The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

The question whether every dream can be interpreted may be answered in the negative. One must not forget that in the work of interpretation one must cope with the psychic forces which are responsible for the distortion of the dream. Whether one can become master of the inner resistances through his intellectual interest, his capacity for self-control, his psychological knowledge, and his practice in dream interpretation becomes a question of the preponderance of forces. It is always possible to make some progress. One can at least go far enough to become convinced that the dream is an ingenious construction, generally far enough to gain an idea of its meaning. It happens very often that a second dream confirms and continues the interpretation assumed for the first. A whole series of dreams running for weeks or months rests on a common basis, and is therefore to be interpreted in connection. In dreams following each other, it may be often observed how one takes as its central point what is indicated only as the periphery of the next, or it is just the other way, so that the two supplement each other in interpretation. That the different dreams of the same night are quite regularly in the interpretation to be treated as a whole I have already shown by examples.

In the best interpreted dreams we must often leave one portion in obscurity because we observe in the interpretation that it represents the beginning of a tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unravelled but which has furnished no new contribution to the dream content. This, then, is the keystone of the dream, the place at which it mounts into the unknown. For the dream thoughts which we come upon in the interpretation must generally remain without a termination, and merge in all directions into the net-like entanglement of our world of thoughts. It is from some denser portion of this texture that the dream-wish then arises like the mushroom from its mycelium.

Let us now return to the facts of dream-forgetting, as we have really neglected to draw an important conclusion from them. If the waking life shows an unmistakable intention to forget the dream formed at night, either as a whole, immediately after awakening, or in fragments during the course of the day, and if we recognise as the chief participator in this forgetting the psychic resistance against the dream which has already performed its part in opposing the dream at night—then the question arises, What has the dream formation actually accomplished against this resistance? Let us consider the most striking case in which the waking life has done away with the dream as though it had never happened. If we take into consideration the play of the psychic forces, we are forced to assert that the dream would have never come into existence had the resistance held sway during the night as during the day. We conclude then, that the resistance loses a part of its force during the night; we know that it has not been extinguished, as we have demonstrated its interest in the dream formation in the production of the distortion. We have, then, forced upon us the possibility that it abates at night, that the dream formation has become possible with this diminution of the resistance, and we thus readily understand that, having regained its full power with the awakening, it immediately sets aside what it was forced to admit as long as it was in abeyance. Descriptive psychology teaches us that the chief determinant in dream formation is the dormant state of the mind. We may now add the following elucidation: The sleeping state makes dream formation possible by diminishing the endopsychic censor.

We are certainly tempted to look upon this conclusion as the only one possible from the facts of dream-forgetting, and to develop from it further deductions concerning the proportions of energy in the sleeping and waking states. But we shall stop here for the present. When we have penetrated somewhat deeper into the psychology of the dream we shall find that the origin of the dream formation may be differently conceived. The resistance operating to prevent the dream thoughts coming to consciousness may perhaps be eluded without suffering diminution per se. It is also plausible that both the factors favourable to dream formation, the diminution as well as the eluding of the resistance, may be made possible simultaneously through the sleeping state. But we shall pause here, and continue this line of thought later.

There is another series of objections against our procedure in the dream interpretation which we must now consider. In this interpretation we proceed by dropping all the end-presentations which otherwise control reflection, we direct our attention to an individual element of the dream, and then note the unwished-for thoughts that occur to us in this connection. We then take up the next component of the dream content, and repeat the operation with it; and, without caring in what direction the thoughts take us, we allow ourselves to be led on by them until we end by rambling from one subject to another. At the same time, we harbour the confident hope that we may in the end, without effort, come upon the dream thoughts from which our dream originated. Against this the critic brings the following objection: That one can arrive somewhere, starting from a single element in the dream is nothing wonderful. Something can be associatively connected with every idea. It is remarkable only that one should succeed in hitting the dream thoughts in this aimless and arbitrary excursion of thought. It is probably a self-deception; the investigator follows the chain of association from one element until for some reason it is seen to break, when a second element is taken up; it is thus but natural that the association, originally unbounded, should now experience a narrowing. He keeps in mind the former chain of associations, and he will therefore in analysis more easily hit upon certain thoughts which have something in common with the thoughts from the first chain. He then imagines that he has found a thought which represents a point of junction between two elements of the dream. As he, moreover, allows himself every freedom of thought connection, excepting only the transitions from one idea to another which are made in normal thinking, it is not finally difficult for him to concoct something which he calls the dream thought out of a series of “intermediary thoughts”; and without any guarantee, as they are otherwise unknown, he palms these off as the psychic equivalent of the dream. But all this is accompanied by arbitrary procedure and over-ingenious exploitation of coincidence. Anyone who will go to this useless trouble can in this way work out any desired interpretation for any dream whatever.

If such objections are really advanced against us, we may refer in our defence to the agreement of our dream interpretations, to the surprising connections with other dream elements which appear in following out the different particular presentations, and to the improbability that anything which so perfectly covers and explains the dream as our dream interpretations do could be gained otherwise than by following psychic connections previously established. We can also justify ourselves by the fact that the method of dream analysis is identical with the method used in the solution of hysterical symptoms, where the correctness of the method is attested through the emergence and fading away of the symptoms—that is, where the elucidation of the text by the interposed illustrations finds corroboration. But we have no object in avoiding this problem—how one can reach to a pre-established aim by following a chain of thoughts spun out thus arbitrarily and aimlessly—for, though we are unable to solve the problem, we can get rid of it entirely.

It is in fact demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon ourselves to an aimless course of thought when, as in the interpretation of dreams, we relinquish our reflection and allow the unwished-for idea to come to the surface. It can be shown that we can reject only those end-presentations that are familiar to us, and that as soon as these stop the unknown, or, as we say more precisely, the unconscious end-presentations, immediately come into play, which now determined the course of the unwished-for presentations. A mode of thinking without end-idea can surely not be brought about through any influence we can exert on our own mental life; nor do I know either of any state of psychic derangement in which such mode of thought establishes itself. The psychiatrists have in this field much too early rejected the solidity of the psychic structure. I have ascertained that an unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid of the end-presentation, occurs as little in the realm of hysteria and paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams. Perhaps it does not appear at all in the endogenous psychic affections, but even the deliria of confused states are senseful according to the ingenious theory of Leuret and become incomprehensible to us only through omissions. I have come to the same conviction wherever I have found opportunity for observation. The deliria are the work of a censor which no longer makes any effort to conceal its sway, which, instead of lending its support to a revision no longer obnoxious to it, cancels regardlessly that which it raises objections against, thus causing the remnant to appear disconnected. This censor behaves analogously to the Russian newspaper censor on the frontier, who allows to fall into the hands of his protected readers only those foreign journals that have passed under the black pencil.

The free play of the presentations following any associative concatenation perhaps makes its appearance in destructive organic brain lesions. What, however, is taken as such in the psychoneuroses can always be explained as the influence of the censor on a series of thoughts which have been pushed into the foreground by the concealed end-presentation.[^[FM]] It has been considered an unmistakable sign of association free from the end-presentations when the emerging presentations (or pictures) were connected with one another by means of the so-called superficial associations—that is, by assonance, word ambiguity, and causal connection without inner sense relationship; in other words, when they were connected through all those associations which we allow ourselves to make use of in wit and play upon words. This distinguishing mark proves true for the connections of thought which lead us from the elements of the dream content to the collaterals, and from these to the thoughts of the dream proper; of this we have in our dream analysis found many surprising examples. No connection was there too loose and no wit too objectionable to serve as a bridge from one thought to another. But the correct understanding of such tolerance is not remote. Whenever one psychic element is connected with another through an obnoxious or superficial association, there also exists a correct and more profound connection between the two which succumbs to the resistance of the censor.

The correct explanation for the predominance of the superficial associations is the pressure of the censor, and not the suppression of the end-presentations. The superficial associations supplant the deep ones in the presentation whenever the censor renders the normal connective paths impassable. It is as if in a mountainous region a general interruption of traffic, e.g., an inundation, should render impassable the long and broad thoroughfares; traffic would then have to be maintained through inconvenient and steep footpaths otherwise used only by the hunter.

We can here distinguish two cases which, however, are essentially one. In the first case the censor is directed only against the connection of the two thoughts, which, having been detached from each other, escape the opposition. The two thoughts then enter successively into consciousness; their connection remains concealed; but in its place there occurs to us a superficial connection between the two which we would not otherwise have thought of, and which as a rule connects with another angle of the presentation complex instead of with the one giving rise to the suppressed but essential connection. Or, in the second case, both thoughts on account of their content succumb to the censor; both then appear not in their correct but in a modified substituted form; and both substituted thoughts are so selected that they represent, through a superficial association, the essential relation which existed between those which have been replaced by them. Under the pressure of the censor the displacement of a normal and vital association by a superficial and apparently absurd one has thus occurred in both cases.