Freud - Complete Works (191 page)

   If we pursue the dream-thoughts
further, we shall keep on finding ridicule and derision as
correlates of the absurdities of the manifest dream. It is well
known that it was the discovery of the split skull of a sheep on
the Lido of Venice that gave Goethe the idea of the so-called
‘vertebral’ theory of the skull. My friend boasts that,
when he was a student, he released a storm which led to the
resignation of an old Professor who, though he had once been
distinguished (among other things in connection precisely with the
same branch of comparative anatomy), had become incapable of
teaching owing to
senile dementia
. Thus the agitation which
my friend promoted served to combat the mischievous system
according to which there is no
age limit
for academic
workers in German universities - for
age is proverbially no
defence against folly
. - In the hospital here I had the honour
of serving for years under a chief who had long been a
fossil
and had for decades been notoriously
feeble
minded
, but who was allowed to continue carrying on his
responsible duties. At this point I thought of a descriptive term
based upon the discovery on the Lido.¹Some of my young
contemporaries at the hospital concocted, in connection with this
man, a version of what was then a popular song: ‘
Das hat
kein Goethe g’schrieben, das hat kein Schiller
g’dicht
. . .’ ²

  
¹
[‘
Schafkopf
’, literally
‘sheep’s head’, = ‘silly
ass.’]

  
²
[‘This was written by no Goethe, this
was composed by no Schiller.’]

On Dreams

1080

VII

   We have not yet come to the end
of our consideration of the dream-work. In addition to
condensation, displacement and pictorial arrangement of the
psychical material, we are obliged to assign it yet another
activity, though this is not to be found in operation in
every
dream. I shall not deal exhaustively with this part of
the dream-work, and will therefore merely remark that the easiest
way of forming an idea of its nature is to suppose - though the
supposition probably does not meet the facts - that it only comes
into operation
after
the dream-content has already been
constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the
constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an
approximately connected whole, a dream-composition. In this way the
dream is given a kind of façade (though this does not, it is
true, hide its content at every point), and thus receives a first,
preliminary interpretation, which is supported by interpolations
and slight modifications. Incidentally, this revision of the
dream-content is only possible if it is not too punctiliously
carried out; nor does it present us with anything more than a
glaring misunderstanding of the dream-thoughts. Before we start
upon the analysis of a dream we have to clear the ground of this
attempt at an interpretation.

   The motive for this part of the
dream-work is particularly obvious.
Considerations of
intelligibility
are what lead to this final revision of a
dream; and this reveals the origin of the activity. It behaves
towards the dream-content lying before it just as our normal
psychical activity behaves in general towards any perceptual
content that may be presented to it. It understands that content on
the basis of certain anticipatory ideas, and arranges it, even at
the moment of perceiving it, on the presupposition of its being
intelligible; in so doing it runs a risk of falsifying it, and in
fact, if it cannot bring it into line with anything familiar, is a
prey to the strangest misunderstandings. As is well known, we are
incapable of seeing a series of unfamiliar signs or of hearing a
succession of unknown words, without at once falsifying the
perception from considerations of intelligibility, on the basis of
something already known to us.

On Dreams

1081

   Dreams which have undergone a
revision of this kind at the hands of a psychical activity
completely analogous to waking thought may be described as
‘well-constructed.’ In the case of other dreams this
activity has completely broken down; no attempt even has been made
to arrange or interpret the material, and, since after we have
woken up we feel ourselves identical with this last part of the
dream-work, we make a judgement that the dream was
‘hopelessly confused.’ From the point of view of
analysis, however, a dream that resembles a disordered heap of
disconnected fragments is just as valuable as one that has been
beautifully polished and provided with a surface. In the former
case, indeed, we are saved the trouble of demolishing what has been
superimposed upon the dream-content.

   It would be a mistake, however,
to suppose that these dream-façades are nothing other than
mistaken and somewhat arbitrary revisions of the dream-content by
the conscious agency of our mental life. In the erection of a
dream-façade use is not infrequently made of wishful
phantasies which are present in the dream-thoughts in a
pre-constructed form, and are of the same character as the
appropriately named ‘day-dreams’ familiar to us in
waking life. The wishful phantasies revealed by analysis in
night-dreams often turn out to be repetitions or modified versions
of scenes from infancy; thus in some cases the façade of the
dream directly reveals the dream’s actual nucleus, distorted
by an admixture of other material.

On Dreams

1082

   The dream-work exhibits no
activities other than the four that have already been mentioned. If
we keep to the definition of ‘dream-work’ as the
process of transforming the dream-thoughts into the dream-content,
it follows that the dream-work is not creative, that it develops no
phantasies of its own, that it makes no judgements and draws no
conclusions; it has no functions whatever other than condensation
and displacement of the material and its modification into
pictorial form, to which must be added as a variable factor the
final bit of interpretative revision. It is true that we find
various things in the dream-content which we should be inclined to
regard as a product of some other and higher intellectual function;
but in every case analysis shows convincingly that
these
intellectual operations have already been performed in the
dream-thoughts and have only been
TAKEN OVER
by the
dream-content
. A conclusion drawn in a dream is nothing other
than the repetition of a conclusion in the dream-thoughts; if the
conclusion is taken over into the dream unmodified, it will appear
impeccable; if the dream-work has displaced it on to some other
material, it will appear nonsensical. A calculation in the
dream-content signifies nothing more than that there is a
calculation in the dream-thoughts; but while the latter is always
rational, a dream-calculation may produce the wildest results if
its factors are condensed or if its mathematical operations are
displaced on to other material. Not even the speeches that occur in
the dream-content are original compositions; they turn out to be a
hotchpotch of speeches made, heard or read, which have been revived
in the dream-thoughts and whose wording is exactly reproduced,
while their origin is entirely disregarded and their meaning is
violently changed.

   It will perhaps be as well to
support these last assertions by a few examples.

   (I) Here is an innocent-sounding,
well-constructed dream dreamt by a woman patient:

  
She dreamt she was going to
the market with her cook, who was carrying the basket. After she
had asked for something, the butcher said to her:
‘That’s not obtainable any longer’, and offered
her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’ She
rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who
tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in
bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don’t
recognize that; I won’t take it
.’

   The remark ‘
That’s
not obtainable any longer’
originated from the treatment
itself . A few days earlier I had explained to the patient in those
very words that the earliest memories of childhood were
‘
not obtainable any longer
as such’, but were
replaced in analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams. So
I
was the butcher.

   The second speech - ‘
I
don’t recognize that
’ - occurred in an entirely
different connection. On the previous day she had reproved her
cook, who incidentally also appeared in the dream, with the words:
‘
Behave yourself properly! I don’t recognize
that!
’ meaning, no doubt, that she did not understand
such behaviour and would not put up with it. As the result of a
displacement, it was the more innocent part of this speech which
made its way into the content of the dream; but in the
dream-thoughts it was only the other part of the speech that played
a part. For the dream-work had reduced to complete
unintelligibility and extreme innocence an imaginary situation in
which
I
was
behaving improperly
to the lady in a
particular way. But this situation which the patient was expecting
in her imagination was itself only a new edition of something she
had once actually experienced.

On Dreams

1083

   (II) Here is an apparently quite
meaningless dream-containing figures.
She was going to pay for
something. Her daughter took 3 florins and 65 kreuzers from her
(the mother’s) purse. The dreamer said to her: ‘What
are you about? It only costs 21 kreuzers
.’

   The dreamer came from abroad and
her daughter was at school here. She was in a position to carry on
her treatment with me as long as her daughter remained in Vienna.
The day before the dream the head-mistress had suggested to her
that she should leave her daughter at school for another year. In
that case she could also have continued her treatment for a year.
The figures in the dream become significant if we remember that
‘time is money.’ One year is equal to 365 days, or,
expressed in money, 365 kreuzers or 3 florins 65 kreuzers. The 21
kreuzers corresponded to the 3 weeks which had still to run between
the dream-day and the end of the school term and also to the end of
the patient’s treatment. It was clearly financial
considerations which had induced the lady to refuse the head
mistress’s proposal, and which were responsible for the
smallness of the sums mentioned in the dream.

   (III) A lady who, though she was
still young, had been married for a number of years, received news
that an acquaintance of hers, Fräulein Elise L., who was
almost exactly her contemporary, had become engaged. This was the
precipitating cause of the following dream:

  
She was at the theatre with
her husband. One side of the stalls was completely empty. Her
husband told her that Elise L. and her fiancé had wanted to
go too; but had only been able to get bad seats - three for 1
florin 50 kreuzers - and of course they could not take those. She
thought it would not really have done any harm if they had.

   What interests us here is the
source of the figures in the material of the dream-thoughts and the
transformations which they underwent. What was the origin of the 1
florin 50 kreuzers? It came from what was in fact an indifferent
event of the previous day. Her sister-in-law had been given a
present of 150 florins by her husband and had
been in a
hurry
to get rid of them by buying a piece of jewellery. It is
to be noticed that 150 florins is a
hundred
times as much as
1 florin 50 kreuzers. The only connection with the
‘three’, which was the number of the theatre tickets,
was that her newly engaged friend was that number of months - three
- her junior. The situation in the dream was a repetition of a
small incident which her husband often teased her about. On one
occasion she had been in a great hurry to buy tickets for a play in
advance, and when she got to the theatre she had found that one
side of the stalls was almost completely empty. There had been
no need for her to be in such a hurry
. Finally, we must not
overlook the
absurdity
in the dream of two people taking
three tickets for a play.

   Now for the dream-thoughts:
‘It was
absurd
to marry so early. There was
no need
for me to be in such a hurry
. I see from Elise L.’s
example that I should have got a husband in the end. Indeed, I
should have got one
a hundred times
better’ (a
treasure) ‘if I had only waited. My money’ (or dowry)
‘could have bought
three
men just as good.’

On Dreams

1084

VIII

   Having been made acquainted with
the dream-work by the foregoing discussion, we shall no doubt be
inclined to pronounce it a quite peculiar psychical process, the
like of which, so far as we are aware, does not exist elsewhere. It
is as though we were carrying over on to the dream-work all the
astonishment which used formerly to be aroused in us by its
product, the dream. In fact, however, the dream-work is only the
first to be discovered of a whole series of psychical processes,
responsible for of hysterical symptoms, of phobias, obsessions and
delusions. Condensation and, above all, displacement are invariable
characteristics of these other processes as well. Modification into
a pictorial form, on the other hand, remains a peculiarity of the
dream-work. If this explanation places dreams in a single series
alongside the structures produced by psychical illness, this makes
it all the more important for us to discover the essential
determining conditions of such processes as those of
dream-formation. We shall probably be surprised to hear that
neither the state of sleep nor illness is among these indispensable
conditions. A whole number of the phenomena of the everyday life of
healthy people - such as forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled
actions and a particular class of errors - owe their origin to a
psychical mechanism analogous to that of dreams and of the other
members of the series.