The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text

ISBN-13: 9780465019779

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 02-23-2010

Pages: 688

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d)

Age Range: 13 - 18 Years

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a clinical neurologist living and practicing in Vienna. His ground breaking theories of the id, ego, and super-ego of the mind continue to be studied throughout the world. James Strachey (1887–1967) was a British academic and psychoanalyst. The Interpretation of Dreams is considered a major foundational text of the field and one of Strachey’s preeminent translations.

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Chapter One

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE ON
THE PROBLEMS OF DREAMS

In the following pages I shall provide proof that there is a psychological technique which allows us to interpret dreams, and that when this procedure is applied, every dream turns out to be a meaningful psychical formation which can be given an identifiable place in what goes on within us in our waking life. I shall further try to explain the processes that make the dream so strange and incomprehensible, and infer from them the nature of the psychical forces in their combinations and conflicts, out of which the dream emerges. Having got so far, my account will break off, for it will have reached the point at which the problem of dreaming opens out into more comprehensive problems which will have to be resolved on the basis of different material.

I shall begin with a survey both of what earlier authorities have written on the subject and of the present state of scientific inquiry into the problems of dreams, as I shall not often have occasion to return to it in the course of this treatise. In spite of being concerned with the subject over many thousands of years, scientific understanding of the dream has not got very far. This is admitted by the writers so generally that it seems superfluous to quote individual authors. In the writings I list at the end of my work many stimulating observations and a great deal of interesting material can be found relating to our subject, but little or nothing touching the essential nature of the dream or offering a definitive solution to any of its riddles. And of course, evenless has passed into the knowledge of the educated layman.

The first work to treat the dream as an object of psychology seems to be Aristotle's On Dreams and Dream Interpretation [1]. Aristotle concedes that the nature of the dream is indeed daemonic, but not divine—which might well reveal a profound meaning, if one could hit on the right translation. He recognizes some of the characteristics of the dream-life, for example, that the dream reinterprets slight stimuli intruding upon sleep as strong ones ('we believe we are passing through a fire and growing hot when this or that limb is only being slightly warmed'), and he concludes from this that dreams could very well reveal to the physician the first signs of impending changes in the body not perceptible by day. Lacking the requisite knowledge and teaching and without informed assistance, I have not been in a position to arrive at a deeper understanding of Aristotle's treatise.

As we know, the ancients prior to Aristotle regarded the dream not as a product of the dreaming psyche, but as an inspiration from the realm of the divine, and they already recognized the two contrary trends which we shall find are always present in evaluations of the dream-life. They distinguished valuable, truth-telling dreams, sent to the sleeper to warn him or announce the future to him, from vain, deceptive, and idle dreams intended to lead him astray or plunge him into ruin. This pre-scientific conception of the dream held by the ancients was certainly in full accord with their world-view as a whole, which habitually projected as reality into the outside world what had reality only within the life of the psyche. Their conception also took account of the main impression made on the waking life by the memory of the dream remaining in the morning, for in this memory the dream is opposed to the other contents of the psyche as something alien, coming as it were from another world. It would be wrong, by the way, to think that the theory of the supernatural origin of dreams has no followers in our own day. Quite apart from all the pietistic and mystical writers—who do right to occupy the remains of the once extensive realm of the supernatural, as long as it has not been conquered by scientific explanation—we also encounter clear-sighted men averse to the fantastic who use this very inexplicability of the phenomena of dreams in their endeavours to support their religious belief in the existence and intervention of superhuman powers. The high value accorded to the dream-life by many schools of philosophy, for example, by Schelling's followers, is a distinct echo of the undisputed divinity accorded to dreams in antiquity; and the divinatory, future-predicting power of dreams remains under discussion because the attempts at a psychological explanation are not adequate to cope with all the material gathered, however firmly the feelings of anyone devoted to the scientific mode of thought might be inclined to reject such a notion.

The reason why it is so difficult to write a history of our scientific knowledge of the problems of dreams is that, however valuable our knowledge may have become under single aspects, no progress along a particular line of thought is to be discerned. No foundation of confirmed results has been constructed on which the next researcher might have built further, but every new author tackles the self-same problems afresh as though from the very beginning. If I were to discuss the writers in chronological sequence and summarize what each of them had to say on the problems of dreams, I would have to abandon any clear overall survey of the current state of our knowledge of dreams. That is why I have chosen to construct my account according to topics rather than authors, and in dealing with each dream problem I shall cite whatever material for its solution exists in the literature.

However, this literature is very scattered and encroaches upon many other subjects, and I have not been able to cope with it all: so I must ask my readers to rest content as long as no fundamental fact or significant point of view has escaped my attention.

Until recently, most writers have felt obliged to deal with sleep and dreams within the same context, as a rule also linking to this their evaluations of analogous states extending into psychopathology, and their assessments of occurrences similar to dreams (such as hallucinations, visions, etc.). The most recent work, on the other hand, endeavours to restrict the subject and take some single question from the field of the dream-life as its object of inquiry. This change of emphasis is, I believe, an expression of the conviction that in such obscure matters enlightenment and agreement may only be reached by a set of detailed investigations. It is a detailed investigation of this kind, specifically of a psychological nature, that I am able to offer here. I have had little occasion to occupy myself with the problem of sleep, for this is essentially a problem of physiology, though a characterization of the sleeping state has to include changes in the conditions under which the psychical apparatus functions. So in my account I have disregarded the literature on sleep.

Scientific interest in the phenomena of dreams as such leads to the following, partly overlapping, questions:

(a) The Relationship of Dreams to Waking Life

The naive judgement of someone who has just woken up assumes that the dream—even if it does not come from another world—has still transported the sleeper to one. The old physiologist Burdach [8], to whom we owe a scrupulous and sensitive description of the phenomena of dreams, has expressed this conviction in a celebrated passage (p. 474): '... the life of the day, with its exertions and pleasures, its joys and sorrows, is never repeated: the dream is rather bent on freeing us from it. Even when our entire soul has been engrossed with one object, when our heart has been riven with a deep sorrow or some task has exercised all our mental powers, the dream either gives us something completely alien, or takes for its combinations only individual elements from reality, or only enters into the key of the mood we are in and symbolises reality.'

In his justly acclaimed study of the nature and origin of dreams, L. Strümpell [66] expresses a similar view (p. 16): 'The dreamer has turned away from the world of waking consciousness ...' (p. 17): 'In dreams our memory of the ordered content of waking consciousness and its normal behaviour is as good as completely lost ...' (p. 19): 'The almost memory-less isolation of the soul in dreams from the routine content and course of waking life ...'

But the great majority of writers have taken the opposite viewpoint, Haffner [32] writes as follows (p. 19): 'At first the dream continues the waking life. Our dreams always follow the ideas present in our consciousness not long before. Meticulous observation will almost always discover a thread in which the dream links up with the experiences of the previous day.' Weygandt [75] (p. 6) directly contradicts Burdach's assertion quoted above, 'for apparently it can often be observed in the great majority of dreams that, rather than freeing us from ordinary life, they lead us right back into it'. Maury [48] (p. 56) says in a succinct formula: 'Nous rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, désiré ou fait.' In his Psychologie of 1855 (p. 530), Jessen [36] puts it at rather greater length: 'The content of dreams is always more or less determined by the individual personality, by age, sex, class, level of education, mode of life and by all the events and experiences of our lives hitherto.'

The ancients shared this idea of the dependence of the content of dreams on life. To cite Radestock [54] (p. 134): about to begin his campaign against Greece, Xerxes was dissuaded from this decision by sound advice, but was spurred on to it again and again by his dreams; at this, the rational old dream-interpreter of the Persians, Artabanos, told him quite rightly that dream-images usually contain what the dreamer already thinks when awake.

In Lucretius' didactic poem, De rerum natura, we find the passage (iv. v. 959):

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.<

Table of Contents

Editor'S Introduction xi

Preface to the First Edition xxiii

Preface to the Second Edition xxv

Preface to the Third Edition xxvii

Preface to the Fourth Edition xxviii

Preface to the Fifth Edition xxix

Preface to the Sixth Edition xxix

Preface to the Eighth Edition xxxi

Preface to the Third (Revised) English Edition xxxii

I The Scientific Literature Dealing With the Problems of Dreams 35

(a) The Relation of Dreams to Waking Life 41

(b) The Material of Dreams-Memory in Dreams 44

(c) The Stimuli and Sources of Dreams 54

(1) External Sensory Stimuli 55

(2) Internal (Subjective) Sensory Excitations 62

(3) Internal Organic Somatic Stimuli 65

(4) Psychical Sources of Stimulation 70

(d) Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking 73

(e) The Distinguishing Psychological Characteristics of Dreams 77

(f) The Moral Sense in Dreams 93

(g) Theories of Dreaming and Its Function 101

(h) The Relation Between Dreams and Mental Diseases 113

Postscript, 1909 118

Postscript, 1914 120

II The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream 121

III A Dream is the Fulfilment of a Wish 147

IV Distortion in Dreams 159

V The Material and Sources of Dreams 187

(a) Recent and Indifferent Material in Dreams 188

(b) Infantile Material as a Source of Dreams 211

(c) The Somatic Sources of Dreams 240

(d) Typical Dreams 259

(?) Embarrassing Dreams of Being Naked 260

(?) Dreams of the Death of Persons of Whom the Dreamer Is Fond 266

(?) Other Typical Dreams 288

(?) Examination Dreams 291

VI The Dream-Work 295

(a) The Work of Condensation 296

(b) The Work of Displacement 322

(c) The Means of Representation in Dreams 326

(d) Considerations of Representability 353

(e) Representation by Symbols in Dreams-Some Further Typical Dreams 363

(f) Some Examples-Calculations and Speeches in Dreams 414

(g) Absurd Dreams-Intellectual Activity in Dreams 434

(h) Affects in Dreams 466

(i) Secondary Revision 493

VII The Psychology of the Dream-Processes 513

(a) The Forgetting of Dreams 516

(b) Regression 535

(c) Wish-Fulfilment 550

(d) Arousal by Dreams-The Function of Dreams-Anxiety-Dreams 572

(e) The Primary and Secondary Processes-Repression 585

(f) The Unconscious and Consciousness-Reality 605

Appendix A A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled 617

Appendix B List of Writings by Freud Dealing Predominantly or Largely with Dreams 621

Additional Notes 623

Bibliography

(a) Author Index and List of Works Quoted 625

(b) List of Works on Dreams Published Before 1900 647

Index Of Dreams

(a) Freud's Own Dreams 653

(b) Other People's Dreams 654

General Index 657