Chapter VII: Part 7

Going away on a journey stands in dreams for dying; similarly, it is the custom in the nursery, when a child asks questions as to the whereabouts of someone who has died and whom he misses, to tell him that that person has “gone away.” Here again, I deprecate the idea that the dream-symbol has its origin in this evasive reply to the child. The poet uses the same symbol when he speaks of the other side as “the undiscovered country from whose bourne _no traveller_ returns.” Again, in everyday speech it is quite usual to speak of the “last journey,” and everyone who is acquainted with ancient rites knows how seriously the idea of a journey into the land of the dead was taken, for instance, in ancient Egyptian belief. In many cases the “Book of the Dead” survives, which was given to the mummy, like a Baedeker, to take with him on the last journey. Since burial-grounds have been placed at a distance from the houses of the living, the last journey of the dead has indeed become a reality.

Nor does sexual symbolism belong only to dreams. You will all know the expression “a baggage” as applied contemptuously to a woman, but perhaps people do not know that they are using a genital symbol. In the New Testament we read: “The woman is the weaker _vessel_.” The sacred writings of the Jews, the style of which so closely approaches that of poetry, are full of expressions symbolic of sex, which have not always been correctly interpreted and the exegesis of which, e.g. in the Song of Solomon, has led to many misunderstandings.[37] In later Hebrew literature the woman is very frequently represented by a house, the door standing for the genital opening; thus a man complains, when he finds a woman no longer a virgin, that “he has found the door open.” The symbol “table” for a woman also occurs in this literature; the woman says of her husband “I spread the table for him, but he overturned it.” Lame children are said to owe their infirmity to the fact that the man “overturned the table.” I quote here from a treatise by L. Levy in Brünn: _Sexual Symbolism in the Bible and the Talmud_.

That ships in dreams signify women is a belief in which we are supported by the etymologists, who assert that “ship” (_Schiff_) was originally the name of an earthen vessel and is the same word as _Schaff_ (_schaffen_ = to make or produce). That an oven stands for a woman or the mother’s womb is an interpretation confirmed by the Greek story of Periander of Corinth and his wife Melissa. According to the version of Herodotus, the tyrant adjured the shade of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had murdered out of jealousy, to tell him something about herself, whereupon the dead woman identified herself by reminding him that he, Periander, “had put his bread into a cold oven,” thus expressing in a disguised form a circumstance of which everyone else was ignorant. In the _Anthropophyteia_, edited by F. S. Kraus, a work which is an indispensable text-book on everything concerning the sexual life of different peoples, we read that in a certain part of Germany people say of a woman who is delivered of a child that “her oven has fallen to pieces.” The kindling of fire and everything connected with this is permeated through and through with sexual symbolism, the flame always standing for the male organ, and the fireplace or the hearth for the womb of the woman.

If you have chanced to wonder at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to symbolize the female sexual organs, you may learn from mythologists how large a part has been played in the ideas and cults of ancient times by “Mother Earth” and how the whole conception of agriculture was determined by this symbolism. The fact that in dreams a room represents a woman you may be inclined to trace to the German colloquialism by which _Frauenzimmer_ (_lit._ “woman’s room”) is used for _Frau_, that is to say, the human person is represented by the place assigned for her occupation. Similarly we speak of the Porte, meaning thereby the Sultan and his government, and the name of the ancient Egyptian ruler, Pharaoh, merely means “great court.” (In the ancient Orient the courts between the double gates of the city were places of assembly, like the market-place in classical times.) But I think this derivation is too superficial, and it strikes me as more probable that the room came to symbolize woman on account of its property of enclosing within it the human being. We have already met with the house in this sense; from mythology and poetry we may take towns, citadels, castles and fortresses to be further symbols for women. It would be easy to decide the point by reference to the dreams of people who neither speak nor understand German. Of late years I have mainly treated foreign patients, and I think I recollect that in their dreams rooms stand in the same way for women, even though there is no word analogous to our _Frauenzimmer_ in their language. There are other indications that symbolism may transcend the boundaries of language, a fact already maintained by the old dream-investigator, Schubert, in 1862. Nevertheless, none of my patients were wholly ignorant of German, so that I must leave this question to be decided by those analysts who can collect instances in other countries from persons who speak only one language.[38]

Amongst the symbols for the male sexual organ, there is scarcely one which does not appear in jests, or in vulgar or poetic phrases, especially in the old classical poets. Here, however, we meet not only with such symbols as occur in dreams but also with new ones, e.g. the _implements_ employed in various kinds of work, first and foremost, the _plough_. Moreover, when we come to male symbols, we trench on very extensive and much-contested ground, which, in order not to waste time, we will avoid. I should just like to devote a few remarks to the one symbol which stands, as it were, by itself; I refer to the number _three_. Whether this number does not in all probability owe its sacred character to its symbolic significance is a question which we must leave undecided, but it seems certain that many tripartite natural objects, e.g. the clover-leaf, are used in coats-of-arms and as emblems on account of their symbolism. The so-called “French” lily with its three parts and, again, the “trisceles,” that curious coat-of-arms of two such widely separated islands as Sicily and the Isle of Man (a figure consisting of three bent legs projecting from a central point), are supposed to be merely disguised forms of the male sexual organ, images of which were believed in ancient times to be the most powerful means of warding off evil influences (_apotropaea_); connected with this is the fact that the lucky “charms” of our own time may all be easily recognized as genital or sexual symbols. Let us consider a collection of such charms in the form of tiny silver pendants: a four-leaved clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horseshoe, a ladder and a chimney-sweep. The four-leaved clover has taken the place of that with three leaves, which was really more appropriate for the purposes of symbolism; the pig is an ancient symbol of fruitfulness; the mushroom undoubtedly symbolizes the penis, there are mushrooms which derive their name from their unmistakable resemblance to that organ (_Phallus impudicus_); the horseshoe reproduces the contour of the female genital opening; while the chimney-sweep with his ladder belongs to this company because his occupation is one which is vulgarly compared with sexual intercourse. (Cf. _Anthropophyteia_.) We have learnt to recognize his ladder in dreams as a sexual symbol: expressions in language show what a completely sexual significance the word _steigen_, to mount, has, as in the phrases: _Den Frauen nachsteigen_ (to run after women) and _ein alter Steiger_ (an old roué). So, in French, where the word for “step” is _la marche_, we find the quite analogous expression for an old rake: _un vieux marcheur_. Probably the fact that with many of the larger animals sexual intercourse necessitates a mounting or “climbing upon” the female has something to do with this association of ideas.

Pulling off a branch to symbolize onanism is not only in agreement with vulgar descriptions of that act, but also has far-reaching parallels in mythology. But especially remarkable is the representation of onanism, or rather of castration as the punishment for onanism, by the falling out or extraction of teeth; for we find in folk-lore a counterpart to this which could only be known to very few dreamers. I think that there can be no doubt that circumcision, a practice common to so many peoples, is an equivalent and replacement of castration. And recently we have learnt that certain aboriginal tribes in Australia practise circumcision as a rite to mark the attaining of puberty (at the celebration of the boy’s coming of age), whilst other tribes living quite near have substituted for this practice that of knocking out a tooth.

I will end my account with these examples. They are only examples; we know more about this subject and you can imagine how much richer and more interesting a collection of this sort might be made, not by dilettanti like ourselves, but by real experts in mythology, anthropology, philology and folk-lore. We are forced to certain conclusions, which cannot be exhaustive, but nevertheless will give us plenty to think about.

In the first place, we are confronted with the fact that the dreamer has at his command a symbolic mode of expression of which he knows nothing, and does not even recognize, in his waking life. This is as amazing as if you made the discovery that your housemaid understood Sanscrit, though you know that she was born in a Bohemian village and had never learnt that language. It is not easy to bring this fact into line with our views on psychology. We can only say that the dreamer’s knowledge of symbolism is unconscious and belongs to his unconscious mental life, but even this assumption does not help us much. Up till now we have only had to assume the existence of unconscious tendencies which are temporarily or permanently unknown to us; but now the question is a bigger one and we have actually to believe in unconscious knowledge, thought-relations, and comparisons between different objects, in virtue of which one idea can constantly be substituted for another. These comparisons are not instituted afresh every time, but are ready to hand, perfect for all time; this we infer from their unanimity in different persons, even probably in spite of linguistic differences.

Whence is our knowledge of this symbolism derived? The usages of speech cover only a small part of it, whilst the manifold parallels in other fields are for the most part unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves had to collate them laboriously in the first instance.

In the second place, these symbolic relations are not peculiar to the dreamer or to the dream-work by which they are expressed; for we have discovered that the same symbolism is employed in myths and fairy tales, in popular sayings and songs, in colloquial speech and poetic phantasy. The province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide: dream-symbolism is only a small part of it; it would not even be expedient to attack the whole problem from the side of dreams. Many of the symbols commonly occurring elsewhere either do not appear in dreams at all or appear very seldom; on the other hand, many of the dream-symbols are not met with in every other department, but, as you have seen, only here and there. We get the impression that here we have to do with an ancient but obsolete mode of expression, of which different fragments have survived in different fields, one here only, another there only, a third in various spheres perhaps in slightly different forms. At this point I am reminded of the phantasy of a very interesting insane patient, who had imagined a “primordial language” (_Grundsprache_) of which all these symbols were survivals.

In the third place, it must strike you that the symbolism occurring in the other fields I have named is by no means confined to sexual themes, whereas in dreams the symbols are almost exclusively used to represent sexual objects and relations. This again is hard to account for. Are we to suppose that symbols originally of sexual significance were later employed differently and that perhaps the decline from symbolic to other modes of representation is connected with this? It is obviously impossible to answer these questions by dealing only with dream-symbolism; all we can do is to hold fast to the supposition that there is a specially close relation between true symbols and sexuality.

An important clue in this connection has recently been given to us in the view expressed by a philologist (H. Sperber, of Upsala, who works independently of psycho-analysis), that sexual needs have had the largest share in the origin and development of language. He says that the first sounds uttered were a means of communication, and of summoning the sexual partner, and that in the later development the elements of speech were used as an accompaniment to the different kinds of work carried on by primitive man. This work was performed by associated efforts, to the sound of rhythmically repeated utterances, the effect of which was to transfer a sexual interest to the work. Primitive man thus made his work agreeable, so to speak, by treating it as the equivalent of and substitute for sexual activities. The word uttered during the communal work had therefore two meanings, the one referring to the sexual act, the other to the labour which had come to be equivalent to it. In time the word was dissociated from its sexual significance and its application confined to the work. Generations later the same thing happened to a new word with a sexual signification, which was then applied to a new form of work. In this way a number of root-words arose which were all of sexual origin but had all lost their sexual meaning. If the statement here outlined be correct, a possibility at least of understanding dream-symbolism opens out before us. We should comprehend why it is that in dreams, which retain something of these primitive conditions, there is such an extraordinarily large number of sexual symbols; and why weapons and tools in general stand for the male, and materials and things worked on for the female. The symbolic relation would then be the survival of the old identity in words; things which once had the same name as the genitalia could now appear in dreams as symbolizing them.

Further, our parallels to dream-symbolism may assist you to appreciate what it is in psycho-analysis which makes it a subject of general interest, in a way that was not possible to either psychology or psychiatry; psycho-analytic work is so closely intertwined with so many other branches of science, the investigation of which gives promise of the most valuable conclusions: with mythology, philology, folk-lore, folk psychology and the study of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a publication has sprung from psycho-analytic soil, of which the exclusive object is to foster these relations. I refer to _Imago_, first published in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In its relation to all these other subjects, psycho-analysis has in the first instance given rather than received. True, analysis reaps the advantage of receiving confirmation of its own results, seemingly so strange, again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis which supplies the technical methods and the points of view, the application of which is to prove fruitful in these other provinces. The mental life of the human individual yields, under psycho-analytic investigation, explanations which solve many a riddle in the life of the masses of mankind or at any rate can show these problems in their true light.

I have still given you no idea of the circumstances in which we may arrive at the deepest insight into that hypothetical “primordial language,” or of the province in which it is for the most part retained. As long as you do not know this you cannot appreciate the true significance of the whole subject. I refer to the province of neurosis; the material is found in the symptoms and other modes of expression of nervous patients, for the explanation and treatment of which psycho-analysis was indeed devised.

My fourth point of view takes us back to the place from which we started and leads into the track we have already marked out. We said that even if there were no dream-censorship we should still find it difficult to interpret dreams, for we should then be confronted with the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into the language of waking life. SYMBOLISM, then, is a second and independent factor in dream-distortion, existing side by side with the censorship. But the conclusion is obvious that it suits the censorship to make use of symbolism, in that both serve the same purpose: that of making the dream strange and incomprehensible.

Whether a further study of the dream will not introduce us to yet another contributing factor in the distortion, we shall soon see. But I must not leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching on the puzzling fact that it has succeeded in rousing such strenuous opposition amongst educated persons, although the prevalence of symbolism in myth, religion, art and language is beyond all doubt. Is it not probable that, here again, the reason is to be found in its relation to sexuality?

ELEVENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM-WORK

When you have successfully grasped the dream-censorship and symbolic representation, you will not, it is true, have mastered dream-distortion in its entirety, but you will nevertheless be in a position to understand most dreams. To do so, you will make use of the two complementary methods: you will call up the dreamer’s associations till you have penetrated from the substitute to the thought proper for which it stands, and you will supply the meaning of the symbols from your own knowledge of the subject. We will speak later of certain doubtful points which may arise in the process.

We can now return to a task which we attempted earlier with inadequate equipment, when we were studying the relations between dream-elements and the thoughts proper underlying them. We then determined the existence of four such main relations: substitution of the part for the whole, hints or allusions, symbolic connection, and plastic word-representation (images). We will now try to deal with this subject on a larger scale, by a comparison of the _manifest_ dream-content as a whole with the _latent_ dream as laid bare by our interpretation.

I hope you will never again confuse these two things. If you succeed in distinguishing between them, you will have advanced further towards an understanding of dreams than in all probability most of the readers of my _Interpretation of Dreams_ have done. Let me again remind you that _the process by which the latent dream is transformed into the manifest dream is called_ THE DREAM-WORK; while the reverse process, which seeks to progress from the manifest to the latent thoughts, is our work of interpretation; the work of interpretation therefore aims at demolishing the dream-work. In dreams of the infantile type in which the obvious wish-fulfilments are easily recognized, the process of dream-work has nevertheless been operative to some extent, for the wish has been transformed into a reality and, usually, the thoughts also into visual images. Here no interpretation is necessary; we only have to retrace both these transformations. The further operations of the dream-work, as seen in the other types of dreams, we call _dream-distortion_, and here the original ideas have to be restored by our interpretative work.

Having had the opportunity of comparing many dream-interpretations, I am in a position to give you a comprehensive account of the manner in which the dream-work deals with the material of the latent dream-thoughts. But please do not expect to understand too much: it is a piece of description which should be listened to quietly and attentively.

The first achievement of the dream-work is CONDENSATION; by this term we mean to convey the fact that the content of the manifest dream is less rich than that of the latent thoughts, is, as it were, a kind of abbreviated translation of the latter. Now and again condensation may be lacking, but it is present as a rule and is often carried to a very high degree. It never works in the opposite manner, i.e. it never happens that the manifest dream is wider in range or richer in content than is the latent dream. Condensation is accomplished in the following ways: (1) certain latent elements are altogether omitted; (2) of many complexes in the latent dream only a fragment passes over into the manifest content; (3) latent elements sharing some common characteristic are in the manifest dream put together, blended into a single whole.

If you prefer to do so, you can reserve the term ‘condensation’ for this last process, the effects of which are particularly easy to demonstrate. Taking your own dreams, you will be able without any trouble to recall instances of the condensation of different persons into a single figure. Such a composite figure resembles A. in appearance, but is dressed like B., pursues some occupation which recalls C., and yet all the time you know that it is really D. The composite picture serves, of course, to lay special emphasis upon some characteristic common to the four people. And it is possible also for a composite picture to be formed with objects or places, as with persons, provided only that the single objects or places have some common attribute upon which the latent dream lays stress. It is as though a new and fugitive concept were formed, of which the common attribute is the kernel. From the superimposing of the separate parts which undergo condensation there usually results a blurred and indistinct picture, as if several photographs had been taken on the same plate.

The formation of such composite figures must be of great importance in the dream-work, for we can prove that the common properties necessary to their formation are purposely manufactured where at first sight they would seem to be lacking, as, for example, by the choice of some particular verbal expression for a thought. We have already met with instances of condensation and composite-formation of this sort; they played an important part in originating many slips of the tongue. You will remember the case of the young man who wished to “insort” a lady (_beleidigen_ = insult, _begleiten_ = escort, composite word _begleitdigen_). Besides, there are jokes in which the technique is traceable to condensation of this sort. Apart from this, however, we may venture to assert that this process is something quite unusual and strange. It is true that in many a creation of phantasy we meet with counterparts to the formation of the composite persons of our dreams, component parts which do not belong to one another in reality being readily united into a single whole by phantasy, as, for instance, in the centaurs and fabulous animals of ancient mythology or of Boecklin’s pictures. “Creative” phantasy can, in fact, invent nothing new, but can only regroup elements from different sources. But the peculiar thing about the way in which the dream-work proceeds is this: its material consists of thoughts, some of which may be objectionable and disagreeable, but which nevertheless are correctly formed and expressed. The dream-work transmutes these thoughts into another form, and it is curious and incomprehensible that in this process of translation—of rendering them, as it were, into another script or language—the means of blending and combining are employed. The translator’s endeavour in other cases must surely be to respect the distinctions observed in the text, and especially to differentiate between things which are similar but not the same; the dream-work, on the contrary, strives to condense two different thoughts by selecting, after the manner of wit, an ambiguous word which can suggest both thoughts. We must not expect to understand this characteristic straight away, but it may assume great significance for our conception of the dream-work.

Although condensation renders the dream obscure, yet it does not give the impression of being an effect of the dream-censorship. Rather we should be inclined to trace it to mechanical or economic factors; nevertheless the censorship’s interests are served by it.

What condensation can achieve is sometimes quite extraordinary: by this device it is at times possible for two completely different latent trains of thought to be united in a single manifest dream, so that we arrive at an apparently adequate interpretation of a dream and yet overlook a second possible meaning.

Moreover, one of the effects of condensation upon the relationship between the manifest and the latent dream is that the connection between the elements of the one and of the other nowhere remains a simple one; for by a kind of interlacing a manifest element represents simultaneously several latent ones and, conversely, a latent thought may enter into several manifest elements. Again, when we come to interpret dreams, we see that the associations to a single manifest element do not commonly make their appearance in orderly succession; we often have to wait until we have the interpretation of the whole dream.

The dream-work, then, follows a very unusual mode of transcription for the dream-thoughts; not a translation, word for word, or sign for sign; nor yet a process of selection according to some definite rule, for instance, as though the consonants only of the words were reproduced and the vowels omitted; nor again what one might call a process of representation, one element being always picked out to represent several others. It works by a different and much more complicated method.

The second achievement of the dream-work is DISPLACEMENT. Fortunately here we are not breaking perfectly fresh ground; indeed, we know that it is entirely the work of the dream-censorship. Displacement takes two forms: first, a latent element may be _replaced_, not by a part of itself, but by something more remote, something of the nature of an allusion; and, secondly, the _accent_ may be transferred from an important element to another which is unimportant, so that the centre of the dream is shifted as it were, giving the dream a foreign appearance.

Substitution by allusion is familiar to us in our waking thoughts also, but with a difference; for it is essential in the latter that the allusion should be easily comprehensible, and that the content of the substitute should be associated to that of the thought proper. Allusion is also frequently employed in wit, where the condition of association in content is dispensed with and replaced by unfamiliar external associations, such as similarity of sound, ambiguity of meaning, etc. The condition of comprehensibility, however, is observed: the joke would lose all its point if we could not recognize without any effort what is the actual thing to which the allusion is made. But in dreams allusion by displacement is unrestricted by either limitation. It is connected most superficially and most remotely with the element for which it stands, and for that reason is not readily comprehensible; and, when the connection is traced, the interpretation gives the impression of an unsuccessful joke or of a “forced,” far-fetched and “dragged in” explanation. The object of the dream-censorship is only attained when it has succeeded in making it impossible to trace the thought proper back from the allusion.

Displacement of accent is not a legitimate device if our object be the expression of thought; though we do sometimes admit it in waking life in order to produce a comic effect. I can to some extent convey to you the impression of confusion which then results, by reminding you of an anecdote, according to which there was in a certain village a smith who had committed a capital offence. The court decided that the smith was guilty; but, since he was the only one of his trade in the village and therefore indispensable, whereas there were three tailors living there, one of these three was hanged in his place!

The third achievement of the dream-work is the most interesting from the psychological point of view. It consists in the transformation of thoughts into _visual images_. Let us be quite clear that not everything in the dream-thoughts is thus transformed; much keeps its original form and appears also in the manifest dream as thought or knowledge, on the part of the dreamer; again, translation of them into visual images is not the only possible transformation of thoughts. But it is nevertheless the essential feature in the formation of dreams, and, as we know, this part of the dream-work is, if we except one other case, the least subject to variation; for single dream-elements, moreover, _plastic word-representation_ is a process already familiar to us.

Obviously this achievement is by no means an easy one. In order to get some idea of its difficulty, imagine that you had undertaken to replace a political leading article in a newspaper by a series of illustrations; you would have to abandon alphabetic characters in favour of hieroglyphics. The people and concrete objects mentioned in the article could be easily represented, perhaps even more satisfactorily, in pictorial form; but you would expect to meet with difficulties when you came to the portrayal of all the abstract words and all those parts of speech which indicate relations between the various thoughts, e.g. particles, conjunctions, and so forth. With the abstract words you would employ all manner of devices: for instance, you would try to render the text of the article into other words, more unfamiliar perhaps, but made up of parts more concrete and therefore more capable of such representation. This will remind you of the fact that most abstract words were originally concrete, their original significance having faded; and therefore you will fall back on the original concrete meaning of these words wherever possible. So you will be glad that you can represent the “possessing” of an object as a literal, physical “sitting upon” it (possess = _potis_ + _sedeo_). This is just how the dream-work proceeds. In such circumstances you can hardly demand great accuracy of representation, neither will you quarrel with the dream-work for replacing an element which is difficult to reduce to pictorial form, such as the idea of breaking marriage vows, by some other kind of breaking, e.g. that of an arm or leg.[39] In this way you will to some extent succeed in overcoming the awkwardness of rendering alphabetic characters into hieroglyphs.

When you come to represent those parts of speech which indicate thought-relations, e.g. “because,” “therefore,” “but,” and so on, you have no such means as those described to assist you; so that these parts of the text must be lost, so far as your translation into pictorial form is concerned. Similarly, the content of the dream-thoughts is resolved by the dream-work into its ‘raw material,’ consisting of objects and activities. You may be satisfied if there is any possibility of indicating somehow, by a more minute elaboration of the images, certain relations which cannot be represented in themselves. In a precisely similar manner the dream-work succeeds in expressing much of the content of the latent thoughts by means of peculiarities in the _form_ of the manifest dream, by its distinctness or obscurity, its division into various parts, etc. The number of parts into which a dream is divided corresponds as a rule with the number of its main themes, the successive trains of thought in the latent dream; a short preliminary dream often stands in an introductory or causal relation to the subsequent detailed main dream; whilst a subordinate dream-thought is represented by the interpolation into the manifest dream of a change of scene, and so on. The form of dreams, then, is by no means unimportant in itself, and itself demands interpretation. Several dreams in the same night often have the same meaning, and indicate an endeavour to control more and more completely a stimulus of increasing urgency. In a single dream, a specially difficult element may be represented by “doubling” it, i.e. by more than one symbol.

If we continue the comparison of dream-thoughts with the manifest dreams representing them, we discover in all directions things we should never have expected, e.g. that even nonsense and absurdity in dreams have their meaning; in fact, at this point the contrast between the medical and the psycho-analytic view of dreams becomes more marked than ever before. According to the medical view, the dream is absurd because while dreaming our mental activity has renounced its functions; according to our view, on the other hand, the dream becomes absurd when it has to represent a criticism implicit in the latent thoughts—the opinion: “It is absurd.” The dream I told you, about the visit to the theatre (“three tickets for one florin and a half”) is a good example of this: the opinion thus expressed was as follows: “It was _absurd_ to marry so early.”

Similarly, we find out when we interpret dreams what is the real meaning of the doubts and uncertainties, so frequently mentioned by dreamers, whether a certain element did actually appear in the dream, whether it was really this and not rather something else. As a rule, there is nothing in the latent thoughts corresponding with these doubts and uncertainties; they originate wholly through the operation of the censorship and are comparable to a not entirely successful attempt at erasure.

One of our most surprising discoveries is the manner in which _opposites_ in the latent dream are dealt with by the dream-work. We know already that points of agreement in the latent material are replaced by condensation in the manifest dream. Now contraries are treated in just the same way as similarities, with a marked preference for expression by means of the _same_ manifest element. An element in the manifest dream which admits of an opposite may stand simply for itself, or for its opposite, or for both together; only the sense can decide which translation is to be chosen. It accords with this that there is no representation of a “No” in dreams, or at least none which is not ambiguous.

A welcome analogy to this strange behaviour of the dream-work is furnished in the development of language. Many philologists have maintained that in the oldest languages opposites such as: strong—weak, light—dark, large—small, were expressed by the same root word (_antithetical sense of primal words_). Thus, in old Egyptian “_ken_” stood originally for both “strong” and “weak.” In speaking, misunderstanding was guarded against in the use of such ambivalent words by the intonation and accompanying gestures; in writing, by the addition of a so-called “determinative,” that is to say, of a picture which was not meant to be expressed orally. Thus, “_ken_” = “strong” was written in such a way that after the letters there was a picture of a little man standing upright; when “_ken_” meant “weak,” there was added the picture of a man in a slack, crouching attitude. Only at a later period did the two opposite meanings of the same primal word come to be designated in two different ways by slight modifications of the original. Thus, from “_ken_” meaning “strong—weak” were derived two words: “_ken_” = “strong” and “_kan_” = “weak.” Nor is it only the oldest languages, in the last stages of their development, which have retained many survivals of these early words capable of meaning either of two opposites, but the same is true of much younger languages, even those which are to-day still living. I will quote some illustrations of this taken from the work of C. Abel (1884):

In Latin, such ambivalent words are:

_altus_ = high or deep. _sacer_ = sacred or accursed.

As examples of modifications of the original root, I quote:

_clamare_ = to shout. _clam_ = quietly, silently, secretly.
_siccus_ = dry. _succus_ = juice.

and, in German, _Stimme_ = voice. _stumm_ = dumb.

A comparison of kindred languages yields a large number of examples:

English: lock = to shut. German: _Loch_ = hole. _Lücke_ = gap.
English: cleave.[40] German: _kleben_ = to stick, adhere.

The English word “without,” originally carrying with it both a positive and a negative connotation, is to-day used in the negative sense only, but it is clear that “with” has the signification, not merely of “adding to,” but of “depriving of,” from the compounds “withdraw,” “withhold” (cf. the German _wieder_).

Yet another peculiarity of the dream-work has its counterpart in the development of language. In ancient Egyptian, as well as in other later languages, the sequence of sounds was transposed so as to result in different words for the same fundamental idea. Examples of this kind of parallels between English and German words may be quoted:

_Topf_ (pot)—pot. Boat—tub. Hurry—_Ruhe_ (rest). _Balken_
(beam)—_Kloben_ (club). wait—_täuwen_ (to wait).

Parallels between Latin and German:—

_capere_—_packen_ (to seize). _ren_—_Niere_ (kidney).

Such transpositions as have taken place here in the case of single words are made by the dream-work in a variety of ways. The inversion of the meaning, i.e. substitution by the opposite, is a device with which we are already familiar; but, besides this, we find in dreams inversion of situations or of the relations existing between two persons, as though the scene were laid in a “topsy-turvy” world. In dreams often enough the hare shoots the hunter. Again, inversion is met with in the sequence of events, so that in dreams cause follows effect, which reminds us of what sometimes happens in a third-rate theatrical performance, when first the hero falls and then the shot which kills him is fired from the wings. Or there are dreams in which the whole arrangement of the elements is inverted, so that in interpreting them the last must be taken first, and the first last, in order to make sense at all. You remember that we also found this in our study of dream-symbolism, in which the act of plunging or falling into water has the same meaning as that of emerging from water, namely, giving birth or being born, and going up steps or a ladder means the same as coming down them. We cannot fail to recognize the advantage reaped for dream-distortion by this freedom from restrictions in representing the dream-thoughts.

These features of the dream-work may be termed _archaic_. They cling to the primitive modes of expression of languages or scripts, and yield the same difficulties, which we shall touch upon later in the course of some critical observations on this topic.

Now let us consider some other aspects of the subject. Clearly what has to be accomplished by the dream-work is the transformation of the latent thoughts, as expressed in words, into perceptual forms, most commonly into visual images. Now our thoughts originated in such perceptual forms; their earliest material and the first stages in their development consisted of sense-impressions, or, more accurately, of memory-pictures of these. It was later that words were attached to these pictures and then connected so as to form thoughts. So that the dream-work subjects our thoughts to a _regressive_ process and retraces the steps in their development; in the course of this REGRESSION all new acquisitions won during this development of memory-pictures into thoughts must necessarily fall away.

This then is what we mean by the dream-work. Beside what we have learnt of its processes our interest in the manifest dream is bound to recede far into the background; I will, however, devote still a few more remarks to the manifest dream, for, after all, that is the only part of the dream with which we have any direct acquaintance.

It is natural that the manifest dream should lose some of its importance in our eyes. It must strike us as a matter of indifference whether it is carefully composed or split up into a succession of disconnected pictures. Even when the outward form of the dream is apparently full of meaning, we know that this appearance has been arrived at by the process of dream-distortion, and can have as little organic connection with the inner content of the dream as exists between the _façade_ of an Italian church and its general structure and ground-plan. At times, however, this _façade_ of the dream has a meaning too, reproducing an important part of the latent thoughts with little or no distortion. But we cannot know this until we have interpreted the dream and thus arrived at an opinion with regard to the degree of distortion present. A similar doubt obtains where two elements seem to be closely connected; such connection may contain a valuable hint that the corresponding elements in the latent dream are similarly related, but at other times we can convince ourselves that what is connected in thought has become widely separated in the dream.

In general we must refrain from attempting to explain one part of the manifest dream by another part, as though the dream were a coherent conception and a pragmatic representation. It is in most cases comparable rather to a piece of Breccia stone, composed of fragments of different kinds of stone cemented together in such a way that the markings upon it are not those of the original pieces contained in it. There is, as a matter of fact, one mechanism in the dream-work, known as SECONDARY ELABORATION, the object of which is to combine the immediate results of the work into a single and fairly coherent whole; during this process the material is often so arranged as to give rise to total misunderstanding, and for this purpose any necessary interpolations are made.

On the other hand, we should not overrate the dream-work or attribute to it more than is its due. Its activity is limited to the achievements here enumerated; condensation, displacement, plastic representation and secondary elaboration of the whole dream; these are all that it can effect. Such manifestations of judgement, criticism, surprise, or deductive reasoning, as are met with in dreams are not brought about by the dream-work and are only very rarely the expression of subsequent reflection about the dream; but are for the most part fragments of the latent thoughts introduced into the manifest dream with more or less modification and in a form suited to the context. Again, the dream-work cannot create conversation in dreams; save in a few exceptional cases, it is imitated from, and made up of, things heard or even said by the dreamer himself on the previous day, which have entered into the latent thoughts as the material or incitement of his dream. Neither do mathematical calculations come into the province of the dream-work; anything of the sort appearing in the manifest dream is generally a mere combination of numbers, a pseudo-calculation, quite absurd as such, and again only a copy of some calculation comprised in the latent thoughts. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the interest which was felt in the dream-work soon becomes directed instead towards the latent thoughts which disclose themselves in a more or less distorted form through the manifest dream. We are not justified, however, in a theoretical consideration of the subject, in letting our interest stray so far that we altogether substitute the latent thoughts for the dream as a whole, and make some pronouncement on the latter which is only true of the former. It is strange that the findings of psycho-analysis could be so misused as to result in confusion between the two. The term “dream” can only be applied to the _results of the dream-work_, i.e. to the _form_ into which the latent thoughts have been rendered by the dream-work.

This work is a process of a quite peculiar type; nothing like it has hitherto been known in mental life. This kind of condensation, displacement, and regressive translation of thoughts into images, is a novelty, the recognition of which in itself richly rewards our efforts in the field of psycho-analysis. You will again perceive, from the parallels to dream-work, the connections revealed between psycho-analytic and other research, especially in the fields of the development of speech and thought. You will only realize the further significance of the insight so acquired when you learn that the mechanism of the dream-work is a kind of model for the formation of neurotic symptoms.

I know too that it is not possible for us yet to grasp the full extent of the fresh gain accruing to psychology from these labours. We will only hint at the new proofs thereby afforded of the existence of unconscious mental activities—for this indeed is the nature of the latent dream-thoughts—and at the promise dream-interpretation gives of an approach, wider than we ever guessed at, to the knowledge of the unconscious life of the mind.

Now, however, I think the time has come to give you individual examples of various short dreams, which will illustrate the points for which I have already prepared you.

TWELFTH LECTURE
EXAMPLES OF DREAMS AND ANALYSIS OF THEM

You must not be disappointed if I present you once more with fragments of dream-interpretations, instead of inviting you to participate in the interpretation of one fine long dream. You will say that after so much preparation you surely have a right to expect that; and you will express your conviction that, after successful interpretations of so many thousands of dreams, it should long ago have been possible to collect a number of striking examples by which the truth of all our assertions about the dream-work and dream-thoughts could be demonstrated. Yes, but there are too many difficulties in the way of fulfilling this wish of yours.

In the first place, I must confess that there is nobody who makes the interpretation of dreams his main business. In what circumstances, then, do we come to interpret them? At times we may occupy ourselves, for no particular purpose, with the dreams of a friend, or we may work out our own dreams over a period of time in order to train ourselves for psycho-analytic work; but chiefly we have to do with the dreams of nervous patients who are undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. These last dreams provide splendid material and are in no respect inferior to those of healthy persons, but the technique of the treatment obliges us to subordinate dream-interpretation to therapeutic purposes and to desist from the attempt to interpret a large number of the dreams as soon as we have extracted from them something of use for the treatment. Again, many dreams which occur during the treatment elude full interpretation altogether; since they have their origin in the whole mass of material in the mind which is as yet unknown to us, it is not possible to understand them until the completion of the cure. To relate such dreams would necessarily involve revealing all the secrets of a neurosis; this will not do for us, since we have taken up the problem of dreams in preparation for the study of the neuroses.

Now I expect you would willingly dispense with this material and would prefer to listen to the explanation of dreams of healthy persons or perhaps of your own. But the content of these dreams makes that impossible. One cannot expose oneself, nor anyone whose confidence has been placed in one, so ruthlessly as a thorough interpretation of a dream would necessitate; for, as you already know, they touch upon all that is most intimate in the personality. Apart from the difficulty arising out of the nature of the material, there is another difficulty as regards relating the dreams. You are aware that the dream seems foreign and strange to the dreamer himself; how much more so to an outsider to whom his personality is unknown. The literature of psycho-analysis shows no lack of good and detailed dream-analyses; I myself have published some which formed part of the history of certain pathological cases. Perhaps the best example of a dream-interpretation is that published by O. Rank, consisting of the analysis of two mutually-related dreams of a young girl. These cover about two pages of print, while the analysis of them runs into 76 pages. It would need almost a whole term’s lectures in order to take you through a work of this magnitude. If we selected some fairly long and considerably distorted dream we should have to enter into so many explanations, to adduce so much material in the shape of associations and recollections, and to go down so many sidetracks, that a single lecture would be quite unsatisfying and would give no clear idea of it as a whole. So I must ask you to be content if I pursue a less difficult course, and relate some fragments from dreams of neurotic patients, in which this or that isolated feature may be recognized. Symbols are the easiest features to demonstrate and, after them, certain peculiarities of the regressive character of dream-representation. I will tell you why I regard each of the following dreams as worth relating.

1. A dream consisted only of two short pictures: _The dreamer’s uncle was smoking a cigarette, although it was Saturday.—A woman was fondling and caressing the dreamer as though he were her child._

With reference to the first picture, the dreamer (a Jew) remarked that his uncle was a very pious man who never had done, and never would do, anything so sinful as smoking on the Sabbath. The only association to the woman in the second picture was that of the dreamer’s mother. These two pictures or thoughts must obviously be related to one another; but in what way? Since he expressly denied that his uncle would in reality perform the action of the dream, the insertion of the conditional “if” will at once suggest itself. “If my uncle, that deeply religious man, were to smoke a cigarette on the Sabbath, then I myself might be allowed to let my mother fondle me.” Clearly, that is as much as to say that being fondled by the mother was something as strictly forbidden as smoking on the Sabbath is to the pious Jew. You will remember my telling you that in the dream-work all relations among the dream-thoughts disappear; the thoughts are broken up into their raw material, and our task in interpreting is to re-insert these connections which have been omitted.

2. My writings on the subject of dreams have placed me to some extent in the position of public consultant on the question, and for many years now I have received letters from the most diverse quarters communicating dreams to me or asking for my opinion. Naturally I am grateful to all those who have given me sufficient material with their dreams to make an interpretation possible, or have themselves volunteered one. The following dream of a medical student in Munich dating from 1910, belongs to this category; and I quote it because it may prove to you how hard it is, generally speaking, to understand a dream until the dreamer has given us what information he can about it. For I have a suspicion that in the bottom of your hearts you think that the translating of the symbols is the ideal method of interpretation and that you would like to discard that of free association; I want, therefore, to clear your minds of so pernicious an error.

July 18th, 1910. Towards morning I had the following dream: _I was bicycling down a street in Tübingen, when a brown dachshund came rushing after me and caught hold of one of my heels. I rode a little further and then dismounted, sat down on a step and began to beat the creature off, for it had set its teeth fast in my heel._ (The dog’s biting me and the whole scene roused no unpleasant sensations.) _Two elderly ladies were sitting opposite, watching me with grinning faces. Then I woke up and, as has frequently happened before, with the transition to waking consciousness the whole dream was clear to me._

In this instance symbolism cannot help us much, but the dreamer goes on to tell us: “I recently fell in love with a girl, just from seeing her in the street; but I had no means of introduction to her. I should have liked best to make her acquaintance through her dachshund, for I am a great animal-lover myself and was attracted by seeing that she was one too.” He adds that several times he had separated fighting dogs very skilfully, often to the amazement of the onlookers. Now we learn that the girl who had taken his fancy was always seen walking with this particular dog. She, however, has been eliminated from the manifest dream; only the dog associated with her has remained. Possibly the elderly ladies who grinned at him represented her, but the rest of what he tells us does not clear up this point. The fact that he was riding a bicycle in the dream was a direct repetition of the situation as he remembered it, for he had not met the girl with the dog except when he was bicycling.