On dreams

by Sigmund Freud

This appears simple, but let the reader study the dreams analysed in this essay, and he will find himself stirred by a thousand suggestions. For Professor Freud has constructed empirical laws out of his masses of material. The dream as it appears to the dreamer he calls the manifest dream ideas. But as these are too absurd to form a coherent reality, he gives ground for believing that they represent latent dream ideas. The manifest dream is a mass of symbols representing elements in the latent dream ideas. How the latent dream ideas generate the manifest dream is discovered by psycho-analysis, the translation from the latent to the manifest is the effect of the dream work. The dream work is the very core of the difficulty. It is round this that Professor Freud’s greatest subtleties of method are focussed. He shows that every dream is linked to something that occurs on the previous day, some recent experience, but the experience emerges in the dream as part of the current panorama of the subjective life, and there is no date to the beginning of the panorama—it may go back to any point in the individual’s history, even into the preconscious days of early infancy. The day’s experience and the life’s experience flow in a single stream, and the images that appear in dreams are but the symbols of all the latent ideas of that experience. How, by displacement of this element or that, compound symbols are formed; how, by the foreshortening of experience and the linking of the past with the present in a single idea, masses of old memories are clotted into a single point; how, in the freedom of the dream world, where the tension of the waking life is relaxed, where the exacting stimulations of the day are reduced, where the consciousness of duty to be done in the highly organised conditions of social conduct is lowered, where, in a word, the censor is drowsy or asleep, where the dream symbols shape themselves into dramatic scenes of endless variety—these it is that Professor Freud’s theory endeavours to set forth. Displacement, condensation, dramatisation—these are the short names for these long and complicated processes. In the course of his expositions, Professor Freud uses these processes almost as if they were demons, and he admits frankly their figurative character. But he pleads that they represent real processes, and is ready to accept better names when he finds them. To trace back the dream images to a definite meaning in experience is the aim of the psycho-analysis of dreams. And the successes in these must be tested by the facts. Sometimes the results are highly persuasive, sometimes they look highly fanciful, always they are full of suggestion and keep close to realities.

The dream symbolism, in particular, it is easy to criticise; but, after all, dream symbolism is a reality. The point to investigate is, what dream images are legitimately considered symbolic and what not. One has only to remember that every word spoken or written is a symbol, and a symbol in much the same sense as the symbolism of dreams, for every written or spoken word is a complicated series of motions that express meanings. The dream images are complicated series of images that express meanings. The difficulty of symbolism is no greater in the one case than in the other. But the variety of dream symbols is so immense that the difficulties of tracing their meaning are enormous. It is here that the method meets its greatest difficulties; but, equally, it is here that it scores its greatest triumphs. Spoken or written language is a technically organised system of symbols; dream language is as yet a poorly organised system of symbols. The method of psycho-analysis aims at organising them. Some test results are described in this essay; multitudes of others are to be found in the literature that is flowing from the application of the psycho-analytic method. Time alone will show how far the organisation of dream symbols into a definite “language of dreams” is, in any given society, actual or possible. But the effort of organisation has led Professor Freud to another fine fetch of theory, for his dream symbolism suggests many curious explanations for the mythologies of all ages and all countries. Myth symbols, that seem to defy explanation, he traces back to their roots in the “unconscious” of primitive man.

That the emotions of sex should play an enormous part in the processes of analysis is to be expected; for the sex emotions are among the deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature, and colour every experience. From their proximate beginning in infancy—and Freud’s theory here is of immense significance—to their multiform derivatives in adult life, the sex emotions exercise an influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or another, are themselves a normal index of the stages of development. It is therefore reasonable to expect that they should play a great part in the formation of obsessions, of fixed ideas, of perversions, of repressed complexes. In every civilisation, as Freud indicates, the sex emotions are the most difficult to control, and have demanded the greatest amount of restraint.

Restraints lead to repressions, repressions lead to dissociations, dissociations lead to irregularities of action. When, therefore, as in dreams, the restraints of the social day are withdrawn, naturally the repressed ideas tend to emerge once more. How much these ideas account for in the hysterias, how much “the shocks of despised love” affect even the normal life, needs no emphasis, but Freud pushes his analysis farther, and tracks the sex emotions, like many other fundamental emotions, into a thousand by-paths of ordinary experience. But it would be foolishness to say that sex emotions are everything in the ruins of the “Buried Temple.” Far from it. What is true of the sex emotions is true of all other emotions in their varying degrees, and often what looks like predominant sex emotions may turn out to be accidental rather than causative, a concomitant symptom rather than the initiatory centre of disturbance. But these points are all controversial. It is the object of Freud to put them to the test. If his general theory be true, the dream-world will more and more become the revealer of our deepest and oldest experience.

It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrative items and relative criticisms, but that is not the purpose of an introduction. Here I am concerned simply to recommend this essay to the careful study of all those interested in the mental history of the individual, and in the blotting out from the mind of needless fears and anxieties. And no one need hesitate to enter on this study, whatever his metaphysical theories may be. Even the “unity of consciousness” will not suffer, for, through his unending efforts to link the experiences of the day with the whole experience of the individual life, Professor Freud, by the union of buried consciousness, restores to the mind a new unity of consciousness.

Dr. Eder, whose studies in this field have been long and varied, does well to present to British readers this essay which serves as an introduction to the more elaborate studies of Freud and his school, and I am glad to have the privilege of saying so.

W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.

I.

In what we may term “prescientific days” people were in no uncertainty about the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after awakening they were regarded as either the friendly or hostile manifestation of some higher powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer’s own psychical act.

But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream’s evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has the dream a meaning—can sense be made of each single dream as of other mental syntheses?