Part 9

This technique is certainly very simple, nevertheless I am afraid it will provoke most strenuous opposition in you. You will say: “Another assumption, the third! And the most improbable of all! When I ask the dreamer what ideas come to him about the dream, do you mean to say that his very first association will give the desired explanation? But surely he might have no association at all, or heaven only knows what the association might be. We cannot imagine upon what grounds such an expectation is based. It really implies too much trust in Providence, and this at a point where rather more exercise of the critical faculty would better meet the case. Besides, a dream is not like a single slip of the tongue but is made up of many elements. That being so, upon which association is one to rely?”

You are right in all the unessentials. It is true that a dream differs from a slip of the tongue in the matter of its many elements as well as in other points. We must take account of that in our technique. So I suggest to you that we divide the dream up into its various elements, and examine each element separately; then we shall have re-established the analogy with a slip of the tongue. Again, you are right in saying that the dreamer when questioned on the single elements of the dream may reply that he has no ideas about them. There are cases in which we accept this answer, and later I will tell you which these are; curiously enough, they are cases about which we ourselves may have certain definite ideas. But in general, when the dreamer declares that he has no ideas, we shall contradict him, press him to answer, assure him that he must have some idea and—shall find we are right. He will produce an association, any one, it does not matter to us what it is. He will be especially ready with information which we may term historical. He will say: “That is something which happened yesterday” (as in the instance of the two “prosaic” dreams quoted above) or: “That reminds me of something which happened recently,” and in this way we shall come to notice that dreams are much more often connected with impressions of the day before than we thought at first. Finally, with the dream as his starting-point, he will recall events which happened less recently, and at last even some which lie very far back in the past.

In regard to the main issue, however, you are wrong. When you think it arbitrary to assume that the first association of the dreamer must give us just what we are looking for, or at any rate lead to it, and further, that the association is much more likely to be quite capricious and to have no connection with what we are looking for, and that it only shows my blind trust in Providence if I expect anything else—then you make a very great mistake. I have already taken the liberty of pointing out to you that there is within you a deeply-rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice, that this belief is quite unscientific, and that it must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs even mental life. I ask you to have some respect for the fact that that one association, and nothing else, occurs to the dreamer when he is questioned. Nor am I setting up one belief against another. It can be proved that the association thus given is not a matter of choice, not indeterminate, and that it is not unconnected with what we are looking for. Indeed, I have recently learnt—not that I attach too much importance to the fact—that experimental psychology itself has brought forward similar proofs.

Because of the importance of the matter I ask you to pay special attention to this. When I ask a man to say what comes to his mind about any given element in a dream, I require him to give himself up to the process of FREE ASSOCIATION which follows when he keeps in mind the original idea. This necessitates a peculiar attitude of the attention, something quite different from reflection, indeed, precluding it. Many people adopt this attitude without any difficulty, but others when they attempt to do so display an incredible inaptitude. There is a still higher degree of freedom in association which appears when I dispense with any particular stimulus-idea and perhaps only describe the kind and species of association that I want; for example, ask someone to let a proper name or a number occur to him. An association of this sort should, one would say, be even more subject to choice and unaccountable than the kind used in our technique. Nevertheless, it can be shown that in every instance it will be strictly determined by important inner attitudes of mind, which are unknown to us at the moment when they operate, just as much unknown as are the disturbing tendencies which cause errors, and those tendencies which bring about so-called “chance” actions.

I myself and many after me have repeatedly made an examination of names and numbers called up without any particular idea as a starting-point; some of these experiments have been published. The method is this: a train of associations is stirred up by the name which occurred, and these associations, as you see, are no longer quite free, but are attached just so far as the associations to the different elements of the dream are attached; this train of associations is then kept up until the thoughts arising from the impulse have been exhausted. By that time, however, you will have explained the motivation and significance of the free association with a name. The experiments yield the same result again and again; the information they give us often includes a wealth of material and necessitates going far afield into its ramifications. The associations to numbers that arise spontaneously are perhaps the most demonstrative; they follow upon one another so swiftly and make for a hidden goal with such astounding certainty that one is really quite taken aback. I will give you just one example of a name-analysis of this sort, because it happens to be one which does not involve the handling of a great mass of material.

Once, when I was treating a young man, I happened to say something on this subject and to assert that in spite of our apparent freedom of choice in such matters we cannot, in point of fact, think of any name which cannot be shown to be narrowly determined by the immediate circumstances, the idiosyncrasies, of the person experimented with and his situation at the moment. As he was inclined to be sceptical, I proposed that he should make the experiment himself then and there. I knew that he had unusually numerous relationships of all sorts with women and girls, so I told him that I thought he would have an exceptionally large number to choose from if he were to let the name of a woman occur to him. He agreed. To my surprise, or rather perhaps to his own, he did not overwhelm me with an avalanche of women’s names, but remained silent for a time, and then confessed that the only name which came into his mind at all was “Albine.” “How curious! What do you connect with this name? How many Albines do you know?” Strangely enough, he knew no one of the name of Albine, and he found no associations to the name. One might infer that the analysis had failed; but no, it was already complete, and no further association was required. The man himself was unusually fair in colouring, and whilst talking to him in analysis I had often jokingly called him an albino; moreover, we were just in the midst of tracing the feminine element in his nature. So it was he himself who was this female albino, the “woman” who interested him most at the moment.

In the same way, the tunes which suddenly come into a man’s head can be shown to be conditioned by some train of thought to which they belong, and which for some reason is occupying his mind without his knowing anything about it. It is easy to show that the connection with the tune is to be sought either in the words which belong to it or in the source from which it comes: I must, however, make this reservation, that I do not maintain this in the case of really musical people of whom I happen to have had no experience; in them the musical value of the tune may account for its suddenly emerging into consciousness. The first case is certainly much more common; I know of a young man who for some time was absolutely haunted by the tune (a charming one, I admit) of the song of Paris in Helen of Troy, until his attention was drawn in analysis to the fact that at that time an “Ida” and a “Helen” were rivals in his interest.

If then the associations which arise quite freely are determined in this way and belong to some definite context, we are surely justified in concluding that associations attached to one single stimulus-idea must be equally narrowly conditioned. Examination shows as a fact that they are not only attached in the first place to the stimulus-idea which we have provided for them, but that they are also dependent, in the second place, on circles of thoughts and interests of strong affective value (complexes, as we call them) of whose influence at the time nothing is known, that is to say, on unconscious activities.

Associations attached in this way have been made the subject of very instructive experiments, which have played a notable part in the history of psycho-analysis. Wundt’s school originated the so-called ‘association-experiment,’ in which the subject of the experiment is bidden to reply to a given ‘stimulus-word’ as quickly as possible with whatever ‘reaction-word’ occurs to him. The following points may then be noted: the interval which elapses between the sounding of the stimulus-word and of the reaction-word, the nature of the latter, and possibly any mistake which comes in when the same experiment is repeated later, and so on. The Zurich School, under the leadership of Bleuler and Jung, arrived at the explanation of the reactions to the association-experiment by asking the person experimented upon to throw light upon any associations which seemed at all remarkable, by means of subsequent associations. In this way it became clear that these unusual reactions were most strictly determined by the complexes of the person concerned. By this discovery Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge between experimental psychology and psycho-analysis.

Having heard this you may possibly say: “We admit now that free associations are subject to determination and not a matter of choice, as we thought at first, and we admit this also in the case of associations to the elements of dreams. But it is not this that we are bothering about. You maintain that the association to each element in the dream is determined by some mental background to this particular element, a background of which we know nothing. We cannot see that there is any proof of this. Naturally we expect that the association to the dream-element will be shown to be conditioned by one of the complexes of the dreamer, but what good is that to us? That does not help us to understand the dream; it merely leads to some knowledge of these so-called complexes, as did the association-experiment; but what have these to do with the dream?”

You are right, but you are overlooking an important point, the very thing which deterred me from choosing the association-experiment as a starting-point for this discussion. In this experiment the stimulus-word, the single thing which determines the reaction, is chosen by us at will, and the reaction stands as intermediary between this stimulus-word and the complex aroused in the person experimented upon. In the dream, the stimulus-word is replaced by something derived from the mental life of the dreamer, from sources unknown to him, and hence may very probably be itself a ‘derivative of a complex.’ It is not, therefore, altogether fantastic to suppose that the further associations connected with the elements of the dream are determined by no other complex than that which has produced the particular element itself, and that they will lead to the discovery of that complex.

Let me give you another instance which may serve to show that, in the case of dreams, the facts bear out our expectations. The forgetting of proper names is really an excellent prototype of what happens in dream-analysis, only that in the former case one person alone is concerned, while in the interpretation of dreams there are two. When I forget a name temporarily, I am still certain that I know it, and by way of a détour through Bernheim’s experiment, we are now in a position to achieve a similar certainty in the case of the dreamer. Now this name which I have forgotten, and yet really know, eludes me. Experience soon teaches me that no amount of thinking about it, even with effort, is any use. I can, however, always think of another or of several other names instead of the forgotten one. When such a substitute name occurs to me spontaneously, only then is the similarity between this situation and that of dream-analysis evident. The dream-element also is not what I am really looking for; it is only a substitute for something else, for the real thing which I do not know and am trying to discover by means of dream-analysis. Again the difference is that when I forget a name I know perfectly well that the substitute is not the right one, whereas we only arrived at this conception of the dream-element by a laborious process of investigation. Now there also is a way in which, when we forget a name, we can by starting from the substitute, arrive at the real thing eluding our consciousness at the moment, i.e. the forgotten name. If I turn my attention to these substitute names and let further associations to them come into my mind, I arrive after a short or a long way round at the name I have forgotten, and in so doing I discover that the substitutes I have spontaneously produced had a definite connection with, and were determined by, the forgotten name.

I will give you an instance of an analysis of this sort: one day I found that I could not call to mind the name of the small country on the Riviera, of which Monte Carlo is the capital. It was most annoying, but so it was. I delved into all my knowledge about the country; I thought of Prince Albert of the House of Lusignan, of his marriages, of his passion for deep-sea exploration—in fact of everything I could summon up, but all to no purpose. So I gave up trying to think and, instead of the name I had lost, let substitute names come into my mind. They came quickly: Monte Carlo itself, then Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Albania was the first to attract my attention; it was immediately replaced by Montenegro, probably because of the contrast between black and white. Then I noticed that four of the substitute names have the same syllable “mon,” and immediately I recalled the forgotten word and cried out “Monaco.” You see the substitutes really originated in the forgotten name; the four first came from the first syllable and the last gave the sequence of the syllables and the whole of the final syllable. Incidentally, I could quite easily find out what had made me forget the name for the time being. Monaco is the Italian name for Munich, and it was some thoughts connected with this town which had acted as an inhibition.

Now that is a very pretty example, but it is too simple. In other cases you might have to take a longer succession of associations to the substitute name, and then the analogy to dream-analysis would be clearer. I have had experiences of that sort, too. A stranger once invited me to drink some Italian wine with him, and in the inn he found he had forgotten the name of the wine which he had meant to order on account of his very pleasant recollections of it. A number of dissimilar substitute names occurred to him, and from these I was able to infer that the thought of someone called Hedwig had made him forget the name of the wine. Sure enough, not only did he tell me that there had been a Hedwig with him on the occasion when he first tasted the wine, but this discovery brought back to him the name he wanted. He was now happily married, and “Hedwig” belonged to earlier days which he did not care to recall.

What is possible in the case of forgotten names must be also possible in the interpretation of dreams: starting from the substitute, we must be able to arrive at the real object of our search by means of a train of associations; and further, arguing from what happens with forgotten names, we may assume that the associations to the dream-element will have been determined not only by that element but also by the real thought which is not in consciousness. If we could do this, we should have gone some way towards justifying our technique.

SEVENTH LECTURE MANIFEST CONTENT AND LATENT THOUGHTS

You see that our study of errors has not been fruitless. Thanks to our exertions in that direction, we have—reasoning from the hypotheses with which you are familiar—secured two results: a conception of the nature of the dream-element and a technique of dream-interpretation. The conception of the dream-element is as follows: it is not in itself a primary and essential thing, a ‘thought proper,’ but a substitute for something else unknown to the person concerned, just as is the underlying intention of the error, a substitute for something the knowledge of which is indeed possessed by the dreamer but is inaccessible to him. We hope to be able to carry over the same conception on to the dream as a whole, which consists of a number of such elements. Our method is to allow other substitute-ideas, from which we are able to divine that which lies hidden, to emerge into consciousness by means of free association to the said elements.

I am now going to propose that we introduce an alteration in our nomenclature in order to make our terminology more flexible. Instead of using the words “hidden,” “inaccessible,” or “proper,” let us give a more precise description and say “inaccessible to the consciousness of the dreamer” or “unconscious.” By that we mean nothing more than was implied in the case of the forgotten word, or the underlying intention responsible for the error; that is to say, unconscious at the moment. It follows that in contradistinction we may call the dream-elements themselves, and those substitute-ideas arrived at by the process of association, conscious. No theoretical implication is so far contained in these terms; no exception can be taken to the use of the word “unconscious” as a description at once applicable and easy to understand.

Now, transferring our conception from the single element to the dream as a whole, it follows that the latter is the distorted substitute for something else, something unconscious, and that the task of dream-interpretation is to discover these unconscious thoughts. Hence are derived three important rules which should be observed in the work of dream-interpretation:

1. We are not to trouble about the surface meaning of the dream, whether it be reasonable or absurd, clear or confused; in no case does it constitute the unconscious thoughts we are seeking. (An obvious limitation of this rule will force itself upon us later.)

2. We are to confine our work to calling up substitute-ideas for every element and not to ponder over them and try to see whether they contain something which fits in, nor to trouble ourselves about how far they are taking us from the dream-element.

3. We must wait until the hidden unconscious thoughts which we are seeking appear of their own accord, just as in the case of the missing word “Monaco” in the experiment which I described.

Now we understand also how entirely indifferent it is whether we remember much or little of our dreams, above all whether we remember them accurately or not. The dream as remembered is not the real thing at all, but a distorted substitute which, by calling up other substitute-ideas, provides us with a means of approaching the thought proper, of bringing into consciousness the unconscious thoughts underlying the dream. If our recollection was at fault, all that has happened is that a further distortion of the substitute has taken place, and this distortion itself cannot be without motivation.

We can interpret our own dreams as well as those of others; indeed, we learn more from our own and the process carries more conviction. Now if we experiment in this direction, we notice that something is working against us. Associations come, it is true, but we do not admit them all; we are moved to criticize and to select. We say to ourselves of one association: “No, that does not fit in—it is irrelevant,” and of another: “That is too absurd,” and of a third: “That is quite beside the point”; and then we can observe further that in making such objections we stifle, and in the end actually banish, the associations before they have become quite clear. So on the one hand we tend to hold too closely to the initial idea, that is, the dream-element itself, and on the other, by allowing ourselves to select, we vitiate the results of the process of free association. If we are not attempting the interpretation by ourselves, but are allowing someone else to interpret, we shall clearly perceive another motive impelling us to this selection, forbidden as we know it to be. We find ourselves thinking at times: “No, this association is too unpleasant; I cannot, or will not, tell it to him.”

Clearly these objections threaten to spoil the success of our work. We must guard against them when we are interpreting our own dreams by resolving firmly not to yield to them, and, in interpreting those of someone else, by laying down the hard and fast rule that he must not withhold any association, even if one of the four objections I have named rises up against it, namely, that it is too unimportant, too absurd, too irrelevant or too unpleasant to speak of. He promises to keep this rule, and we may well feel annoyed when we find how badly he fulfils his promise later on. At first we account for this by imagining that in spite of our authoritative assurance he is not convinced that the process of free association will be justified by its results; and perhaps our next idea will be to win him over first to our theory, by giving him books to read or sending him to lectures so that he may be converted to our views on the subject. But we shall be saved from any such false steps by observing that the same critical objections against certain associations arise even in ourselves, whom we surely cannot suspect of doubt, and can only subsequently, on second thoughts as it were, be overcome.

Instead of being annoyed at the dreamer’s disobedience, we can turn this experience to good account as a means of learning something new, something which is the more important the more unprepared we were for it. We realize that the work of dream-interpretation is encountering opposition by a resistance which expresses itself in this very form of critical objections. This resistance is independent of the theoretical conviction of the dreamer. We learn even more than this. Experience shows that a critical objection of this nature is never justified. On the contrary, the associations which people wish to suppress in this way prove without exception to be the most important, to be decisive for the discovery of the unconscious thought. When an association is accompanied by an objection of this sort it positively calls for special notice.

This resistance is something entirely new; a phenomenon which we have found by following out our hypotheses, although it was not included in them. We are not altogether agreeably surprised by this new factor which we have to reckon with, for we suspect already that it will not make our work any easier: it might almost tempt us to give up the effort with dreams altogether. To take such a trivial subject and then to have so much trouble, instead of spinning along smoothly with our technique! But we might on the other hand find these difficulties fascinating and be led to suspect that the work will be worth the trouble. Resistances invariably confront us when we try to penetrate to the hidden unconscious thought from the substitute offered by the dream-element. We may suppose, therefore, that something very significant must be concealed behind the substitute; for, if not, why should we meet with such difficulties, the purpose of which is to keep up the concealment? When a child will not open his clenched fist to show what is in it, we may be quite certain that it is something which he ought not to have.

As soon as we introduce into our subject the dynamic conception of resistance, we must bear in mind that this factor is something quantitatively variable. There are greater and lesser resistances, and we are prepared to find these differences showing themselves in the course of our work. Perhaps we can connect with this another experience also met with in the process of dream-interpretation. I mean that sometimes only a few associations—perhaps not more than one—suffice to lead us from the dream-element to the unconscious thought behind it, whilst on other occasions long chains of associations are necessary and many critical objections have to be overcome. We shall probably think that the number of associations necessary varies with the varying strength of the resistances, and very likely we shall be right. If there is only a slight resistance, the substitute is not far removed from the unconscious thought; a strong resistance on the other hand causes great distortions of the latter, and thereby entails a long journey back from the substitute to the unconscious thought itself.