The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

The individual parts of this complicated structure naturally stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another. They constitute a foreground or background, digressions, illustrations, conditions, chains of argument, and objections. When the whole mass of these dream thoughts is subjected to the pressure of the dream activity, during which the parts are turned about, broken up, and pushed together, something like drifting ice, there arises the question, what becomes of the logical ties which until now had given form to the structure? What representation do “if,” “because,” “as though,” “although,” “either—or,” and all the other conjunctions, without which we cannot understand a phrase or a sentence, receive in the dream?

At first we must answer that the dream has at its disposal no means for representing these logical relations among the dream thoughts. In most cases it disregards all these conjunctions, and undertakes the elaboration only of the objective content of the dream thoughts. It is left to the interpretation of the dream to restore the coherence which the activity of the dream has destroyed.

If the dream lacks ability to express these relations, the psychic material of which the dream is wrought must be responsible. The descriptive arts are limited in the same manner—painting and the plastic arts in comparison with poetry, which can employ speech; and here too the reason for this impotence is to be found in the material in the treatment of which the two arts strive to give expression to something. Before the art of painting had arrived at an understanding of the laws of expression by which it is bound, it attempted to escape this disadvantage. In old paintings little tags were hung from the mouths of the persons represented giving the speech, the expression of which in the picture the artist despaired of.

Perhaps an objection will here be raised challenging the assertion that the dream dispenses with the representation of logical relations. There are dreams in which the most complicated intellectual operations take place, in which proof and refutation are offered, puns and comparisons made, just as in waking thoughts. But here, too, appearances are deceitful; if the interpretation of such dreams is pursued, it is found that all of this is dream material, not the representation of intellectual activity in the dream. The content of the dream thoughts is reproduced by the apparent thinking of the dream, not the relations of the dream thoughts to one another, in the determination of which relations thinking consists. I shall give examples of this. But the thesis which is most easily established is that all speeches which occur in the dream, and which are expressly designated as such, are unchanged or only slightly modified copies of speeches which are likewise to be found in the recollections of the dream material. Often the speech is only an allusion to an event contained in the dream thoughts; the meaning of the dream is a quite different one.

I shall not deny, indeed, that there is also critical thought activity which does not merely repeat material from the dream thoughts and which takes part in the formation of the dream. I shall have to explain the influence of this factor at the close of this discussion. It will then become clear that this thought activity is evoked not by the dream thoughts, but by the dream itself after it is already finished in a certain sense.

We shall, therefore, consider it settled for the present that the logical relations among the dream thoughts do not enjoy any particular representation in the dream. For instance, where there is a contradiction in the dream, this is either a contradiction directed against the dream itself or a contradiction derived from the content of one of the dream thoughts; a contradiction in the dream corresponds to a contradiction among the dream thoughts only in a highly indirect manner.

But just as the art of painting finally succeeded in depicting in the represented persons, at least their intention in speaking—their tenderness, threatening attitude, warning mien, and the like—by other means than the dangling tag, so also the dream has found it possible to render account of a few of the logical relations among its dream thoughts by means of an appropriate modification of the peculiar method of dream representation. It will be found by experience that different dreams go to different lengths in taking this into consideration; while one dream entirely disregards the logical coherence of its material, another attempts to indicate it as completely as possible. In so doing the dream departs more or less widely from the subject-matter which it is to elaborate. The dream also takes a similarly varying attitude towards the temporal coherence of the dream thoughts, if such coherence has been established in the unconscious (as for example in the dream of Irma’s injection).

But what are the means by which the dream activity is enabled to indicate these relations in the dream material which are so difficult to represent? I shall attempt to enumerate these separately.

In the first place, the dream renders account of the connection which is undeniably present between all the parts of the dream thoughts by uniting this material in a single composition as a situation or process. It reproduces logical connection in the form of simultaneousness; in this case it acts something like the painter who groups together all the philosophers or poets into a picture of the school of Athens or of Parnassus, although these were never at once present in any hall or on any mountain top—though they do, however, form a unity from the point of view of reflective contemplation.

The dream carries out this method of representation in detail. Whenever it shows two elements close together, it vouches for a particularly intimate connection between those elements which correspond to them in the dream thoughts. It is as in our method of writing: to signifies that the two letters are to be pronounced as one syllable, while t with o after a free space shows that t is the last letter of one word and o the first letter of another. According to this, dream combinations are not made of arbitrary, completely incongruent elements of the dream material, but of elements that also have a somewhat intimate relation to one another in the dream thoughts.