It is not the place here to explain by examples the territory of dream-analysis so extraordinary composed; we must be satisfied with the results of the study; dreams are a symbolical compensation for a personally important wish of the daytime, one which had had too little attention (or which had been repressed).
As a result of the dominant morals, wishes which are not sufficiently noticed by our waking consciousness and which attempt to realize themselves symbolically in the dream are as a rule of an erotic nature. Therefore it is advisable not to tell individual dreams in the presence of the initiated, because dream symbolism is transparent to one acquainted with its fundamental rules. Therefore we have always to conquer in ourselves a certain resistance before we seriously can be fitted for the task of unraveling the symbolical composition by patient work. When we finally comprehend the true meaning of a dream then we at once find ourselves transposed into the very midst of the secrets of the dreamer and to our amazement we see that even an apparently meaningless dream is full of sense and really bears witness of extremely important and serious things concerning the soul-life. This knowledge obliges us to have more respect for the old superstition concerning the meaning of dreams, a respect which is far to seek in our present-day rationalistic era.
Freud correctly terms dream-analysis the royal road which leads to the subconscious; it leads us into the most deeply hidden personal mysteries and, therefore, in the hand of the physician and the educator is an instrument not to be too highly valued.
The opposition to this method makes use of arguments which chiefly (as we will observe, from personal motives) originate in the still strongly scholastic bent, which the learned thought of the present-day exhibits. And dream-analysis is precisely what inexorably lays bare the lying morals and the hypocritical pose of men, and now for once makes them see the reverse side of their character. Is it to be wondered at that many therefore feel as if some one were stepping on their toes?
Dream-analysis always makes me think of the striking statue of worldly pleasure which stands before the cathedral at Basel. The front presents an archaic sweet smile, but the back is covered with toads and snakes. Dream-analysis reverses things and allows the back side to be seen. That this correct picture of reality possesses an ethical value is what no one can contradict. It is a painful but very useful operation, which demands a great deal from the physician as well as from the patient. Psychoanalysis seen from the standpoint of therapeutic technic consists chiefly of numerous analyses of dreams; these in the course of treatment, little by little, bring what is evil out of the subconsciousness to the light and submit it to the disinfecting light of day, and thereby find again many valuable and pretendedly lost portions of the past. It represents a cathartic of especial worth, which has a similarity to the Socratic "maieutike," the "obstetric." From this state of affairs one can only expect that psychoanalysis for many people who have taken a certain pose, in which they firmly believe, is a real torture, because according to the ancient mystic saying: "Give what you have, then shall you receive!" They must of their own free will offer as a price their beloved illusions if they wish to allow something deeper, more beautiful and more vast to enrich them. Only through the mystery of self-sacrifice does the self succeed in finding itself again renewed.
There are proverbs of very old origin which through the psychoanalytical treatment again come to light. It is surely very remarkable that at the height to which our present-day culture has attained this particular kind of psychic education seems necessary, an education which may be compared in more than one respect with the technic of Socrates, although psychoanalysis goes much deeper.
We always discover in the patient a conflict which at a certain point is connected with the great social problems, and when the analysis has penetrated to that point, the seemingly individual conflict of the patient is disclosed as the conflict, common to his environment and his time.
Thus the neurosis is really nothing but an individual (unsuccessful to be sure) attempt to solve a common problem It must be so, because a common problem, a "Question" which plunges the sick man into misery is—I can't help it—"the sexual question," more properly termed the question of the present-day sexual moral.
His increased claim upon life and the joy of life, upon colored, brilliant reality, must endure the inevitable limitations, placed by reality, but not the arbitrary, wrong, indefensable limitations which put too many chains upon the creative spirit mounting from out the depths of animal darkness. The nervous sufferer possesses the soul of a child, that arbitrary limitation which represses and the reason for which is not understood. To be sure it attempts to identify itself with the morals, but by this it is brought into great conflict and disharmony with itself. On one side it wishes to submit, on the other to free itself—and this conflict we speak of as the neurosis.
If this conflict in all its parts were clearly a conscious one, then naturally no nervous phenomena would arise from it. These phenomena arise only when man cannot see the reverse side of his being and the urgency of his problem. Only under these circumstances does the phenomena occur which allows expression to the non-conscious side of the soul.