Freud,Sigmund - The Interpretation of Dreams

INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

by

Sigmuend Freud

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INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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2

Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo

FOREWORD

In 1909, G. Stanley Hall invited me to Clark University, in Worcester, to give the first

lectures on psychoanalysis. In the same year, Dr Brill published the first of his

translations of my writings, which were soon followed by further ones. If psychoanalysis

now plays a role in American intellectual life, or if it does so in the future, a large part of

this result will have to be attributed to this and other activities of Dr Brill's.

His first translation of The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1913. Since then, much

has taken place in the world, and much has been changed in our views about the

neuroses. This book, with the new contribution to psychology which surprised the world

when it was published (1900), remains essentially unaltered. It contains, even according

to my present-day judgment, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good

fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime.

FREUD

Vienna

March 15, 1931

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The Interpretation of Dreams

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 5A

Chapter 5B

Chapter 5C

Chapter 5D

Chapter 6

Chapter 6A

Chapter 6B

Chapter 6C

Chapter 6D

Chapter 6E

Chapter 6F

Chapter 6G

Chapter 6H

Chapter 6I

Chapter 7

Chapter 7A

Chapter 7B

Chapter 7C

Chapter 7D

Chapter 7E

Chapter 7F

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CHAPTER ONE

The Scientific Literature of Dream-Problems (up to 1900)

In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which

makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every

dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which

may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I

shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity

of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose

conflict or co-operation is responsible for our dreams. This done, my investigation will

terminate, as it will have reached the point where the problem of the dream merges into

more comprehensive problems, and to solve these, we must have recourse to material of a

different kind.

I shall begin by giving a short account of the views of earlier writers on this subject and

of the status of the dream-problem in contemporary science; since in the course of this

treatise, I shall not often have occasion to refer to either. In spite of thousands of years of

endeavour, little progress has been made in the scientific understanding of dreams. This

fact has been so universally acknowledged by previous writers on the subject that it

seems hardly necessary to quote individual opinions. The reader will find, in many

stimulating observations, and plenty of interesting material relating to our subject, but

little or nothing that concerns the true nature of the dream, or that solves definitely any of

its enigmas. The educated layman, of course, knows even less of the matter.

The conception of the dream that was held in prehistoric ages by primitive peoples, and

the influence which it may have exerted on the formation of their conceptions of the

universe, and of the soul, is a theme of such great interest that it is only with reluctance

that I refrain from dealing with it in these pages. I will refer the reader to the well-known

works of Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor and other

writers; I will only add that we shall not realise the importance of these problems and

speculations until we have completed the task of dream interpretation that lies before us.

A reminiscence of the concept of the dream that was held in primitive times seems to

underlie the evaluation of the dream which was current among the peoples of classical

antiquity.1 They took it for granted that dreams were related to the world of the

supernatural beings in whom they believed, and that they brought inspirations from the

gods and demons. Moreover, it appeared to them that dreams must serve a special

purpose in respect of the dreamer; that, as a rule, they predicted the future. The

extraordinary variations in the content of dreams, and in the impressions which they

produced on the dreamer, made it, of course, very difficult to formulate a coherent

conception of them, and necessitated manifold differentiations and group-formations,

according to their value and reliability. The valuation of dreams by the individual

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philosophers of antiquity naturally depended on the importance which they were prepared

to attribute to manticism in general.

In the two works of Aristotle in which there is mention of dreams, they are already

regarded as constituting a problem of psychology. We are told that the dream is not god-

sent, that it is not of divine but of daimonic origin. For nature is really daimonic, not

divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws

of the human spirit, which has, of course, a kinship with the divine. The dream is defined

as the psychic activity of the sleeper, inasmuch as he is asleep. Aristotle was acquainted

with some of the characteristics of the dream-life; for example, he knew that a dream

converts the slight sensations perceived in sleep into intense sensations (`one imagines

that one is walking through fire, and feels hot, if this or that part of the body becomes

only quite slightly warm'), which led him to conclude that dreams might easily betray to

the physician the first indications of an incipient physical change which escaped

observation during the day.2

As has been said, those writers of antiquity who preceded Aristotle did not regard the

dream as a product of the dreaming psyche, but as an inspiration of divine origin, and in

ancient times, the two opposing tendencies which we shall find throughout the ages in

respect of the evaluation of the dream-life, were already perceptible. The ancients

distinguished between the true and valuable dreams which were sent to the dreamer as

warnings, or to foretell future events, and the vain, fraudulent and empty dreams, whose

object was to misguide him or lead him to destruction.

The pre-scientific conception of the dream which obtained among the ancients was, of

course, in perfect keeping with their general conception of the universe, which was

accustomed to project as an external reality that which possessed reality only in the life of

the psyche. Further, it accounted for the main impression made upon the waking life by

the morning memory of the dream; for in this memory the dream, as compared with the

rest of the psychic content, seems to be something alien, coming, as it were, from another

world. It would be an error to suppose that the theory of the supernatural origin of dreams

lacks followers even in our own times; for quite apart from pietistic and mystical writers -

- who cling, as they are perfectly justified in doing, to the remnants of the once

predominant realm of the supernatural until these remnants have been swept away by

scientific explanation -- we not infrequently find that quite intelligent persons, who in

other respects are averse to anything of a romantic nature, go so far as to base their

religious belief in the existence and co-operation of superhuman spiritual powers on the

inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreams (Haffner). The validity ascribed to the

dream life by certain schools of philosophy -- for example, by the school of Schelling --

is a distinct reminiscence of the undisputed belief in the divinity of dreams which

prevailed in antiquity; and for some thinkers, the mantic or prophetic power of dreams is

still a subject of debate. This is due to the fact that the explanations attempted by

psychology are too inadequate to cope with the accumulated material, however strongly

the scientific thinker may feel that such superstitious doctrines should be repudiated.

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To write a history of our scientific knowledge of the dream problem is extremely

difficult, because, valuable though this knowledge may be in certain respects, no real

progress in a definite direction is as yet discernible. No real foundation of verified results

has hitherto been established on which future investigators might continue to build. Every

new author approaches the same problems afresh, and from the very beginning. If I were

to enumerate such authors in chronological order, giving a survey of the opinions which

each has held concerning the problems of the dream, I should be quite unable to draw a

clear and complete picture of the present state of our knowledge on the subject. I have

therefore preferred to base my method of treatment on themes rather than on authors, and

in attempting the solution of each problem of the dream, I shall cite the material found in

the literature of the subject.

But as I have not succeeded in mastering the whole of this literature -- for it is widely

dispersed and interwoven with the literature of other subjects -- I must ask my readers to

rest content with my survey as it stands, provided that no fundamental fact or important

point of view has been overlooked.

In a supplement to a later German edition, the author adds:

I shall have to justify myself for not extending my summary of the literature of dream

problems to cover the period between first appearance of this book and the publication of

the second edition. This justification may not seem very satisfactory to the reader; none

the less, to me it was decisive. The motives which induced me to summarise the

treatment of dreams in the literature of the subject have been exhausted by the foregoing

introduction; to have continued this would have cost me a great deal of effort and would

not have been particularly useful or instructive. For the interval in question -- a period of

nine years -- has yielded nothing new or valuable as regards the conception of dreams,

either in actual material or in novel points of view. In most of the literature which has

appeared since the publication of my own work, the latter has not been mentioned or

discussed; it has, of course, received the least attention from the so-called `research

workers on dreams', who have thus afforded a brilliant example of the aversion to

learning anything new so characteristic of the scientist. `Les savants ne sont pas curieux',

said the scoffer, Anatole France. If there were such a thing in science as the right of

revenge, I, in my turn, should be justified in ignoring the literature which has appeared

since the publication of this book. The few reviews which have appeared in the scientific

journals are so full of misconceptions and lack of comprehension that my only possible

answer to my critics would be a request that they should read this book over again -- or

perhaps merely that they should read it!

And in a supplement to the fourth German edition which appeared in 1914, a year after I

published the first English translation of this work, he writes:

Since then, the state of affairs has certainly undergone a change; my contribution to the

`interpretation of dreams' is no longer ignored in the literature of the subject. But the new

situation makes it even more impossible to continue the foregoing summary. The

Interpretation of Dreams has evoked a whole series of new contentions and problems,

INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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which have been expounded by the authors in the most varied fashions. But I cannot

discuss these works until I have developed the theories to which their authors have

referred. Whatever has appeared to me as valuable in this recent literature, I have

accordingly reviewed in the course of the following exposition.

1 The following remarks are based on Büchsenschütz's careful essay, Traum und

Traumdeutung im Altertum (Berlin, 1868).

2 The relationship between dreams and disease is discussed by Hippocrates in a chapter of

his famous work.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Method of Dream Interpretation

THE ANALYSIS OF A SPECIMEN DREAM

The epigraph on the title-page of this volume* indicates the tradition to which I prefer to

ally myself in my conception of the dream. I am proposing to show that dreams are

capable of interpretation; and any contributions to the solution of the problem which have

already been discussed will emerge only as possible by-products in the accomplishment

of my special task. On the hypothesis that dreams are susceptible of interpretation, I at

once find myself in disagreement with the prevailing doctrine of dreams -- in fact, with

all the theories of dreams, excepting only that of Scherner, for `to interpret a dream', is to

specify its `meaning', to replace it by something which takes its position in the

concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of definite importance and value. But, as

we have seen, the scientific theories of the dream leave no room for a problem of dream-

interpretation; since, in the first place, according to these theories, dreaming is not a

psychic activity at all, but a somatic process which makes itself known to the psychic

apparatus by means of symbols. Lay opinion has always been opposed to these theories.

It asserts its privilege of proceeding illogically, and although it admits that dreams are

incomprehensible and absurd, it cannot summon up the courage to deny that dreams have

any significance. Led by a dim intuition, it seems rather to assume that dreams have a

meaning, albeit a hidden one; that they are intended as a substitute for some other

thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to

discover the hidden meaning of the dream.

The unscientific world, therefore, has always endeavoured to `interpret' dreams, and by

applying one or the other of two essentially different methods. The first of these methods

envisages the dream-content as a whole, and seeks to replace it by another content, which

is intelligible and in certain respects analogous. This is symbolic dream-interpretation;

and of course it goes to pieces at the very outset in the case of those dreams which are not

only unintelligible but confused. The construction which the biblical Joseph placed upon

the dream of Pharaoh furnishes an example of this method. The seven fat kine, after

which came seven lean ones that devoured the former, were a symbolic substitute for

seven years of famine in the land of Egypt, which according to the prediction were to

consume all the surplus that seven fruitful years had produced. Most of the artificial

dreams contrived by the poets1 are intended for some such symbolic interpretation, for

they reproduce the thought conceived by the poet in a guise not unlike the disguise which

we are wont to find in our dreams.

The idea that the dream concerns itself chiefly with the future, whose form it surmises in

advance -- a relic of the prophetic significance with which dreams were once invested --

now becomes the motive for translating into the future the meaning of the dream which

has been found by means of symbolic interpretation.

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A demonstration of the manner in which one arrives at such a symbolic interpretation

cannot, of course, be given. Success remains a matter of ingenious conjecture, of direct

intuition, and for this reason dream-interpretation has naturally been elevated into an art

which seems to depend upon extraordinary gifts.2 The second of the two popular methods

of dream-interpretation entirely abandons such claims. It might be described as the

`cipher method', since it treats the dream as a kind of secret code in which every sign is

translated into another sign of known meaning, according to an established key. For

example, I have dreamt of a letter, and also of a funeral or the like; I consult a `dream-

book', and I find that `letter' is to be translated by `vexation' and `funeral' by

`engagement'. It now remains to establish a connection, which I am again to assume as

pertaining to the future, by means of the rigmarole which I have deciphered. An

interesting variant of this cipher procedure, a variant in which its character of purely

mechanical transference is to a certain extent corrected, is presented in the work on

dream-interpretation by Artemidoros of Daldis.3 Here not only the dream-content, but

also the personality and social position of the dreamer are taken into consideration, so

that the same dream-content has a significance for the rich man, the married man, or the

orator, which is different from that which applies to the poor man, the bachelor, or, let us

say, the merchant. The essential point, then, in this procedure is that the work of

interpretation is not applied to the entirety of the dream, but to each portion of the dream-

content severally, as though the dream were a conglomerate in which each fragment calls

for special treatment. Incoherent and confused dreams are certainly those that have been

responsible for the invention of the cipher method.4

The worthlessness of both these popular methods of interpretation does not admit of

discussion. As regards the scientific treatment of the subject, the symbolic method is

limited in its application, and is not susceptible of a general exposition, In the cipher

method everything depends upon whether the `key', the dream-book, is reliable, and for

that all guarantees are lacking. So that one might be tempted to grant the contention of

the philosophers and psychiatrists, and to dismiss the problem of dream-interpretation as

altogether fanciful.5

I have, however, come to think differently. I have been forced to perceive that here, once

more, we have one of those not infrequent cases where an ancient and stubbornly retained

popular belief seems to have come nearer to the truth of the matter than the opinion of

modern science. I must insist that the dream actually does possess a meaning, and that a

scientific method of dream-interpretation is possible. I arrived at my knowledge of this

method in the following manner.

For years I have been occupied with the resolution of certain psychopathological

structures -- hysterical phobias, obsessional ideas, and the like -- with therapeutic

intentions. I have been so occupied, in fact, ever since I heard the significant statement of

Joseph Breuer, to the effect that in these structures, regarded as morbid symptoms,

solution and treatment go hand in hand.6 Where it has been possible to trace a

pathological idea back to those elements in the psychic life of the patient to which it

owed its origin, this idea has crumbled away, and the patient has been relieved of it. In

view of the failure of our other therapeutic efforts, and in the face of the mysterious

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character of these pathological conditions, it seemed to me tempting, in spite of all the

difficulties, to follow the method initiated by Breuer until a complete elucidation of the

subject had been achieved. I shall have occasion elsewhere to give a detailed account of

the form which the technique of this procedure has finally assumed, and of the results of

my efforts. In the course of these psychoanalytic studies, I happened upon the question of

dream-interpretation. My patients, after I had pledged them to inform me of all the ideas

and thoughts which occurred to them in connection with a given theme, related their

dreams, and thus taught me that a dream may be interpolated in the psychic

concatenation, which may be followed backwards from a pathological idea into a

patient's memory. The next step was to treat the dream itself as a symptom, and to apply

to it the method of interpretation which had been worked out for such symptoms.

For this a certain psychic preparation on the part of the patient is necessary. A twofold

effort is made, to stimulate his attentiveness in respect of his psychic perceptions, and to

eliminate the critical spirit in which he is ordinarily in the habit of viewing such thoughts

as come to the surface. For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention it

is advantageous that the patient should take up a restful position and close his eyes; he

must be explicitly instructed to renounce all criticism of the thought formations which he

may perceive. He must also be told that the success of the psychoanalysis depends upon

his noting and communicating everything that passes through his mind, and that he must

not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant

to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical. He must preserve an absolute

impartiality in respect to his ideas; for if he is unsuccessful in finding the desired solution

of the dream, the obsessional idea, or the like, it will be because he permits himself to be

critical of them.

I have noticed in the course of my psychoanalytical work that the psychological state of a

man in an attitude of reflection is entirely different from that of a man who is observing

his psychic processes. In reflection there is a greater play of psychic activity than in the

most attentive self-observation; this is shown even by the tense attitude and the wrinkled

brow of the man in a state of reflection, as opposed to the mimic tranquillity of the man

observing himself. In both cases there must be concentrated attention, but the reflective

man makes use of his critical faculties, with the result that he rejects some of the thoughts

which rise into consciousness after he has become aware of them, and abruptly interrupts

others, so that he does not follow the lines of thought which they would otherwise open

up for him; while in respect of yet other thoughts he is able to behave in such a manner

that they do not become conscious at all -- that is to say, they are suppressed before they

are perceived. In self-observation, on the other hand, he has but one task -- that of

suppressing criticism; if he succeeds in doing this, an unlimited number of thoughts enter

his consciousness which would otherwise have eluded his grasp. With the aid of the

material thus obtained -- material which is new to the self-observer -- it is possible to

achieve the interpretation of pathological ideas, and also that of dream-formations. As

will be seen, the point is to induce a psychic state which is in some degree analogous, as

regards the distribution of psychic energy (mobile attention), to the state of the mind

before falling asleep -- and also, of course, to the hypnotic state. On falling asleep the

`undesired ideas' emerge, owing to the slackening of a certain arbitrary (and, of course,

Freud, Sigmund - The Interpretation of Dreams

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