On dreams

by Sigmund Freud

Meanwhile, let it be said that Professor Freud has been steeped in this whole subject from his student days. It is, however, less important to discuss his theory than to understand his method. The method is called “psycho-analysis.” The name is not inviting, and it might apply to any form of mental analysis; but it is at least consistently Greek in etymology, and has taken on a technical meaning in the medical schools. What is the method?

Let it be granted that a person has undergone a strongly emotional experience—for example, a sudden shock or fright. If the person is highly nervous, the shock may result in some degree of dissociation. This may take the form of a loss of memory for certain parts of the experience. Let it be so. The ultimate result may be an unreasonable fear of some entirely harmless object or situation. The person is afraid of a crowd, or afraid of a closed door, or has an intense fear of some animal or person. For this fear he can give no reason; he cannot tell when it began nor why it persists. He may more or less overcome it; but he may not. All through his future life he will go about with a helplessly unreasonable fear of a closed door (claustrophobia) or of a crowd (agoraphobia). Minor varieties of such an affection are to be found in every person’s experience. On investigation, however, the root of the fear can be discovered: it is the product of the original emotional shock. The intellectual details of the emotional experience have completely vanished from the memory, but the emotion remains, and it is attached to some accidental object or circumstance present in the original experience. Thousands of illustrations could be given. They are, unfortunately, only too numerous. In this essay on the Interpretation of Dreams the reader will find many simple cases.

If, now, the person so affected is placed in a quiet room, if he is requested to concentrate his mind on the disturbing object or idea associated with his fear, if he is encouraged to observe passively the chance ideas which float up to him when he thus concentrates himself, if he utters, under the direction of his medical attendant, every such idea as it comes into his mind, there is a strange result. These ideas, coming apparently by chance from nowhere in particular, are, when carefully studied, found to be linked up with some past experience, dating, perhaps, from months or years away. If each idea as it emerges is followed up, if the other ideas dragged into consciousness by it are carefully recorded, it is found that sooner or later entirely forgotten experiences come into clear consciousness. There are many ways of helping this process. One of the ways is this: Let a series of words be arranged; let the doctor speak one of them to the patient; let the patient, in the shortest time possible to him, say right out whatever idea is suggested to him by the word; let the time taken to make the response be recorded in seconds and fractions of a second—a thing easy enough to do with a stop-watch. Then, when the responses to a long series of words are all recorded, and the time each response has taken, it is found that some responses have taken much longer than others. This prolongation of the response-time is always found whenever the test word has stirred up a memory associated with emotion. By following up further the ideas stirred by this word, more ideas of a related kind are discovered, often to the patient’s surprise. Things long forgotten come back to memory; circumstances that apparently had no relation to the present consciousness are found to be linked in sequence with it—emotions, unreasoning fears, anxieties, that apparently had no relation to any particular experience, are found at last to be part and parcel of things that happened long ago. Once the doctor has his cue, he can range in many directions, and probe the mind again and again, until he reveals multitudes of suppressed memories, forgotten ideas, forgotten elements of experience. He can even get back into early childhood, which, to the patient himself, leaves many and many a blank area in the memory. But always the doctor lights, sooner or later, on some complex experience in which the particular fear or anxiety arose.

But now, if the case is a suitable one, a still stranger thing happens. When the forgotten experience has thus artfully been brought into the full light of consciousness, the patient finds himself satisfied with the explanation, and loses his particular fear. He can now go back over the whole history of its genesis; he can link up the old experience to the new, and so he attains once more satisfaction and peace of mind. Up till now he could not be reasoned out of his anxiety; he had always an answer for any explanation; he had always a fresh foolish reason for his fear. Now all this vanishes. He finds his mind once more running smoothly, and his “phobia” gone. The unreasoning dread has been tracked back to its lair, and its lair has been destroyed in the process.

There are many other methods of achieving the same result; let this generalised sketch suffice.

What now is the theory? The theory is that the mental experience or “complex” had, for some reason and by some mechanism, been submerged, or suppressed, or forgotten. Freud maintains that there is a fundamental tendency in the mind to suppress every experience that is associated with painful emotion. This doctrine is allied to Bain’s “Law of Conservation”—that painful experiences depress the vitality and tend to disappear, while pleasant experiences exalt the vitality and tend to remain in memory. At any rate, by some process the painful experience disappears from conscious memory, but it does not cease to exist. It may lie dormant, or it may work subconsciously, and throw up the emotional bubbles that continue, without a known reason, to excite the ordinary consciousness. But the complex, though deep and partly dormant, never gets beyond reach. By the method of concentration, by the use of “free associations,” by the following up of all the clues offered by the ideas “fished up,” the submerged complex can, element by element, be brought back. When once it is brought back the patient is restored, the dormant complexes once more resume their place in the total current of his experience, and the mind flows at peace.

This is, roughly, the method of psycho-analysis. It has been applied in various types of neurosis—hysterias, obsessions, phobias, etc. It has not always succeeded in removing the morbid conditions, but it has succeeded so often that it may legitimately be regarded as a method of treatment. As a matter of discovery it is arduous, and demands the highest skill and invention if it is to succeed. Incidentally it reveals masses of unpleasant ideas, of painful ideas, even of disgusting ideas; but, in the right hands, it leads to the healing of the mind.

Macbeth. How does your patient, doctor? Doctor. Not so sick, my lord, As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, That keep her from her rest. Macbeth. Cure her of that; Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain; And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor. Therein the patient Must minister to himself.

And here, insensibly, we have passed into the World of Dreams. The morbid and the normal have come together. Dreams are the awaking of dormant complexes; they are transfigured experiences; they come into consciousness trailing clouds of emotion, and fill the dreamer’s imagination with mysterious images. It is here that the method of psycho-analysis most fascinates the student. It looks as if once more the “interpretation of dreams” had become a reality. The results of psycho-analysis, even when the method is applied with a master hand and the details are interpreted with a skill that comes only of a quick imagination, are not entirely convincing; but they are certainly such as to make more and more observation desirable. In the present short essay Professor Freud gives a sketch of psycho-analysis as it is applied to the interpretations of dreams. His examples, if they are enough to illustrate the theory, are hardly enough to prove it, but they are intended as an introduction to his more elaborate studies; and, hitherto, observers as they have increased in experience have gained in conviction. That the method goes a long way to prove that dreams are not a chaotic sport of the brain, but are a manifestation of ordered mental experience, is beyond doubt. It would be easy to show where the theory does not cover facts, but it is equally easy to show many facts that it does cover.

What, then, is the theory? Briefly this, that dreams are very largely the expressions of unfulfilled desires. Where, as in children, the waking experience and the sleeping experience differ from each other by very little, the dream, or sleeping experience, readily takes the form of the ungratified desires of the day. But as the mind grows older the dream expression of a desire gets more intricate. By-and-by it is too intricate to be deciphered from direct memory, and then there is a chance for the method of psycho-analysis. What of the dream is remembered gives the cue for the analysis. Take a remembered element of a dream, track it back and back by free association or other method, and you will find that, at one or two removes, the remembered element stirs up forgotten elements, and ultimately brings coherence out of incoherence.