Part 18

This knowledge has a bearing on another of the problems which up to the present have proved insoluble. You will remember the astonishment caused by our discovery that dreams have their origin in actively evil or in excessive sexual desires, which have made both the dream-censorship and dream-distortion necessary. Supposing now that we have interpreted a dream of this sort, and the circumstances are specially favourable in that the dreamer does not quarrel with the interpretation itself, he does nevertheless invariably ask how any such wish could come into his mind, since it seems quite foreign to him and he is conscious of desiring the exact opposite. We need have no hesitation in pointing out to him the origin of the wish he repudiates: these evil impulses may be traced to the past, often indeed to a past which is not so very far away. It may be demonstrated that he once knew and was conscious of them, even if this is no longer so. A woman who had a dream meaning that she wished to see her only daughter (then seventeen years old) lying dead found, with our help, that at one time she actually had cherished this death-wish. The child was the offspring of an unhappy marriage, which ended in the speedy separation of husband and wife. Once when the child was as yet unborn the mother, in an access of rage after a violent scene with her husband, beat her body with her clenched fists in order to kill the baby in her womb. How many mothers who to-day love their children tenderly, perhaps with excessive tenderness, yet conceived them unwillingly and wished that the life within them might not develop further; and have indeed turned this wish into various actions, fortunately of a harmless kind. The later death-wish against beloved persons, which appears so puzzling, thus dates from the early days of the relationship to them.

A father, whose dream when interpreted shows that he wished for the death of his eldest and favourite child, is in the same way obliged to recall that there was a time when this wish was not unknown to him. The man, whose marriage had proved a disappointment, often thought when the child was still an infant that if the little creature who meant nothing to him were to die he would again be free and would make better use of his freedom. A large number of similar impulses of hate are to be traced to a similar source; they are recollections of something belonging to the past, something which was once in consciousness and played its part in mental life. From this you will be inclined to draw the conclusion that such dreams and such wishes would not occur in cases where there have been no changes of this sort in the relations between two persons, that is to say, where the relation has been of the same character from the beginning. I am prepared to grant you this conclusion, only I must warn you that you have to consider, not the literal meaning of the dream, but what it signifies on interpretation. It may be that the manifest dream of the death of some beloved person was only using this as a terrible mask, whilst really meaning something totally different, or it is possible that the beloved person is an illusory substitute for someone else.

This situation will, however, raise in you another and much more serious question. You will say: “Even though this death-wish did at one time actually exist and this is confirmed by recollection, that is still no true explanation; for the desire has long since been overcome and surely at the present time can exist in the unconscious merely as a recollection, of no affective value, and not as a powerful exciting agent. For this later assumption we have no evidence. Why is the wish recollected at all in dreams?” This is a question which you are really justified in asking; the attempt to answer it would take us far afield and would oblige us to define our position with regard to one of the most important points in the theory of dreams. But I must keep within the limits of our discussion and must forbear to follow up this question; so you must be reconciled to leaving it for the present. Let us content ourselves with the actual evidence that this wish, long since subdued, can be proved to have given rise to the dream, and let us continue our enquiry whether other evil wishes also can be traced in the same way to the past.

Let us keep to the death-wishes, which we shall certainly find mostly derived from the unbounded egoism of the dreamer. Wishes of this sort are very often found to be the underlying agents of dreams. Whenever anyone gets in our way in life—and how often must this happen when our relations to one another are so complicated!—a dream is immediately prepared to make away with that person, even if it be father, mother, brother or sister, husband or wife. It appeared to us amazing that such wickedness should be innate in humanity, and certainly we were not inclined to admit without further evidence that this result of our interpretation of dreams was correct. But, when once we had seen that the origin of wishes of this sort must be looked for in the past, we had little difficulty in finding the period in the past of the individual in which there is nothing strange in such egoism and such wishes, even when directed against the nearest and dearest. A child in his earliest years (which later are veiled in oblivion) is just the person who frequently displays such egoism in boldest relief; invariably, unmistakable tendencies of this kind, or, more accurately, surviving traces of them, are plainly visible in him. For a child loves himself first and only later learns to love others and to sacrifice something of his own ego to them. Even the people whom he seems to love from the outset are loved in the first instance because he needs them and cannot do without them—again therefore, from motives of egoism. Only later does the impulse of love detach itself from egoism: it is a literal fact that the child learns how to love through his own egoism.

In this connection it will be instructive to compare a child’s attitude towards his brothers and sisters with his attitude towards his parents. The little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, and often he is quite frank about it. It is unquestionable that in them he sees and hates his rivals, and it is well known how commonly this attitude persists without interruption for many years, till the child reaches maturity and even later. Of course it often gives place to a more tender feeling, or perhaps we should say it is overlaid by this, but the hostile attitude seems very generally to be the earlier. We can most easily observe it in children of two and a half to four years old when a new baby arrives, which generally meets with a very unfriendly reception; remarks such as “I don’t like it. The stork is to take it away again” are very common. Subsequently every opportunity is seized to disparage the new-comer; attempts are even made to injure it and actual attacks upon it are by no means unheard-of. If the difference in age is less, by the time the child’s mental activity is more fully developed the rival is already in existence and he adapts himself to the situation; if on the other hand there is a greater difference between their ages, the new baby may rouse certain kindly feelings from the first, as an object of interest, a sort of living doll; and when there is as much as eight years or more between them, especially if the elder child is a girl, protective, motherly impulses may at once come into play. But, speaking honestly, when we find a wish for the death of a brother or a sister latent in a dream we need seldom be puzzled, for we find its origin in early childhood without much trouble, or indeed, quite often in the later years when they still lived together.

There is probably no nursery without violent conflicts between the inhabitants, actuated by rivalry for the love of the parents, competition for possessions shared by them all, even for the actual space in the room they occupy. Such hostility is directed against older as well as younger brothers and sisters. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said: “If there is anyone whom a young English lady hates more than her mother it is her elder sister.” Now there is something in this dictum which jars upon us; it is hard enough to bring ourselves to understand hatred and rivalry between brothers and sisters, but how can feelings of hate force themselves into the relation between mother and daughter, parents and children?

This relationship is no doubt a more favourable one, also from the children’s point of view; and this too is what our expectations require: we find it far more offensive for love to be lacking between parents and children than between brothers and sisters. We have, so to speak, sanctified the former love while allowing the latter to remain profane. Yet everyday observation may show us how frequently the sentiments entertained towards each other by parents and grown-up children fall short of the ideal set up by society, and how much hostility lies smouldering, ready to burst into flame if it were not stifled by considerations of filial or parental duty and by other, tender impulses. The motives for this hostility are well known, and we recognize a tendency for those of the same sex to become alienated, daughter from mother and father from son. The daughter sees in her mother the authority which imposes limits to her will, whose task it is to bring her to that renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in certain cases, too, the mother is still a rival, who objects to being set aside. The same thing is repeated still more blatantly between father and son. To the son the father is the embodiment of the social compulsion to which he so unwillingly submits, the person who stands in the way of his following his own will, of his early sexual pleasures and, when there is family property, of his enjoyment of it. When a throne is involved this impatience for the death of the father may approach tragic intensity. The relation between father and daughter or mother and son would seem less liable to disaster; the latter relation furnishes the purest examples of unchanging tenderness, undisturbed by any egoistic considerations.

Why, you ask, do I speak of things so banal and so well-known to everybody? Because there exists an unmistakable tendency in people’s minds to deny the significance of these things in real life and to pretend that the social ideal is much more frequently realized than it actually is. But it is better that psychology should tell the truth than that it should be left to cynics to do so. This general denial is only applied to real life, it is true; for fiction and drama are free to make use of the motives laid bare when these ideals are rudely disturbed.

There is nothing to wonder at therefore if the dreams of a great number of people bring to light the wish for the removal of their parents, especially of the parent whose sex is the same as the dreamer’s. We may assume that the wish exists in waking life as well, sometimes even in consciousness if it can disguise itself behind another motive, as the dreamer in our third example disguised his real thought by pity for his father’s useless suffering. It is but rarely that hostility reigns alone,—far more often it yields to more tender feelings which finally suppress it, when it has to wait in abeyance till a dream shows it, as it were, in isolation. That which the dream shows in a form magnified by this very isolation resumes its true proportions when our interpretation has assigned to it its proper place in relation to the rest of the dreamer’s life. (H. Sachs.) But we also find this death-wish where there is no basis for it in real life and where the adult would never have to confess to entertaining it in his waking life. The reason for this is that the deepest and most common motive for estrangement, especially between parent and child of the same sex, came into play in the earliest years of childhood.

I refer to that rivalry of affections in which sexual elements are plainly emphasized. The son, when quite a little child, already begins to develop a peculiar tenderness towards his mother, whom he looks upon as his own property, regarding his father in the light of a rival who disputes this sole possession of his; similarly the little daughter sees in her mother someone who disturbs her tender relation to her father and occupies a place which she feels she herself could very well fill. Observation shows us how far back these sentiments date, sentiments which we describe by the term Oedipus complex, because in the Oedipus myth the two extreme forms of the wishes arising from the situation of the son—the wish to kill the father and to marry the mother—are realized in an only slightly modified form. I do not assert that the Oedipus complex exhausts all the possible relations which may exist between parents and children; these relations may well be a great deal more complicated. Again, this complex may be more or less strongly developed, or it may even become inverted, but it is a regular and very important factor in the mental life of the child; we are more in danger of underestimating than of overestimating its influence and that of the developments which may follow from it. Moreover, the parents themselves frequently stimulate the children to react with an Oedipus complex, for parents are often guided in their preferences by the difference in sex of their children, so that the father favours the daughter and the mother the son; or else, where conjugal love has grown cold, the child may be taken as a substitute for the love-object which has ceased to attract.

It cannot be said that the world has shown great gratitude to psycho-analytic research for the discovery of the Oedipus complex; on the contrary, the idea has excited the most violent opposition in grown-up people; and those who omitted to join in denying the existence of sentiments so universally reprehended and tabooed have later made up for this by proffering interpretations so wide of the mark as to rob the complex of its value. My own unchanged conviction is that there is nothing in it to deny or to gloss over. We ought to reconcile ourselves to facts in which the Greek myth itself saw the hand of inexorable destiny. Again, it is interesting to find that the Oedipus complex, repudiated in actual life and relegated to fiction, has there come to its own. O. Rank in a careful study of this theme has shown how this very complex has supplied dramatic poetry with an abundance of motives in countless variations, modifications and disguises, in short, subject to just the distortion familiar to us in the work of the dream-censorship. So we may look for the Oedipus complex even in those dreamers who have been fortunate enough to escape conflicts with their parents in later life; and closely connected with this we shall find what is termed the castration complex, the reaction to that intimidation in the field of sex or to that restraint of early infantile sexual activity which is ascribed to the father.

What we have already ascertained has guided us to the study of the child’s mental life, and we may now hope to find in a similar way an explanation of the source of the other kind of prohibited wishes in dreams, i.e. the excessive sexual desires. We are impelled therefore to study the development of the sexual life of the child, and here from various sources we learn the following facts. In the first place, it is an untenable fallacy to suppose that the child has no sexual life and to assume that sexuality first makes its appearance at puberty, when the genital organs come to maturity. On the contrary he has from the very beginning a sexual life rich in content, though it differs in many points from that which later is regarded as normal. What in adult life are termed “perversions” depart from the normal in the following respects: (1) in a disregard for the barriers of species (the gulf between man and beast), (2) in the insensibility to barriers imposed by disgust, (3) in the transgression of the incest-barrier (the prohibition against seeking sexual gratification with close blood-relations), (4) in homosexuality and, (5) in the transferring of the part played by the genital organs to other organs and different areas of the body. All these barriers are not in existence from the outset, but are only gradually built up in the course of development and education. The little child is free from them: he does not perceive any immense gulf between man and beast, the arrogance with which man separates himself from the other animals only dawns in him at a later period. He shows at the beginning of life no disgust for excrement, but only learns this feeling slowly under the influence of education; he attaches no particular importance to the difference between the sexes, in fact he thinks that both have the same formation of the genital organs; he directs his earliest sexual desires and his curiosity to those nearest to him or to those who for other reasons are specially beloved—his parents, brothers and sisters or nurses; and finally we see in him a characteristic which manifests itself again later at the height of some love-relationship—namely, he does not look for gratification in the sexual organs only, but discovers that many other parts of the body possess the same sort of sensibility and can yield analogous pleasurable sensations, playing thereby the part of genital organs. The child may be said then to be polymorphously perverse, and even if mere traces of all these impulses are found in him, this is due on the one hand to their lesser intensity as compared with that which they assume in later life and, on the other hand, to the fact that education immediately and energetically suppresses all sexual manifestations in the child. This suppression may be said to be embodied in a theory; for grown-up people endeavour to overlook some of these manifestations, and, by misinterpretation, to rob others of their sexual nature, until in the end the whole thing can be altogether denied. It is often the same people who first inveigh against the sexual “naughtiness” of children in the nursery and then sit down to their writing-tables to defend the sexual purity of the same children. When they are left to themselves or when they are seduced children often display perverse sexual activity to a really remarkable extent. Of course grown-up people are right in not taking this too seriously and in regarding it, as they say, as “childish tricks” and “play,” for the child cannot be judged either by a moral or legal code as if he were mature and fully responsible; nevertheless these things do exist, and they have their significance both as evidence of innate constitutional tendencies and inasmuch as they cause and foster later developments: they give us an insight into the child’s sexual life and so into that of humanity as a whole. If then we find all these perverse wishes behind the distortions of our dreams, it only means that dreams in this respect also have regressed completely to the infantile condition.

Amongst these forbidden wishes special prominence must still be given to the incestuous desires, i.e. those directed towards sexual intercourse with parents or brothers and sisters. You know in what abhorrence human society holds, or at least professes to hold, such intercourse, and what emphasis is laid upon the prohibitions of it. The most preposterous attempts have been made to account for this horror of incest: some people have assumed that it is a provision of nature for the preservation of the species, manifesting itself in the mind by these prohibitions because in-breeding would result in racial degeneration; others have asserted that propinquity from early childhood has deflected sexual desire from the persons concerned. In both these cases, however, the avoidance of incest would have been automatically secured and we should be at a loss to understand the necessity for stern prohibitions, which would seem rather to point to a strong desire. Psycho-analytic investigations have shown beyond the possibility of doubt that an incestuous love-choice is in fact the first and the regular one, and that it is only later that any opposition is manifested towards it, the causes of which are not to be sought in the psychology of the individual.

Let us sum up the results which our excursion into child-psychology has brought to the understanding of dreams. We have learnt not only that the material of the forgotten childish experiences is accessible to the dream, but also that the child’s mental life, with all its peculiarities, its egoism, its incestuous object-choice, persists in it and therefore in the unconscious, and that our dreams take us back every night to this infantile stage. This corroborates the belief that the Unconscious is the infantile mental life, and, with this, the objectionable impression that so much evil lurks in human nature grows somewhat less. For this terrible evil is simply what is original, primitive and infantile in mental life, what we find in operation in the child, but in part overlook in him because it is on so small a scale, and in part do not take greatly to heart because we do not demand a high ethical standard in a child. By regressing to this infantile stage our dreams appear to have brought the evil in us to light, but the appearance is deceptive, though we have let ourselves be dismayed by it; we are not so evil as the interpretation of our dreams would lead us to suppose.

If the evil impulses of our dreams are merely infantile, a reversion to the beginnings of our ethical development, the dream simply making us children again in thought and feeling, it is surely not reasonable to be ashamed of these evil dreams. But the reasoning faculty is only part of our mental life; there is much in it besides which is not reasonable, and so it happens that, although it is unreasonable, we nevertheless are ashamed of such dreams. We subject them to the dream-censorship and are ashamed and indignant when one of these wishes by way of exception penetrates our consciousness in a form so undisguised that we cannot fail to recognize it; yes, we even at times feel just as much ashamed of a distorted dream as if we really understood it. Just think of the outraged comment of the respectable elderly lady upon her dream about “love service,” although it was not interpreted to her. So the problem is not yet solved, and it is still possible that if we pursue this question of the evil in dreams we may arrive at another conclusion and another estimate of human nature.

Our whole enquiry has led to two results which, however, merely indicate the beginning of new problems and new doubts. In the first place: the regression in dreams is one not only of form but of substance. Not only does it translate our thoughts into a primitive form of expression, but it also re-awakens the peculiarities of our primitive mental life—the old supremacy of the ego, the initial impulses of our sexual life, even restores to us our old intellectual possession if we may conceive of symbolism in this way. And secondly: all these old infantile characteristics, which were once dominant and solely dominant, must to-day be accounted to the unconscious and must alter and extend our views about it. “Unconscious” is no longer a term for what is temporarily latent: the unconscious is a special realm, with its own desires and modes of expression and peculiar mental mechanisms not elsewhere operative. Yet the latent dream-thoughts disclosed by our interpretation do not belong to this realm; rather they correspond to the kind of thoughts we have in waking life also. And yet they are unconscious: how is the paradox to be resolved? We begin to realize that here we must discriminate. Something which has its origin in our conscious life and shares its characteristics—we call it the “residue” from the previous day—meets together with something from the realm of the unconscious in the formation of a dream, and it is with these two contributing elements that the dream-work is accomplished. The influence of the unconscious impinging upon this residue probably constitutes the condition for regression. This is the deepest insight into the nature of dreams possible to us until we have explored further fields in the mind; but soon it will be time to give another name to the unconscious character of the latent dream-thoughts, in order to distinguish it from that unconscious material which has its origin in the province of the infantile.

We can of course also ask: What is it that forces our mental activity during sleep to such regression? Why cannot the mental stimuli that disturb sleep be dealt with without it? And if on account of the dream-censorship the mental activity has to disguise itself in the old, and now incomprehensible, form of expression, what is the object of re-animating the old impulses, desires and characteristics, now surmounted; what, in short, is the use of regression in substance as well as in form? The only satisfactory answer would be that this is the one possible way in which dreams can be formed, that, dynamically considered, the relief from the stimulus giving rise to the dream cannot otherwise be accomplished. But this is an answer for which, at present, we have no justification.

FOURTEENTH LECTURE WISH-FULFILMENT

Shall I remind you once more of the steps by which we have arrived at our present position? When in applying our technique we came upon the distortion in dreams, we made up our minds to avoid it for the moment and turned to the study of infantile dreams for some definite information about the nature of dreams in general. Next, equipped with the results of this investigation, we attacked the question of dream-distortion directly, and I hope that bit by bit we have also mastered that. Now, however, we are bound to admit that our findings in these two directions do not exactly tally, and it behoves us to combine and correlate our results.

Both enquiries have made it plain that the essential feature in the dream-work is the transformation of thoughts into hallucinatory experience. It is puzzling enough to see how this process is accomplished, but this is a problem for general psychology, and we have not to deal with it here. We have learnt from children’s dreams that the object of the dream-work is to remove, by means of the fulfilment of some wish, a mental stimulus which is disturbing sleep. We could make no similar pronouncement with regard to distorted dreams until we understood how to interpret them, but from the outset we expected to be able to bring our ideas about them into line with our views on infantile dreams. This expectation was for the first time fulfilled when we recognized that all dreams are really children’s dreams; that they make use of infantile material and are characterized by impulses and mechanisms which belong to the childish mind. When we feel we have mastered the distortion in dreams we must go on to find out whether the notion that dreams are WISH-FULFILMENTS holds good of distorted dreams also.

We have just subjected a series of dreams to interpretation, but without taking the question of wish-fulfilment into consideration at all. I feel certain that while we were talking about them the question repeatedly forced itself upon you: “What has become of the wish-fulfilment which is supposed to be the object of the dream-work?” Now this question is important, for it is the one which our lay critics are constantly asking. As you know, mankind has an instinctive antipathy to intellectual novelties; one of the ways in which this shows itself is that any such novelty is immediately reduced to its very smallest compass, and if possible embodied in some catch-word. “Wish-fulfilment” has become the catch-word for the new theory of dreams. Directly they hear that dreams are said to be wish-fulfilments, the laity asks: “Where does the wish-fulfilment come in?” and their asking the question amounts to a repudiation of the idea. They can immediately think of countless dreams of their own which were accompanied by feeling so unpleasant as sometimes to reach the point of agonizing dread; and so this statement of the psycho-analytical theory of dreams appears to them highly improbable. It is easy to reply that in distorted dreams the wish-fulfilment is not openly expressed, but has to be looked for, so that it cannot be shown until the dreams have been interpreted. We know too that the wishes underlying these distorted dreams are those which are prohibited and rejected by the censorship, and that it is just their existence which is the cause of distortion and the motive for the intervention of the censorship. But it is difficult to make the lay critic understand that we must not ask about the wish-fulfilment in a dream before it has been interpreted; he always forgets this. His reluctance to accept the theory of wish-fulfilment is really nothing but the effect of the dream-censorship, causing him to replace the real thought by a substitute, and following from his repudiation of these censored dream-wishes.

Of course we ourselves must feel the need to explain why so many dreams are painful in content; and in particular we shall want to know how we come to have ‘anxiety-dreams.’ Here for the first time we are confronted with the problem of the affects in dreams; a problem which deserves special study, but one which we cannot concern ourselves with just now, unfortunately. If the dream is a wish-fulfilment, it should be impossible for any painful emotions to come into it: on this point the lay critics seem to be right. But the matter is complicated by three considerations which they have overlooked.

First, it may happen that the dream-work is not wholly successful in creating a wish-fulfilment, so that part of the painful feeling in the latent thoughts is carried over into the manifest dream. Analysis would then have to show that these thoughts were a great deal more painful than the dream which is formed from them; this much can be proved in every instance. We admit then that the dream-work has failed in its purpose, just as a dream of drinking excited by the stimulus of thirst fails to quench that thirst. One is still thirsty after it and has to wake up and drink. Nevertheless, it is a proper dream: it has renounced nothing of its essential nature. We must say: “Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.” The clearly recognizable intention remains a praiseworthy one, at any rate. Such instances of failure in the work are by no means rare, and one reason is that it is so much more difficult for the dream-work to produce the required change in the nature of the affect than to modify the content; affects are often very intractable. So it happens that in the process of the dream-work the painful content of the dream-thoughts is transformed into a wish-fulfilment while the painful affect persists unchanged. When this occurs the affect is quite out of harmony with the content, which gives our critics the opportunity of remarking that the dream is so far from being a wish-fulfilment that even a harmless content may be accompanied in it by painful feelings. Our answer to this rather unintelligent comment will be that it is just in dreams of this sort that the wish-fulfilling tendency of the dream-work is most apparent, because it is there seen in isolation. The mistake in this criticism arises because people who are not familiar with the neuroses imagine a more intimate connection between content and affect than actually exists, and so cannot understand that there may be an alteration in the content while the accompanying affect remains unchanged.

A second consideration, much more important and far-reaching but equally overlooked by the laity, is the following. A wish-fulfilment must certainly bring some pleasure; but we go on to ask: “To whom?” Of course to the person who has the wish. But we know that the attitude of the dreamer towards his wishes is a peculiar one: he rejects them, censors them, in short, he will have none of them. Their fulfilment then can afford him no pleasure, rather the opposite, and here experience shows that this “opposite,” which has still to be explained, takes the form of anxiety. The dreamer, where his wishes are concerned, is like two separate people closely linked together by some important thing in common. Instead of enlarging upon this I will remind you of a well-known fairy-tale in which you will see these relationships repeated. A good fairy promised a poor man and his wife to fulfil their first three wishes. They were delighted and made up their minds to choose the wishes carefully. But the woman was tempted by the smell of some sausages being cooked in the next cottage and wished for two like them. Lo! and behold, there they were—and the first wish was fulfilled. With that, the man lost his temper and in his resentment wished that the sausages might hang on the tip of his wife’s nose. This also came to pass, and the sausages could not be removed from their position; so the second wish was fulfilled, but it was the man’s wish and its fulfilment was most unpleasant for the woman. You know the rest of the story: as they were after all man and wife, the third wish had to be that the sausages should come off the end of the woman’s nose. We might make use of this fairy-tale many times over in other contexts, but here it need only serve to illustrate the fact that it is possible for the fulfilment of one person’s wish to be very disagreeable to someone else, unless the two people are entirely at one.

It will not be difficult now to arrive at a still better understanding of anxiety-dreams. There is just one more observation to be made use of and then we may adopt an hypothesis which is supported by several considerations. The observation is that anxiety-dreams often have a content in which there is no distortion; it has, so to speak, escaped the censorship. This type of dream is frequently an undisguised wish-fulfilment, the wish being of course not one which the dreamer would accept but one which he has rejected; anxiety has developed in place of the working of the censorship. Whereas the infantile dream is an open fulfilment of a wish admitted by the dreamer, and the ordinary distorted dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, the formula for the anxiety-dream is that it is the open fulfilment of a repressed wish. Anxiety is an indication that the repressed wish has proved too strong for the censorship and has accomplished or was about to accomplish its fulfilment in spite of it. We can understand that fulfilment of a repressed wish can only be, for us who are on the side of the censorship, an occasion for painful emotions and for setting up a defence. The anxiety then manifested in our dreams is, if you like to put it so, anxiety experienced because of the strength of wishes which at other times we manage to stifle. The study of dreams alone does not reveal to us why this defence takes the form of anxiety; obviously we must consider the latter in other connections.

The hypothesis which holds good for anxiety-dreams without any distortion may be adopted also for those which have undergone some degree of distortion, and for other kinds of unpleasant dreams in which the accompanying unpleasant feelings probably approximate to anxiety. Anxiety-dreams generally wake us; we usually break off our sleep before the repressed wish behind the dream overcomes the censorship and reaches complete fulfilment. In such a case the dream has failed to achieve its purpose, but its essential character is not thereby altered. We have compared the dream with a night-watchman, a guardian of sleep, whose purpose it is to protect sleep from interruption. Now night-watchmen also, just like dreams, have to rouse sleepers when they are not strong enough to ward off the cause of disturbance or danger alone. Nevertheless we do sometimes succeed in continuing to sleep even when our dreams begin to give us some uneasiness and to turn to anxiety. We say to ourselves in sleep: “It is only a dream after all,” and go on sleeping.

You may ask when it happens that the dream-wish is able to overcome the censorship. This may depend either on the wish or on the censorship: it may be that for unknown reasons the strength of the wish at times becomes excessive; but our impression is that it is more often the attitude of the censorship which is responsible for this shifting in the balance of power. We have already heard that the censorship works with varying intensity in each individual instance, treating the different elements with different degrees of strictness; now we may add that it is very variable in its general behaviour and does not show itself always equally severe towards the same element. If then it chances that the censorship feels itself for once powerless against some dream-wish which threatens to overthrow it, it then, instead of making use of distortion, employs the last weapon left to it and destroys sleep by bringing about an access of anxiety.

At this point it strikes us that we still have no idea why these evil, rejected wishes rise up just at night-time, so as to disturb us when we sleep. The answer can hardly be found except in another hypothesis which goes back to the nature of sleep itself. During the day the heavy pressure of a censorship is exercised upon these wishes and, as a rule, it is impossible for them to make themselves felt at all. But in the night it is probable that this censorship, like all the other interests of mental life, is suspended, or at least very much weakened, in favour of the single desire for sleep. So it is due to this partial abrogation of the censorship at night that the forbidden wishes can again become active. There are nervous people suffering from insomnia who confess that their sleeplessness was voluntary in the first instance; for they did not dare to go to sleep because they were afraid of their dreams—that is to say, they feared the consequences of the diminished vigilance of the censorship. You will have no difficulty in understanding that this curtailment of the censorship does not argue any flagrant carelessness: sleep impairs our motor functions; even if our evil intentions do begin to stir within us the utmost they can do is to produce a dream, which is for all practical purposes harmless; and it is this comforting circumstance which gives rise to the sleeper’s remark, made, it is true, in the night but yet not part of his dream-life: “It is only a dream.” So we let it have its way and continue to sleep.