Chapter IV

The theories of resistance and of repression, of the unconscious, of the ætiological significance of sexual life and of the importance of infantile experiences—these form the principal constituents of the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis. In these pages, unfortunately, I have been able to describe only the separate elements and not their inter-connections and their bearing upon one another. But I am obliged now to turn to the alterations which gradually took place in the technique of the analytic method.

The means which I first adopted for overcoming the patient’s resistance, by pressing and encouraging him, had been indispensable for the purpose of giving me a first general survey of what was to be expected. But in the long run it proved to be too much of a strain upon both sides and, further, it seemed open to certain obvious criticisms. It therefore gave place to another method which was in one sense its opposite. Instead of urging the patient to say something upon some particular subject, I now asked him to abandon himself to a process of _free association_, i. e. to say whatever came into his head, while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts. It was essential, however, that he should bind himself to report literally everything that occurred to his self-perception and not to give way to critical objections which sought to put certain associations on one side on the ground that they were not sufficiently important or that they were irrelevant or that they were altogether meaningless. There was no necessity to repeat explicitly the insistence upon the need for candor on the patient’s part in reporting his thoughts, for it was the precondition of the whole analytic treatment.

It may seem surprising that this method of free association, carried out subject to the observation of _the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis_, should have achieved what was expected of it, namely the bringing into consciousness of the repressed material which was held back by resistances. We must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free. The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation even though he is not directing his mental activities onto a particular subject. We shall be justified in assuming that nothing will occur to him that has not some reference to that situation. His resistance against reproducing the repressed material will now be expressed in two ways. Firstly, it will be shown by critical objections; and it was to deal with these that the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis was invented. But if the patient observes that rule and so overcomes his reticences, the resistance will find another means of expression. It will so arrange it that the repressed material itself will never occur to the patient but only something which approximates to it in an allusive way; and the greater the resistance, the more remote will be the substitutive association which the patient has to report from the actual idea that the analyst is in search of. The analyst, who listens composedly, but without any constrained effort, to the stream of associations and who, from his experience, has a general notion of what to expect can make use of the material brought to light by the patient according to two possibilities. If the resistance is slight, he will be able, from the patient’s allusions, to infer the unconscious material itself; or if the resistance is stronger, he will be able to recognize from the associations, as they seem to become more remote from the subject, the character of the resistance itself and will explain it to the patient. Uncovering the resistance, however, is the first step towards overcoming it. Thus the work of analysis involves an _art of interpretation_, the successful handling of which may require tact and practice, but which is not hard to acquire. But it is not only in the saving of labour that the method of free association has an advantage over the earlier method. It exposes the patient to the least possible amount of compulsion, it never allows of contact being lost with the actual current situation, it guarantees to a great extent that no factor in the structure of the neurosis will be overlooked and that nothing will be introduced into it by the expectations of the analyst. It is left to the patient in all essentials to determine the course of the analysis and the arrangement of the material; any systematic handling of particular symptoms or complexes thus becomes impossible. In complete contrast to what happened with hypnosis and with the urging method, inter-related material makes its appearance at different times and at different points in the treatment. To a spectator, therefore—though, in fact, there can be none—an analytic treatment would seem completely obscure.

Another advantage of the method is that it need never break down. It must theoretically always be possible to have an association, provided that no conditions are made as to its character. Yet there is one case in which, in fact, a break down occurs with absolute regularity; from its very uniqueness, however, this case, too can be interpreted.

I now come to the description of a factor which adds an essential feature to my picture of analysis and which can claim alike technically and theoretically, to be regarded as of the first importance. In every analytic treatment, there arises, without the physician’s agency, an intense emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst which is not to be accounted for by the actual situation. It can be of a positive or of a negative character, and can vary between the extremes of a passionate, completely sensual love and the unbridled expression of an embittered defiance and hatred. This _transference_—to give it its shortened name—soon replaces, in the patient’s mind, the desire to be cured, and, so long as it is affectionate and moderate becomes the agent of the physician’s influence and neither more nor less than the main-spring of the joint work of analysis. Later on, when it has become passionate or has been converted into hostility, it becomes the principal tool of the resistance. It may then happen that it will paralyse the patient’s powers of associating and endanger the success of the treatment. Yet it would be senseless to try to evade it; for an analysis without transference is an impossibility. It must not be supposed, however, that the transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. The transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence and, in fact, dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. We can easily recognize it as the same dynamic factor that the hypnotists have named “suggestibility,” which is the agent of hypnotic _rapport_ and the incalculable behavior of which led to such difficulties with the cathartic method. When there is no inclination to a transference of emotion such as this, or when it has become entirely negative, as happens in dementia præcox or paranoia, then there is also no possibility of influencing the patient by psychological means.

It is perfectly true that psychoanalysis, like other psycho-therapeutic methods, employs the instrument of suggestion (or transference). But the difference is this: that in analysis it is not allowed to play the decisive part in determining the therapeutic results. It is used instead to induce the patient to perform a piece of mental work—the overcoming of his transference-resistances—which involves a permanent alteration in his mental economy. The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst, and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference-attitude he is _re-experiencing_ emotional relations which had their origin in his earliest object-relationships during the repressed period of his childhood. In this way the transference is changed from the strongest weapon of the resistance into the best instrument of the analytic treatment. Nevertheless, its handling remains the most difficult as well as the most important part of the technique of analysis.

With the help of the method of free association and of the closely related art of interpretation, psychoanalysis succeeded in achieving something which appeared to be of no practical importance but which, in fact, necessarily led to a fresh attitude and a fresh scale of values in scientific thought. It became possible to prove that dreams have a meaning and to discover it. In classical antiquity great importance was attached to dreams as foretelling the future; but modern science would have nothing to do with them, it handed them over to superstition, declaring them to be purely “somatic” processes—a kind of spasm occurring in a mind that is otherwise asleep. It seemed quite inconceivable that anyone who had done serious scientific work could make his appearance as an “interpreter of dreams.” But by disregarding the excommunication pronounced upon dreams, by treating them as unexplained neurotic symptoms, as delusional or obsessional ideas, by neglecting their apparent content and by making their separate component images into subjects for free association, a different conclusion was reached. The numerous associations produced by the dreamer led to the discovery of a mental structure which could no longer be described as absurd or confused, which was on an equality with any other product of the mind, and of which the _manifest_ dream was no more than a distorted, abbreviated and misunderstood translation and usually a translation into visual images. These _latent dream-thoughts_ contained the meaning of the dream, while its manifest content was simply a make-believe, a façade, which could serve as a starting-point for the associations but not for the interpretation.

There were now a whole series of questions to be answered, among the most important of them being whether there was a motive for the formation of dreams, under what conditions it took place, by what methods the dream-thoughts (which are invariably full of sense) became converted into the dream (which is often senseless), and others besides. I attempted to solve all of these problems in _The Interpretation of Dreams_,[11] which I published in the year 1900. I can only find space here for the briefest abstract of my investigation. When the latent dream-thoughts that are revealed by the analysis of a dream are examined, one of them is found to stand out from among the rest, which are intelligible and well known to the dreamer. These latter thoughts are residues of waking life (the _day’s residues_, as they are called technically); but the isolated thought is found to be an impulse in the form of a wish, often of a very repellent kind, which is foreign to the waking life of the dreamer and is consequently disavowed by him with surprise or indignation. This impulse is the actual constructor of the dream: it provides the energy for its production and makes use of the day’s residues as material; the dream which thus originates represents a situation in which the impulse is satisfied, it is the fulfilment of the wish which the impulse contains. It would not be possible for this process to take place without being favored by the presence of something in the nature of a state of sleep. The necessary mental precondition of sleep is the concentration of the ego upon the wish to sleep and the withdrawal of psychical energy from all the interests of life; since at the same time all the paths of approach to motility are blocked, the ego is also able to reduce the expenditure of energy by which at other times it maintains the repressions. The unconscious impulse makes use of this nocturnal relaxation of repression in order to push its way into consciousness with the dream. But the repressive resistance of the ego is not abolished in sleep, but merely reduced. Some of it remains in the shape of a _censorship of dreams_ and forbids the unconscious impulse to express itself in the forms which it would properly assume. In consequence of the severity of the censorship of dreams, the latent dream-thoughts are obliged to submit to being altered and softened so as to make the forbidden meaning of the dream unrecognizable. This is the explanation of _dream-distortion_, which accounts for the most striking characteristic of the manifest dream. We are therefore justified in asserting that _a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed) wish_. It will now be seen that dreams are constructed like neurotic symptoms: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego. Since they have a similar origin they are equally unintelligible and stand in equal need of interpretation.

There is no difficulty in discovering the general function of dreaming. It serves the purpose of warding off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal stimuli which would tend to arouse the sleeper, and thus of securing sleep against interruption. External stimuli are warded off by being given a new interpretation and by being woven into some harmless situation; internal stimuli, caused by the pressure of instincts, are given free play by the sleeper and allowed to find satisfaction in the formation of dreams, so long as the latent dream-thoughts submit to the control of the censorship. But if they threaten to break free and the meaning of the dream becomes too plain, the sleeper cuts short the dream and awakens in terror. (Dreams of this class are known as _anxiety-dreams_). A similar failure in the function of dreaming occurs if an external stimulus becomes too strong to be warded off. (This is the class of _awakening-dreams_). I have given the name of _dream-work_ to the process which, with the co-operation of the censorship, converts the latent thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. It consists in a peculiar way of treating the preconscious material of thought, so that its component parts become _condensed_, its mental emphasis becomes _displaced_, and the whole of it is translated into visual images or _dramatized_, and filled out by a deceptive secondary elaboration. The dream-work is an excellent example of the processes occurring in the deeper, unconscious layers of the mind, which differ considerably from the familiar normal processes of thought. It also displays a number of archaic characteristics, such as the use of a _symbolism_ (in this case of a predominantly sexual kind) which it has since also been possible to discover in other spheres of mental activity.

We have explained that the unconscious impulse which causes the dream connects itself with part of the day’s residues, with some unexhausted interest of waking life; this lends the dream which is thus brought into being a double value for the work of analysis. It is true that, on the one hand, a dream that has been analysed reveals itself as the fulfilment of a repressed wish; but, on the other hand, it will be a continuation of some preconscious activity of the day before and will contain subject-matter of some kind or other, giving expression, for instance, to a determination, a warning, a reflection or once more to the fulfilment of a wish. Analysis exploits the dream in both directions as a means of obtaining knowledge alike of the patient’s conscious and of his unconscious processes. It also profits from the fact that dreams have access to the forgotten material of childhood, and so it happens that infantile amnesia is for the most part overcome in connection with the interpretation of dreams. In this respect dreams achieve a part of what was previously the task of hypnosis. On the other hand, I have never maintained the assertion which has so often been ascribed to me, that dream-interpretation shows that all dreams have a sexual content or are derived from sexual motive forces. It is easy to see that hunger, thirst, or the need to excrete, can produce dreams of satisfaction just as well as any repressed sexual or egoistic impulse. The case of young children affords us a convenient test of the validity of our theory of dreams. In them the various psychical systems are not yet sharply divided and the repressions have not yet grown deep, so that we often come upon dreams which are nothing more than undisguised fulfilments of impulses left over from waking life. Under the influence of imperative needs, adults may also produce dreams of this infantile type.

In the same way that psychoanalysis makes use of dream-interpretation, it also profits by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make—symptomatic actions, as they are called. I investigated this subject in a series of papers which were published for the first time in book-form in 1904 under the title of _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_.[12] In this widely circulated work I have pointed out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them the presence of restrained or repressed impulses and intentions. But what constitutes the enormous importance of dream-interpretation, as well as of this latter study, is not the assistance they give to the work of analysis but another of their qualities. Previously psychoanalysis had only been concerned with solving pathological phenomena and in order to explain them it had often been driven into making assumptions whose comprehensiveness was out of all proportion to the importance of the actual material under consideration. But when it came to dreams, it was no longer dealing with a pathological symptom, but with a phenomenon of normal mental life which might occur in any healthy person. If dreams turned out to be constructed like symptoms, if their explanation required the same assumptions—the repression of impulses, substitute-formation, compromise-formation, the dividing of the conscious and the unconscious into various psychical systems—then psychoanalysis was no longer a subsidiary science in the field of psycho-pathology, it was rather the foundation for a new and deeper science of the mind which would be equally indispensable for the understanding of the normal. Its postulates and findings could be carried over to other regions of mental happening; a path lay open to it that led far afield, into spheres of universal interest.