On dreams

by Sigmund Freud

INTRODUCTION

“The interpretation of dreams,” says Professor Freud in one place, “is the royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in the mental life.”

Even standing alone this statement is sufficiently striking; it is at once a theory and a challenge. But it does not stand alone. It comes at the end of many years of research among every class of mental diseases. It comes, therefore, with the authentication of experience. It is not to be lightly set aside; it claims our study; and the study of it will not go unrewarded. The short essay here translated by Dr. Eder is but an introduction to the vast field opened up by Professor Sigm. Freud and his colleagues. Already the journals of clinical psychology, normal or morbid, are full of the discussions of Professor Freud’s methods and results. There is a “Freud School.” That alone is a proof that the method is novel if not new. There are, of course, violent opponents and critical students. The opponents may provoke, but it is to the critical students that Professor Freud will prefer to speak. “The condemnation,” said Hegel, “that a great man lays upon the world is to force it to explain him.” Of a new method, either of research or of treatment—and the Freud method is both—the same may be said. It is certain that, whatever our prejudice against details may be, the theory of “psycho-analysis” and the treatment based upon it deserves, if only as a mental exercise, our critical consideration. But Professor Freud is not alone in the world of morbid psychology. Let me digress for a moment.

Over twenty years ago it was my special business to study and criticise several textbooks on insanity. To the study of these textbooks I came after many years of discipline in normal psychology and the related sciences. When I came to insanity proper, I found that practically not a single textbook made any systematic effort to show how the morbid symptoms we classified as “mental diseases” had their roots in the mental processes of the normal mind. In his small book, “Sanity and Insanity,” Dr. Charles Mercier did make an effort to lay out, as it were, the institutes of insanity, the normal groundwork out of which the insanities grew, the groups of ideas that to-day serve to direct our conduct and to-morrow lose their adjustment to any but a specially adapted environment. In his later works, particularly in “Psychology, Normal and Morbid,” Dr. Mercier has followed up the central ideas of the early study. All the more recent textbooks in English contain efforts in the same direction; but with a few striking exceptions they are studies rather of physical symptoms associated with mental processes than of morbid psychology proper. It was not until there came from across the Channel Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully elaborated studies on Hysteria that I realised what a wealth of psychological material had remained hidden in our asylums, in our nervous homes, even in our ordinary hospitals, and in the multitudes of strange cases that occur in private practice. Janet, a pupil of the Charcot School—Charcot, who made la Salpetrière famous—pushed the minute analysis of morbid mental states into regions practically hitherto untouched. He was not alone. His colleague, Professor Raymond, and others in France and Germany, all work with the same main ideas. Janet’s books read like romances. His studies on Psychological Automatism, the Mental State of Hystericals, Neuroses and Fixed Ideas, and many others on the part played by the unconscious, were such rich mines of fact and suggestion that Professor William James, in his “Principles of Psychology,” said of them: “All these facts taken together, form unquestionably the beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new light into the very abysses of our nature.” Curiously, not in this country—the country of great psychologists, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among the dead, and whole schools of distinguished psychologists among the living—not in this country, but in America, was the value of the new material seriously considered. Here and there, within recent years, in this country, Janet’s elaborate studies have not been fruitless; but I could not readily name any clinician in this country that has produced similar studies. It is to the continents of Europe and America, which in this field are in intimate touch, that we must go if we are to see the rich outgrowths of morbid psychology. I do not say that the work done by our English students of insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as important as any done in the world, but it is none the less true that, until a few years ago, the methods of Janet, Raymond, Bernheim, Beaunis, not to speak of Moll, Forel, and Oppenheim, were practically unstudied here. In America it has been entirely different. Even the names of the men are now familiar in our English magazines—Muensterberg, Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, Ernest Jones, J. Mark Baldwin, not to mention William James and Stanley Hall. It looks as if every new idea unearthed in the Old World is put to the test by someone in the new. Britain remains curiously cold.

It would be interesting to ask the reason. Is it our metaphysical training? Is it the failure of the philosophical schools to realize the value of all this new raw material of study? Is it, perhaps, the fear that “the unity of consciousness” may be endangered by the study of Double Personality, Multiple Personality, Dissociation of Consciousness, Dormant Complexes, Hysterias, Phobias, Obsessions, Psychoneuroses, Fixed Ideas, Hysterical Amnesias, Hypermnesias, and the masses of other notions correlated, roughly, under the term “unconscious”? The suggestion of fear is not mere conjecture. Many years ago a distinguished student of philosophy, a pupil and friend of Sir William Hamilton, indicated to me, when I spoke to him of some recent work on Double Personality, that he had difficulty in placing the new work, feeling that, in admitting the possibility of multiple personality, he was sacrificing the primary concept of philosophy, the unity of consciousness. It did not perhaps occur to him that, when two so-called “persons” speak together, there are, in popular language, “two personalities”—each, no doubt, in a separate body, but each having his own “unity of consciousness.”

If this be a fact, is there any greater difficulty in explaining the other fact that two persons may be, as James put it, under the same hat? The metaphysical difficulty, if there be a difficulty, is neither more nor less in the one case than in the other. But it is needless to ask why a whole field of study has been, relatively, neglected in this country. For now we have begun to make up leeway.

This translation by Dr. Eder is an introduction to the latest phase of the study of the unconscious. It brings us back to the point I began with, the relation of the normal to the morbid. Dreams are a part of everyone’s normal experience, yet they are shown here to be of the same tissue, of the same mental nature, as other phenomena that are undoubtedly morbid. Dreams therefore offer in the normal a budding-point for the study of morbid growths. And the study of dreams by Freud came long after his studies of such neuroses as the phobias, hysterias, and the rest. To dreams he applied the same method of investigation and treatment as to the others, and he found that dreams offered an unlimited field for the same kind of study.

Perhaps, before going further, I should attempt to disarm criticism about the term “unconscious.” We speak of subconsciousness, co-consciousness, unconscious mind, unconscious cerebration; or what other terms should we use? Here it is better to avoid discussion, for we are concerned less with theory than with practice. And in Freud’s work, whether we accept his theory or not, the practice is of primary importance. He takes the view that no conscious experience is entirely lost; what seems to have vanished from the current consciousness has really passed into a subconsciousness, where it lives on in an organised form as real as if it were still part of the conscious personality. This view, with various modifications, is adopted by many students of morbid psychology. But there is another view. Muensterberg, for instance, maintains that it is unnecessary to speak of “subconsciousness,” for every fact can be explained in terms of physiology. He would accept the term “co-conscious” or “co-consciousness”; but in one chapter he ends the discussion by saying: “But whether we prefer the physiological account or insist on the co-conscious phenomena, in either case is there any chance for the subconscious to slip in? That a content of consciousness is to a high degree dissociated, or that the idea of the personality is split off, is certainly a symptom of pathological disturbance, but it has nothing to do with the constituting of two different kinds of consciousness, or with breaking the continuous sameness of consciousness itself. The most exceptional and most uncanny occurrences of the hospital teach after all the same which our daily experience ought to teach us: there is no subconsciousness” (“Psychotherapy,” p. 157).

There are many refinements of distinction that we could make here, and if any reader is anxious to consider them, he will find some of them in a small volume on “Subconscious Phenomena,” by Muensterberg, Ribot, and others (Rebman, London).

Here it is not of primary importance to come to any conclusion on the best term to use or the complement theory of the facts. The discussion is far from an end; but the harvest of facts need not wait for the end of the discussion.