical theory that they are the outcome
of a restricted mental activity. The most evident signs of
incoherence are seldom absent, especially in dream-compositions of
any considerable length and complexity.

On Dreams

1061

   The contrast between the manifest
and latent content of dreams is clearly of significance only for
dreams of the second and more particularly of the third category.
It is there that we are faced by riddles which only disappear after
we have replaced the manifest dream by the latent thoughts behind
it; and it was on a specimen of the last category - a confused and
unintelligible dream - that the analysis which I have just recorded
was carried out. Contrary to our expectation, however, we came up
against motives which prevented us from becoming fully acquainted
with the latent dream-thoughts. A repetition of similar experiences
may lead us to suspect that
there is an intimate and regular
relation between the unintelligible and confused nature of dreams
and the difficulty of reporting the thoughts behind them
.
Before enquiring into the nature of this relation, we may with
advantage turn our attention to the more easily intelligible dreams
of the first category, in which the manifest and latent content
coincide, and there appears to be a consequent saving in
dream-work.

   Moreover, an examination of these
dreams offers advantages from another standpoint. For
children’s
dreams are of that kind - significant and
not puzzling. Here, incidentally, we have a further argument
against tracing the origin of dreams to dissociated cerebral
activity during sleep. For why should a reduction in psychical
functioning of this kind be a characteristic of the state of sleep
in the case of adults but not in that of children? On the other
hand, we shall be fully justified in expecting that an explanation
of psychical processes in children, in whom they may well be
greatly simplified, may turn out to be an indispensable prelude to
the investigation of the psychology of adults.

On Dreams

1062

   I will therefore record a few
instances of dreams which I have collected from children. A little
girl nineteen months old had been kept without food all day because
she had had an attack of vomiting in the morning; her nurse
declared that she had been upset by eating strawberries. During the
night after this day of starvation she was heard saying her own
name in her sleep and adding: ‘
Stwawbewwies, wild
stwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!
’ She was thus dreaming of
eating a meal, and she laid special stress in her menu on the
particular delicacy of which, as she had reason to expect, she
would only be allowed scanty quantities in the near future. - A
little boy of twenty-two months had a similar dream of a feast
which he had been denied. The day before, he had been obliged to
present his uncle with a gift of a basket of fresh cherries, of
which he himself, of course, had only been allowed to taste a
single sample. He awoke with this cheerful news: ‘
Hermann
eaten all the chewwies!
’ - One day a girl of three and a
quarter made a trip across a lake. The voyage was evidently not
long enough for her, for she cried when she had to get off the
boat. Next morning she reported that during the night she had been
for a trip on the lake: she had been continuing her interrupted
voyage. - A boy of five and a quarter showed signs of
dissatisfaction in the course of a walk in the neighbourhood of the
Dachstein. Each time a new mountain came into view he asked if it
was the Dachstein and finally refused to visit a waterfall with the
rest of the company. His behaviour was attributed to fatigue; but
it found a better explanation when next morning he reported that he
had dreamt that
he climbed up the Dachstein
. He had
evidently had the idea that the expedition would end in a climb up
the Dachstein, and had become depressed when the promised mountain
never came in view. He made up in his dream for what the previous
day had failed to give him. - A six-year-old girl had an exactly
similar dream. In the course of a walk her father had stopped short
of their intended goal as the hour was getting late. On their way
back she had noticed a signpost bearing the name of another
landmark; and her father had promised to take her there as well
another time. Next morning she met her father with the news that
she had dreamt that
he had been with her to both places
.