Part 12

I hope you recognize how obvious is the inference that it is just the shocking nature of these passages which has led to their suppression. Now where will you find a parallel to what has taken place here? In these times you have not far to seek. Take up any political paper and you will find that here and there in the text something is omitted and in its place the blank white of the paper meets your eye: you know that this is the work of the press censor. Where these blank spaces occur, there originally stood something of which the authorities at the censorship disapproved and which has been deleted on that account. You probably think it a pity, for that must have been the most interesting part, the “cream” of the news.

On other occasions the censorship has not dealt with the sentence in its completed form; for the writer, foreseeing which passages were likely to be objected to by the censor, has forestalled him by softening them down, making some slight modification or contenting himself with hints and allusions to what he really wants to write. In this case there are no blanks, but from the roundabout and obscure mode of expression you can detect the fact that, at the time of writing, the author had the censorship in mind.

Now keeping to this parallel we say that those speeches in the dream which were omitted or disguised by a murmur have also been sacrificed to some form of censorship. We actually use the term DREAM-CENSORSHIP, and ascribe part of the distortion to its agency. Wherever there are gaps in the manifest dream we know that the censorship is responsible; and indeed we should go further and recognize that wherever, amongst other more clearly-defined elements, one appears which is fainter, more indefinite or more dubious in recollection, it is evidence of the work of the censorship. It is, however, seldom that it takes a form so undisguised, so naïve, as we might say, as it does in the case of the dream about “love service;” far more often the censorship makes itself felt in the second way I mentioned: by effecting modifications, hints, and allusions in place of the true meaning.

There is a third way in which the dream-censorship works, to which the ordinances of the Press censorship supply no parallel; but it happens that I can demonstrate to you this particular mode of activity on the part of the dream-censorship in the only dream hitherto analysed by us. You will remember the dream of the “three bad theatre tickets, costing one florin and a half.” In the latent thoughts underlying this dream, the element “too great a hurry, too early” was in the foreground; the meaning was: “It was folly to marry so early, it was foolish also to take the tickets so early, it was ridiculous of the sister-in-law to spend her money so hurriedly on a piece of jewellery.” Nothing of this central element of the dream-thoughts appeared in the manifest content, where everything was focussed on going to the theatre and taking tickets. By this displacement of the accent and regrouping of the dream-elements, the manifest content was made so unlike the latent thoughts that nobody would suspect the presence of the latter behind the former. This displacement of accent is one of the principal means employed in distortion, and it is this which gives the dream that character of strangeness which makes the dreamer himself reluctant to recognize it as the product of his own mind.

Omission, modification, regrouping of material—these then are the modes of the dream-censorship’s activity and the means employed in distortion. The censorship itself is the originator, or one of the originators, of distortion, the subject of our present enquiry. Modification and alteration in arrangement are commonly included under the term ‘displacement.’

After these remarks on the activities of the dream-censorship, let us turn our attention to its dynamics. I hope you are not taking the expression “censorship” in too anthropomorphic a sense, picturing to yourselves the censor as a stern little manikin or a spirit, who lives in a little chamber of the brain and there discharges the duties of his office; and neither must you localize it too exactly, so that you imagine a “brain-centre” whence there emanates a censorial influence, liable to cease with the injury or disappearance of that centre. For the present we may regard it merely as a useful term by which to express a dynamic relationship. This need not hinder us from asking what sort of tendencies exercise this influence and is it exercised upon; and further, we must not be surprised to discover that we have already come across the censorship, perhaps without recognizing it.

Indeed this has actually happened. Remember a surprising experience we had when we began to apply our method of free association: we discovered that our efforts to penetrate from the dream-element to the unconscious thought proper for which the former is a substitute encountered a certain resistance. The strength of this resistance, we said, varies, being sometimes enormous and at other times very slight. In the latter case we need only a few connecting-links for the work of interpretation; but where there is great resistance we are compelled to go through long chains of associations, which carry us far from the initial idea, and on the way we have to overcome all the difficulties of professedly critical objections to associations arising. That which we encountered as resistance in the work of interpretation we now meet again as the censorship in the dream-work: the resistance is simply the censorship objectified; it proves to us that the power of the censorship is not exhausted in effecting distortion, being thereby extinguished, but that the censorship remains as a permanent institution, the object of which is to maintain the distortion when once it has been achieved. Moreover, just as the strength of the resistance encountered during interpretation varies with each element, so too the degree of distortion effected by the censorship is different for each element of a whole dream. A comparison of the manifest and the latent dream shows that certain latent elements are completely eliminated, others more or less modified, and others again appear in the manifest dream-content unaltered or perhaps even intensified.

Our purpose, however, was to find out which are the tendencies exercising the censorship and upon which tendencies it is exercised. Now this question, which is fundamental for the understanding of dreams and perhaps of human life altogether, is easy to answer when we survey the series of dreams which we have succeeded in interpreting. The tendencies which exercise the censorship are those which are acknowledged by the waking judgement of the dreamer and with which he feels himself to be at one. You may be sure that when you repudiate any correctly-found interpretation of a dream of your own, you do so from the same motives as cause the censorship to be exercised and distortion effected, and make interpretation necessary. Consider the dream of our lady of fifty: her dream, although it had not been interpreted, struck her as shocking and she would have been even more outraged if Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth had told her something of its unmistakable meaning; it was just this attitude of condemnation which caused the offensive passages in the dream to be replaced by a murmur.

Those tendencies against which the dream-censorship is directed must next be described from the point of view of this inner critical standard. When we do this, we can only say that they are invariably of an objectionable nature, offensive from the ethical, æsthetic or social point of view, things about which we do not dare to think at all, or think of only with abhorrence. Above all are these censored wishes, which in dreams are expressed in a distorted fashion, manifestations of a boundless and ruthless egoism; for the dreamer’s own ego makes its appearance in every dream, and plays the principal part, even if it knows how to disguise itself completely as far as the manifest content is concerned. This sacro egoismo of dreams is certainly not unconnected with the attitude of mind essential to sleep: the withdrawal of interest from the whole outside world.

The ego which has discarded all ethical bonds feels itself at one with all the demands of the sexual impulse, those which have long been condemned by our æsthetic training and those which are contrary to all the restraints imposed by morality. The striving for pleasure—the libido, as we say,—chooses its objects unchecked by any inhibition, preferring indeed those which are forbidden: not merely the wife of another man, but, above all, the incestuous objects of choice which by common consent humanity holds sacred—the mother and the sister of men, the father and the brother of women. (Even the dream of our fifty-year-old lady is an incestuous one, the libido being unmistakably directed towards the son.) Desires which we believe alien to human nature show themselves powerful enough to give rise to dreams. Hate, too, rages unrestrainedly; wishes for revenge, and death-wishes, against those who in life are nearest and dearest—parents, brothers and sisters, husband or wife, the dreamer’s own children—are by no means uncommon. These censored wishes seem to rise up from a veritable hell; when we know their meaning, it seems to us in our waking moments as if no censorship of them could be severe enough. Dreams themselves, however, are not to blame for this evil content; you surely have not forgotten that their harmless, nay, useful, function is to protect sleep from disturbance. Depravity does not lie in the nature of dreams; in fact, you know that there are dreams which can be recognized as gratifying justifiable desires and urgent bodily needs. It is true that there is no distortion in these dreams, but then there is no need for it, they can perform their function without offending the ethical and æsthetic tendencies of the ego. Remember, too, that the degree of distortion is proportionate to two factors: on the one hand, the more shocking the wish that must be censored, the greater will be the distortion; but it is also great in proportion as the demands of the censorship are severe. Hence in a strictly brought up and prudish young girl, a rigid censorship will distort dream-excitations which we medical men would have recognized as permissible and harmless libidinous desires, and which the dreamer herself would judge in the same way ten years later.

Besides, we are still not nearly far enough advanced to allow ourselves to be outraged at the result of our work of interpretation. I think we still do not understand it properly; but first of all it is incumbent upon us to secure it against certain possible attacks. It is not at all difficult to detect weak points in it. Our interpretations were based on hypotheses which we adopted earlier: that there really is some meaning in dreams; that the idea of mental processes being unconscious for a time, which was first arrived at through hypnotic sleep, may be applied also to normal sleep; and that all associations are subject to determination. Now if, reasoning from these hypotheses, we had obtained plausible results in our dream-interpretation we should have been justified in concluding that these hypotheses were correct. But what if these discoveries are of the kind I have described? In that case, surely it seems natural to say: “These results are impossible, absurd, at the very least highly improbable, so there must have been something wrong about the hypotheses. Either the dream is after all not a mental phenomenon, or there is nothing which is unconscious in our normal condition, or there is a flaw somewhere in our technique. Is it not simpler and more satisfactory to assume this than to accept all the abominable conclusions which we profess to have deduced from our hypotheses?”

Both! it is both simpler and more satisfactory, but not on that account necessarily more correct. Let us give ourselves time: the matter is not yet ripe for judgement. First of all, we can make the case against our interpretations even stronger. The fact that our results are so unpleasant and repellent would not perhaps weigh so very heavily with us; a stronger argument is the emphatic and well-grounded repudiation by dreamers of the wish-tendencies which we try to foist upon them after interpretating their dreams. “What?” says one, “You want to prove to me from my dream that I grudge the money I have spent on my sister’s dowry and my brother’s education? But it is out of the question; I spend my whole time working for my brothers and sisters and my only interest in life is to do my duty by them, as, being the eldest, I promised our dead mother I would.” Or a woman says: “I am supposed to wish that my husband were dead? Really that is outrageous nonsense! Not only is our married life very happy, though perhaps you won’t believe that, but if he died I should lose everything I possess in the world.” Or someone else will reply: “Do you mean to suggest that I entertain sexual desires towards my sister? The thing is ludicrous; she is nothing to me; we get on badly with one another, and for years I have not exchanged a word with her.” We still might not be much impressed if these dreamers neither admitted nor denied the tendencies attributed to them; we might say that these are just the things of which they are quite unconscious. But when they detect in their own minds the exact opposite of such a wish as is interpreted to them, and when they can prove to us by their whole conduct in life that the contrary desire predominates, surely we must be nonplussed. Is it not about time now for us to discard our whole work of dream-interpretation as something which has led to a reductio ad absurdum?

No, not even now. Even this stronger argument falls to pieces when subjected to a critical attack. Assuming that unconscious tendencies do exist in mental life, the fact that the opposite tendencies predominate in conscious life goes to prove nothing. Perhaps there is room in the mind for opposite tendencies, for contradictions, existing side by side; indeed, possibly the very predominance of the one tendency conditions the unconscious nature of the opposite. So the first objections raised only amount to the statement that the results of dream-interpretation are not simple and are very disagreeable. To the first charge we may reply that, however much enamoured of simplicity you may be, you cannot thereby solve one of the problems of dreams; you have to make up your mind at the outset to accept the fact of complicated relations. And, as regards the second point, you are manifestly wrong in taking the fact that something pleases or repels yourself as the motive for a scientific judgement. What does it matter if you do find the results of dream-interpretation unpleasant, or even mortifying and repulsive? Ça n’empêche pas d’exister—as I, when a young doctor, heard my chief, Charcot, say in a similar case. We must be humble and put sympathies and antipathies honourably in the background if we would learn to know reality in this world. If a physicist could prove to you that organic life on the earth was bound to become extinct before long, would you venture to say to him also: “That cannot be so; I dislike the prospect too much.” I think you would say nothing, until another physicist came along and convicted the first of a mistake in his premises or his calculations. If you repudiate whatever is distasteful to you, you are repeating the mechanism of a dream structure rather than understanding and mastering it.

Perhaps, then, you will undertake to overlook the offensive nature of the censored dream-wishes and will fall back upon the argument that it is surely very improbable that we ought to concede so large a part in the human constitution to what is evil. But do your own experiences justify you in this statement? I will say nothing of how you may appear in your own eyes, but have you met with so much goodwill in your superiors and rivals, so much chivalry in your enemies and so little envy amongst your acquaintances, that you feel it incumbent on you to protest against the idea of the part played by egoistic baseness in human nature? Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life? Or are you ignorant of the fact that all the excesses and aberrations of which we dream at night are crimes actually committed every day by men who are wide awake? What does psycho-analysis do in this connection but confirm the old saying of Plato that the good are those who content themselves with dreaming of what others, the wicked, actually do?

And now look away from individuals to the great war still devastating Europe: think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled place-hunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty? Will you venture, even in these circumstances, to break a lance for the exclusion of evil from the mental constitution of humanity?

You will accuse me of taking a one-sided view of war, and tell me that it has also called out all that is finest and most noble in mankind, heroism, self-sacrifice, and public spirit. That is true; but do not now commit the injustice, from which psycho-analysis has so often suffered, of reproaching it that it denies one thing because it affirms another. It is no part of our intention to deny the nobility in human nature, nor have we ever done anything to disparage its value. On the contrary, I show you not only the evil wishes which are censored but also the censorship which suppresses them and makes them unrecognizable. We dwell upon the evil in human beings with the greater emphasis only because others deny it, thereby making the mental life of mankind not indeed better, but incomprehensible. If we give up the one-sided ethical valuation then, we are sure to find the truer formula for the relation of evil to good in human nature.

Here the matter rests. We need not give up the results of our work of dream-interpretation, even though we cannot fail to find them strange. Perhaps later we shall be able to come nearer to understanding them by another path. For the present let us hold fast to this: dream-distortion is due to the censorship exercised, by certain recognized tendencies of the ego, over desires of an offensive character which stir in us at night during sleep. Obviously, when we ask ourselves why it is just at night that they appear and what is the origin of these reprehensible wishes, we find that there is still much to investigate and many questions to answer.

It would, however, be wrong if we neglected to give due prominence at this point to another result of these investigations. The dream-wishes which would disturb our sleep are unknown to us; we first learn about them by dream-interpretation; they are therefore to be designated “unconscious at the moment” in the sense in which we have used the term. But we must recognize that they are also more than unconscious at the moment; for the dreamer denies them, as we have so frequently found, even after he has learnt of them through the interpretation of his dream. Here we have a repetition of the case which we first met with when interpreting the slip of the tongue “hiccough,” where the after-dinner speaker indignantly assured us that neither then nor at any time had he been conscious of any feeling of disrespect towards his chief. We ventured even then to doubt the value of this assertion and assumed instead that the speaker was permanently ignorant of the existence of this feeling within him. We meet with the same situation every time we interpret a dream in which there is a high degree of distortion, and this lends an added significance to our conception. We are now prepared to assume that there are processes and tendencies in mental life, of which we know nothing; have known nothing; have, for a very long time, perhaps even never, known anything about at all. This gives the term unconscious a fresh meaning for us: the qualification “at the moment” or “temporary” is seen to be no essential attribute, the term may also mean permanently unconscious, not merely “latent at the moment.” You see that later on we shall have to discuss this point further.

TENTH LECTURE SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

We have found out that the distortion in dreams which hinders our understanding of them is due to the activities of a censorship, directed against the unacceptable, unconscious wish-impulses. But of course we have not asserted that the censorship is the only factor responsible for the distortion, and as a matter of fact a further study of dreams leads to the discovery that there are yet other causes contributing to this effect; that is as much as to say, if the censorship were eliminated we should nevertheless be unable to understand dreams, nor would the manifest dream be identical with the latent dream-thoughts.

This other cause of the obscurity of dreams, this additional contribution to distortion, is revealed by our becoming aware of a gap in our technique. I have already admitted to you that there are occasions when persons being analysed really have no associations to single elements in their dreams. To be sure, this does not happen as often as they declare that it does; in very many instances the association may yet be elicited by perseverance; but still there remain a certain number of cases where association fails altogether or, if something is finally extorted, it is not what we need. If this happens during psycho-analytic treatment it has a certain significance which does not concern us here; but it also occurs in the course of interpretation of dreams in normal people, or when we are interpreting our own. When we are convinced in such circumstances that no amount of pressing is of any use, we finally discover that this unwelcome contingency regularly presents itself where special dream-elements are in question; and we begin to recognize the operation of some new principle, whereas at first we thought we had only come across an exceptional case in which our technique had failed.

In this way it comes about that we try to interpret these “silent” elements, and attempt to translate them by drawing upon our own resources. It cannot fail to strike us that we arrive at a satisfactory meaning in every instance in which we venture on this substitution, whereas the dream remains meaningless and disconnected as long as we do not resolve to use this method. The accumulation of many exactly similar instances then affords us the required certainty, our experiment having been tried at first with considerable diffidence.

I am presenting all this somewhat in outline, but that is surely allowable for purposes of instruction, nor is it falsified by so doing, but merely made simpler.

We arrive in this way at constant translations for a series of dream-elements, just as in popular books on dreams we find such translations for everything that occurs in dreams. You will not have forgotten that when we employ the method of free association such constant substitutions for dream-elements never make their appearance.

Now you will at once say that this mode of interpretation seems to you far more uncertain and open to criticism than even the former method of free association. But there is still something more to be said: when we have collected from actual experience a sufficient number of such constant translations, we eventually realize that we could actually have filled in these portions of the interpretation from our own knowledge, and that they really could have been understood without using the dreamer’s associations. How it is that we are bound to know their meaning is a matter which will be dealt with in the second half of our discussion.

We call a constant relation of this kind between a dream-element and its translation a symbolic one, and the dream-element itself a symbol of the unconscious dream-thought. You will remember that some time ago, when we were examining the different relations which may exist between dream-elements and the thoughts proper underlying them, I distinguished three relations: substitution of the part for the whole, allusion, and imagery. I told you then that there was a fourth possible relation, but I did not tell you what it was. This fourth relation is the symbolic, which I am now introducing; there are connected with it certain very interesting points for discussion, to which we will turn attention before setting forth our special observations on this subject. Symbolism is perhaps the most remarkable part of our theory of dreams.

First of all: since the relation between a symbol and the idea symbolized is an invariable one, the latter being as it were a translation of the former, symbolism does in some measure realize the ideal of both ancient and popular dream-interpretation, one from which we have moved very far in our technique. Symbols make it possible for us in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer, who indeed in any case can tell us nothing about the symbols. If the symbols commonly appearing in dreams are known, and also the personality of the dreamer, the conditions under which he lives, and the impressions in his mind after which his dream occurred, we are often in a position to interpret it straightaway; to translate it at sight, as it were. Such a feat flatters the vanity of the interpreter and impresses the dreamer; it is in pleasing contrast to the laborious method of questioning the latter. But do not let this lead you away: it is no part of our task to perform tricks nor is that method of interpretation which is based on a knowledge of symbolism one which can replace, or even compare with, that of free association. It is complementary to this latter, and the results it yields are only useful when applied in connection with the latter. As regards our knowledge of the dreamer’s mental situation, moreover, you must reflect that you have not only to interpret dreams of people whom you know well; that, as a rule, you know nothing of the events of the previous day which stimulated the dream; and that the associations of the person analysed are the very source from which we obtain our knowledge of what we call the mental situation.

Further, it is especially remarkable, particularly with reference to certain considerations upon which we shall touch later, that the most strenuous opposition has manifested itself again here, over this question of the existence of a symbolic relation between the dream and the unconscious. Even persons of judgement and standing, who in other respects have gone a long way with psycho-analysis, have renounced their adherence at this point. This behaviour is the more remarkable when we remember two things: first, that symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, nor exclusively characteristic of them; and, in the second place, that the use of symbolism in dreams was not one of the discoveries of psycho-analysis, although this science has certainly not been wanting in surprising discoveries. If we must ascribe priority in this field to anyone in modern times, the discoverer must be recognized in the philosopher K. A. Scherner (1861); psycho-analysis has confirmed his discovery, although modifying it in certain important respects.