VII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES

AMONG the dreams which have been communicated to me by
others there is one which is at this point especially worthy of
our attention. It was told me by a female patient who had
heard it related in a lecture on dreams. Its original source is
unknown to me. This dream evidently made a deep impression
upon the lady, since she went so far as to imitate it, ie. to
repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own; in
order, by this transference, to express her agreement with a
certain point in the dream.

The preliminary conditions of this typical dream were as
follows: A father had been watching day and night beside the
sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in
an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look
from his room into the next, where the child’s body lay
surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed
as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After
sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was
standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father,
don’t you see that I am burning?” The father woke up and noticed
a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he
found that the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and
one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle.

The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and
the explanation given by the lecturer, as my patient reported
it, was correct. The bright light shining through the open door
on to the sleeper’s eyes gave him the impression which he
would have received had he been awake: namely, that a fire
had been started near the corpse by a falling candle. It is quite
possible that he had taken into his sleep his anxiety lest the
aged watcher should not be equal to his task.

We can find nothing to change in this interpretation; we
can only add that the content of the dream must be over-
determined, and that the speech of the child must have
consisted of phrases which it had uttered while still alive, and
which were associated with important events for the father.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 471

Perhaps the complaint, “I am burning,” was associated with
the fever from which the child died, and “Father, don’t you
see?” to some other affective occurrence unknown to us.

Now, when we have come to recognize that the dream has
meaning, and can be fitted into the context of psychic events,
it may be surprising that a dream should have occurred in
circumstances which called for such an immediate waking.
We shall then note that even this dream is not lacking in a
wish-fufilment. The dead child behaves as though alive; he
warns his father himself; he comes to his father’s bed and
clasps his arm, as he probably did in the recollection from
which the dream obtained the first part of the child’s speech.
It was for the sake of this wish-fulfilment that the father slept
a moment longer. The dream was given precedence over waking
reflection because it was able to show the child still living. If
the father had waked first, and had then drawn the conclusion
which led him into the adjoining room, he would have
shortened the child’s life by this one moment.

There can be no doubt about the peculiar features in this
brief dream which engage our particular interest. So far, we
have endeavoured mainly to ascertain wherein the secret
meaning of the dream consists, how it is to be discovered, and
what means the dream-work uses to conceal it. In other words,
our greatest interest has hitherto been centred on the problems
of interpretation. Now, however, we encounter a dream which
is easily explained, and the meaning of which is without
disguise; we note that nevertheless this dream preserves the
essential characteristics which conspicuously differentiate a
dream from our waking thoughts, and this difference demands
an explanation. It is only when we have disposed of all the
problems of interpretation that we feel how incomplete is our
psychology of dreams.

But before we turn our attention to this new path of
investigation let us stop, and look back, and consider whether
we have not overlooked something important on our way
hither. For we must understand that the easy and comfortable
part of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto all the paths that
we have followed have led, if I mistake not, to light, to
explanation, and to full understanding ; but from the moment
when we seek to penetrate more deeply into the psychic

472 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

processes in dreaming, all paths lead into darkness. It is quite
impossible to explain the dream as a psychic process, for to
explain means to trace back to the known, and as yet we have
no psychological knowledge to which we can refer such
explanatory fundamentals as may be inferred from the psycho-
logical investigation of dreams. On the contrary, we shall be
compelled to advance a number of new assumptions, which do
little more than conjecture the structure of the psychic
apparatus and the play of the energies active in it; and we shall
have to be careful not to go too far beyond the simplest logical
construction, since otherwise its value will be doubtful. And
even if we should be unerring in our inferences, and take
cognizance of all the logical possibilities, we should still be in
danger of arriving at a completely mistaken result, owing to
the probable incompleteness of the preliminary statement of
our elementary data. We shall not be able to arrive at any
conclusions as to the structure and function of the psychic
instrument from even the most careful investigation of dreams,
or of any other isolated activity; or, at all events, we shall not
be able to confirm our conclusions. To do this we shall have
to collate such phenomena as the comparative study of a whole
series of psychic activities proves to be reliably constant. So
that the psychological assumptions which we base on the
analysis of the dream-processes will have to mark time, as it
were, until they can join up with the results of other
investigations which, proceeding from another starting-point,
will seek to penetrate to the heart of the same problem.

A
THE FORGETTING OF DREAMS

I propose, then, that we shall first of all turn our attention to
a subject which brings us to a hitherto disregarded objection,
which threatens to undermine the very foundation of our
efforts at dream-interpretation. The objection has been made
from more than one quarter that the dream which we wish to
interpret is really unknown to us, or, to be more precise, that

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 473

we have no guarantee that we know it as it really occurred
(cf. p. 60).

What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our
methods of interpretation, is, in the first place, mutilated by
the unfaithfulness of our memory, which seems quite peculiarly
incapable of retaining dreams, and which may have omitted
precisely the most significant parts of their content. For when
we try to consider our dreams attentively, we often have reason
to complain that we have dreamed much more than we
remember; that unfortunately we know nothing more than
this one fragment, and that our recollection of even this
fragment seems to us strangely uncertain. Moreover, everything
goes to prove that our memory reproduces the dream not only
incompletely but also untruthfully, in a falsifying manner. As,
on the one hand, we may doubt whether what we dreamed
was really as disconnected as it is in our recollections, so on
the other hand we may doubt whether a dream was really as
coherent as our account of it; whether in our attempted
reproduction we have not filled in the gaps which really existed,
or those which are due to forgetfulness, with new and
arbitrarily chosen material; whether we have not embellished
the dream, rounded it off and corrected it, so that any con-
clusion as to its real content becomes impossible. Indeed, one
writer (Spitta)r surmises that all that is orderly and coherent
is really first put into the dream during the attempt to recall
it. Thus we are in danger of being deprived of the very object
whose value we have undertaken to determine.

In all our dream-interpretations we have hitherto ignored
these warnings. On the contrary, indeed, we have found that
the smallest, most insignificant, and most uncertain components
of the dream-content invited interpretation no less emphatic-
ally than those which were distinctly and certainly contained
in the dream. In the dream of Irma's injection we read:
“I quickly called in Dr. M,” and we assumed that even this
small addendum would not have got into the dream if it had
not been susceptible of a special derivation. In this way we
arrived at the history of that unfortunate patient to whose
bedside I "quickly” called my older colleague. In the seemingly
absurd dream which treated the difference between fifty-one

* Similar views are expressed by Foucault and Tannery.

474 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

and fifty-six as a quantité négligeable the number fifty-one was
mentioned repeatedly. Instead of regarding this as a matter
of course, or a detail of indifferent value, we proceeded from
this to a second train of thought in the latent dream-content,
which led to the number fifty-one, and by following up this
clue we arrived at the fears which proposed fifty-one years as
the term of life in the sharpest opposition to a dominant train
of thought which was boastfully lavish of the years. In the
dream “Won vixit" I found, as an insignificant interpolation,
that I had at first overlooked the sentence: “As P. does not
understand him, FI. asks me," etc. The interpretation then
coming to a standstill, I went back to these words, and I found
through them the way to the infantile phantasy which appeared
in the dream-thoughts as an intermediate point of junction.
This came about by means of the poet's verses :—

“Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Kof uns fanden
So verstanden wir uns gleich!”

“(Seldom have you understood me,
Seldom have I understood you,
But when we found ourselves in the mire,
We at once understood each other !)”

Every analysis will afford evidence of the fact that the most
insignificant features of the dream arc indispensable to inter-
pretation, and will show how the completion of the task is
‚ delayed if we postpone our examination of them. We have
given equal attention, in the interpretation of dreams, to every
nuance of verbal expression found in them; indeed, whenever
we were confronted by a senseless or insufficient wording, as
though we had failed to translate the dream into the proper
version, we have respected even these defects of expression.
In brief, what other writers have regarded as arbitrary
improvisations, concocted hastily to avoid confusion, we have
treated like a sacred text. This contradiction calls for
explanation.
It would appear, without doing any injustice to the writers
in question, that the explanation is in our favour. From the
standpoint of our newly-acquired insight into the origin of

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 475

dreams, all contradictions are completely reconciled. It is true
that we distort the dream in our attempt to reproduce it; we
once more find therein what we have called the secondary and
often misunderstanding elaboration of the dream by the agency
of normal thinking. But this distortion is itself no more than
a part of the elaboration to which the dream-thoughts are
constantly subjected as a result of the dream-censorship. Other
writers have here suspected or observed that part of the
dream-distortion whose work is manifest; but for us this is of
little consequence, as we know that a far more extensive work
of distortion, not so easily apprehended, has already taken the
dream for its object from among the hidden dream-thoughts.
The only mistake of these writers consists in believing the
modification effected in the dream by its recollection and
verbal expression to be arbitrary, incapable of further solution,
and consequently liable to lead us astray in our cognition of
the dream. They underestimate the determination of the dream
in the psyche. Here there is nothing arbitrary. It can be shown
that in all cases a second train of thought immediately takes
over the determination of the elements which have been left
undetermined by the first. For example, I wish quite arbitrarily
to think of a number; but this is not possible; the number
that occurs to me is definitely and necessarily determined by
thoughts within me which may be quite foreign to my
momentary purpose. The modifications which the dream
undergoes in its revision by the waking mind are just as little
arbitrary. They preserve an associative connection with the
content, whose place they take, and serve to show us the way
to this content, which may itself be a substitute for yet another
content.

In analysing the dreams of patients I impose the following
test of this assertion, and never without success. If the first
report of a dream seems not very comprehensible, I request
the dreamer to repeat it. This he rarely does in the same words.
But the passages in which the expression is modified are thereby
made known to me as the weak points of the dream’s disguise ;
they are what the embroidered emblem on Siegfried’s raiment
was to Hagen. These are the points from which the analysis

1 Of. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Translated by A. A, Brill (Ernest Benn,
Ltd., London, and The Macmillan Co., New York).

476 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

may start. The narrator has been admonished by my announce-
ment that I intend to take special pains to solve the dream,
and immediately, obedient to the urge of resistance, he protects
the weak points of the dream’s disguise, replacing a treacherous
expression by a less relevant one. He thus calls my attention
to the expressions which he has discarded. From the efforts
made to guard against the solution of the dream, I can also
draw conclusions about the care with which the raiment of
the dream has been woven.

The writers whom I have mentioned are, however, less
justified when they attribute so much importance to the doubt
with which our judgment approaches the relation of the
dream. For this doubt is not intellectually warranted; our
memory can give no guarantees, but nevertheless we are
compelled to credit its statements far more frequently than is
objectively justifiable. Doubt concerning the accurate repro-
duction of the dream, or of individual data of the dream, is
only another offshoot of the dream-censorship, that is, of
resistance to the emergence of the dream-thoughts into
consciousness. This resistance has not yet exhausted itself by
the displacements and substitutions which it has effected, so
that it still clings, in the form of doubt, to what has been
allowed to emerge. We can recognize this doubt all the more
readily in that it is careful never to attack the intensive elements
of the dream, but only the weak and indistinct ones. But we
already know that a transvaluation of all the psychic values
has taken place between the dream-thoughts and the dream.
The distortion has been made possible only by devaluation;
it constantly manifests itself in this way and sometimes contents
itself therewith. If doubt is added to the indistinctness of an
element of the dream-content, we may, following this indica-
tion, recognize in this element a direct offshoot of one of the
outlawed dream-thoughts. The state of affairs is like that
obtaining after a great revolution in one of the republics of
antiquity or the Renaissance. The once powerful, ruling
families of the nobility are now banished; all high posts
are filled by upstarts; in the city itself only the poorer and
most powerless citizens, or the remoter followers of the
vanquished party, are tolerated. Even the latter do not enjoy
the full rights of citizenship. They are watched with suspicion.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 477

In our case, instead of suspicion we have doubt. I must insist,
therefore, that in the analysis of a dream one must emancipate
oneself from the whole scale of standards of reliability ; and if
there is the slightest possibility that this or that may have
occurred in the dream, it should be treated as an absolute
certainty. Until one has decided to reject all respect for
appearances in tracing the dream-elements, the analysis will
remain at a standstill. Disregard of the element concerned has
the psychic effect, in the person analysed, that nothing in
connection with the unwished ideas behind this element will
occur to him. This effect is really not self-evident; it would be
quite reasonable to say, “Whether this or that was contained
in the dream I do not know for certain ; but the following ideas
happen to occur to me.” But no one ever does say so; it is
precisely the disturbing effect of doubt in the analysis that
permits it to be unmasked as an offshoot and instrument of
the psychic resistance. Psychoanalysis is justifiably suspicious.
One of its rules runs: Whatever disturbs the progress of the
work is a resistance.

The forgetting of dreams, too, remains inexplicable until we
seek to explain it by the power of the psychic censorship.
The feeling that one has dreamed a great deal during the night
and has retained only a little of it may have yet another
meaning in a number of cases: it may perhaps mean that the
dream-work has continued in a perceptible manner throughout
the night, but has left behind it only one brief dream. There
is, however, no possible doubt that a dream is progressively
forgotten on waking. One often forgets it in spite of a painful
effort to recover it. I believe, however, that just as one generally
overestimates the extent of this forgetting, so also one over-
estimates the lacunae in our knowledge of the dream due to

+ This peremptory statement: “Whatever disturbs the progress of the work is a
resistance” might easily be misunderstood. It has, of course, the significance
merely of a technical rule, a warning for the analyst. It is not denied that during
an analysis events may occur which cannot be ascribed to the intention of the
person analysed. The patient’s father may die in other ways than by being mur-
dered by the patient, or a war may break out and interrupt the analysis. But
despite the obvious exaggeration of the above statement there is still something
new and useful in it. Even if the disturbing event is real and independent of the
patient, the extent of the disturbing influence does often depend only on him,
and the resistance reveals itself unmistakably in the ready and immoderate
exploitation of such an opportunity.

478 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the gaps occurring in it. All the dream-content that has been
lost by forgetting can often be recovered by analysis; in a
number of cases, at all events, it is possible to discover from a
single remaining fragment, not the dream, of course—which,
after all, is of no importance—but the whole of the dream-
thoughts. It requires a greater expenditure of attention and
self-suppression in the analysis; that is all; but it shows that
the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention."

A convincing proof of the tendencious nature of dream-
forgetting—of the fact that it serves the resistance—is obtained
on analysis by investigating a preliminary stage of forgetting.
It often happens that in the midst of an interpretation an
omitted fragment of the dream suddenly emerges which is
described as having been previously forgotten. This part of the
dream that has been wrested from forgetfulness is always the

1 As an example of the significance of doubt and uncertainty in a dream with a
simultaneous shrinking of the drcam-content to a single element I will cite from
my Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis the following dream, the analysis of which
was successful, despite a short postponement:—

“A sceptical lady patient has a rather long dream, in which it happens that certain persons
tell her of my book on Wit, and praise it highly. Then something is said about a ‘channel,’
perhaps another book in which “channel” occurs, or something else to do with ‘channel’ . . .
she doesn’t know; it is quite vague.

“You will, of course, be inclined to think that the element ‘channel’ will resist
analysis, because it is so indeterminate. You are right in assuming this difficulty,
but it is not difficult because it is vague; it is vague for the reason that makes the
interpretation difficult. The dreamer could associate nothing with ‘channel’;
and of course I could not suggest anything. A little while later—the following
day, to be precise—she stated that something did occur to her which perhaps
referred to ‘channel.’ It was, as a matter of fact, a witticism which she had heard
someone repeat. On a steamer running between Dover and Calais a well-known
writer was talking to an Englishman, who in a certain connection quoted the
aphorism : Du sublime au ridiculé il n’y a qu’un pas. The writer retorted: Oui, le pas
de Calais, whereby he wished to imply that he thought France sublime and England
ridiculous. But the Pas de Calais is a channel, the Canal la Manche (the sleeve
channel). Do I think that this association has anything to do with the dream?
I certainly do; it really furnishes the solution of this enigmatical dream-element.
Can you doubt that this witticism already existed, before the dream, as the un-
conscious of the element ‘channel’; can you assume that it was subsequently
invented as an association? The association testifies to the scepticism concealed
behind her obtrusive admiration, and the resistance is, of course, the common
reason for both her hesitation in finding an association and the indefinite character
of the corresponding dream-element. Note the relation of the dream-element
to the unconscious in this case. It is like a fragment of this unconscious, like an
allusion to it; by its isolation it has become quite unintelligible.”

3 Concerning the intention of forgetting in general, see my The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life,

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 479

most important part. It lies on the shortest path to the solution
of the dream, and for that very reason it was most exposed to
the resistance. Among the examples of dreams that I have
included in the text of this treatise, it once happened that I
had subsequently to interpolate a fragment of dream-content.
The dream is a dream of travel, which revenges itself on two
unamiable travelling companions ; I have left it almost entirely
uninterpreted, as part of its content is crudely obscene. The
part omitted reads: “I said, referring to a book of Schiller s: “It is
from . . . but corrected myself, as I realized my mistake: “It is
by . ^ Whereupon the man remarked to his sister, “Yes, he said
it correctly.” ?x

Self-correction in dreams, which to some writers seems so
wonderful, does not really call for consideration. But I will
draw from my own memory an instance typical of verbal errors
in dreams. I was nineteen years of age when I visited England
for the first time, and I spent a day on the shore of the Irish
Sea. Naturally enough, I amused myself by picking up the
marine animals left on the beach by the tide, and I was just
examining a starfish (the dream begins with Hollthurn—
Holothurian) when a pretty little girl came up to me and asked
me: “Is it a starfish? Is it alive?" I replied, “Yes, he is alive,” but
then felt ashamed of my mistake, and repeated the sentence
correctly. For the grammatical mistake which I then made,
the dream substitutes another which is quite common among
German people. “Das Buch ist von Schiller” is not to be translated
by “the book is from,” but by "the book is by.” That the dream-
work accomplishes this substitution, because the word from,
owing to its consonance with the German adjective fromm
(pious, devout) makes a remarkable condensation possible,
should no longer surprise us after all that we have heard of the
intentions of the dream-work and its unscrupulous selection of
means. But what relation has this harmless recollection of the
seashore to my dream? It explains, by means of a very innocent
example, that I have used the word—the word denoting
gender, or sex or the sexual (he)—in the wrong place. This is

1 Such corrections in the use of foreign languages are not rare in dreams, but they
are usually attributed to foreigners. Maury (p. 143), while he was studying English,
once dreamed that he informed someone that he had 64160 on him the day
before in the following words: “I called for you yesterday.” The other answered,
correctly: "You mean: I called on you yesterday.”

480 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

surely one of the keys to the solution of the dream. Those who
have heard of the derivation of the book-title Matter and Motion
(Molière in Le Malade Imaginaire: La Matière est-elle laudable?—A
Motion of the bowels) will readily be able to supply the missing
parts.

Moreover, I can prove conclusively, by a demonstratio ad
oculos, that the forgetting of the dream is in a large measure
the work of the resistance. À patient tells me that he has
dreamed, but that the dream has vanished without leaving a
trace, as if nothing had happened. We set to work, however;
I come upon a resistance which I explain to the patient;
encouraging and urging him, I help him to become reconciled
to some disagreeable thought; and I have hardly succeeded
in doing so when he exclaims: “Now I can recall what I
dreamed !” The same resistance which that day disturbed him
in the work of interpretation caused him also to forget the
dream. By overcoming this resistance I have brought back the
dream to his memory.

In the same way the patient, having reached a certain part
of the work, may recall a dream which occurred three, four,
or more days ago, and which has hitherto remained in oblivion.?

Psychoanalytical experience has furnished us with yet
another proof of the fact that the forgetting of dreams depends
far more on the resistance than on the mutually alien character
of the waking and sleeping states, as some writers have believed
it to depend. It often happens to me, as well as to other analysts,
and to patients under treatment, that we are waked from sleep
by a dream, as we say, and that immediately thereafter, while
in full possession of our mental faculties, we begin to interpret
the dream. Often in such cases I have not rested until I have
achieved a full understanding of the dream, and yet it has
happened that after waking I have forgotten the interpretation-
work as completely as I have forgotten the dream-content
itself, though I have been aware that I have dreamed and
that I had interpreted the dream. The dream has far more
frequently taken the result of the interpretation with it into
forgetfulness than the intellectual faculty has succeeded in

3 Ernest Jones describes an analogous case of frequent occurrence; during the
analysis of one dream another dream of the same night is often recalled which
until then was not merely forgotten, but was not even suspected.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 481

retaining the dream in the memory. But between this work of
interpretation and the waking thoughts there is not that psychic
abyss by which other writers have sought to explain the
forgetting of dreams.—When Morton Prince objects to my
explanation of the forgetting of dreams on the ground that it
is only a special case of the amnesia of dissociated psychic
states, and that the impossibility of applying my explanation
of this special amnesia to other types of amnesia makes it
valueless even for its immediate purpose, he reminds the
reader that in all his descriptions of such dissociated states he
has never attempted to discover the dynamic explanation
underlying these phenomena, For had he done so he would
surely have discovered that repression (and the resistance
produced thereby) is the cause not of these dissociations merely,
but also of the amnesia of their psychic content.

That dreams are as little forgotten as other psychic acts, that
even in their power of impressing themselves on the memory
they may fairly be compared with the other psychic perform-
ances, was proved to me by an experiment which I was able
to make while preparing the manuscript of this book. I had
preserved in my notes a great many dreams of my own which,
for one reason or another, I could not interpret, or, at the time
of dreaming them, could interpret only very imperfectly. In
order to obtain material to illustrate my assertion, I attempted
to interpret some of them a year or two later. In this attempt
I was invariably successful; indeed, I may say that the
interpretation was effected more easily after all this time than
when the dreams were of recent occurrence. As a possible
explanation of this fact, I would suggest that I had overcome
many of the internal resistances which had disturbed me at
the time of dreaming. In such subsequent interpretations I
have compared the old yield of dream-thoughts with the present
result, which has usually been more abundant, and I have
invariably found the old dream-thoughts unaltered among the
present ones. However, I soon recovered from my surprise
when I reflected that I had long been accustomed to interpret
dreams of former years that had occasionally been related to
me by my patients as though they had been dreams of the
night before; by the same method, and with the same success,
In the section on anxiety-dreams I shall include two examples

HH

482 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of such delayed dream-interpretations. When I made this
experiment for the first time I expected, not unreasonably,
that dreams would behave in this connection merely like
neurotic symptoms. For when I treat a psychoneurotic, for
instance, an hysterical patient, by psychoanalysis, I am
compelled to find explanations for the first symptoms of the
malady, which have long since disappeared, as well as for those
still existing symptoms which have brought the patient to me ;
and I find the former problem easier to solve than the more
exigent one of to-day. In the Studien über Hysterie published
as early as 1895, I was able to give the explanation of a first
hysterical attack which the patient, a woman over forty years
of age, had experienced in her fifteenth year.?

I will now make a few rather unsystematic remarks relating
to the interpretations of dreams, which will perhaps serve as a
guide to the reader who wishes to test my assertions by the
analysis of his own dreams.

He must not expect that it will be a simple and easy matter
to interpret his own dreams. Even the observation of endoptic
phenomena, and other sensations which are commonly immune
from attention, calls for practice, although this group of
observations is not opposed by any psychic motive. It is very
much more difficult to get hold of the "unwished ideas.” He
who seeks to do so must fulfil the requirements laid down in
this treatise, and while following the rules here given, he must
endeavour to restrain all criticism, all preconceptions, and all
affective or intellectual bias in himself during the work of
analysis. He must be ever mindful of the precept which Claude
Bernard held up to the experimenter in the physiological
laboratory: “Travailler comme une béte”—that is, he must be as
enduring as an animal, and also as disinterested in the results
of his work. He who will follow this advice will no longer find
the task a difficult one. The interpretation of a dream cannot

+ Translated by A. A. Brill, appearing under the title Selected Papers on Hysteria
and other Psychoneuroses, Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
Publishing Co., New York.

2 Dreams which have occurred during the first years of childhood, and which
have sometimes been retained in the memory for decades with perfect sensorial
freshness, are almost always of great importance for the understanding of the
development and the neurosis of the dreamer. The analysis of them protects
the physician from errors and uncertainties which might confuse him even
theoretically.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 483

always be accomplished in one session; after following up a
chain of associations you will often feel that your working
capacity is exhausted; the dream will not tell you anything
more that day; it is then best to break off, and to resume the
work the following day. Another portion of the dream-content
then solicits your attention, and you thus obtain access to a
fresh stratum of the dream-thoughts. One might call this the
“fractional” interpretation of dreams.

It is most difficult to induce the beginner in dream-
interpretation to recognize the fact that his task is not finished
when he is in possession of a complete interpretation of the
dream which is both ingenious and coherent, and which gives
particulars of all the elements of the dream-content. Besides
this, another interpretation, an over-interpretation of the same
dream, one which has escaped him, may be possible. It is really
not easy to form an idea of the wealth of trains of unconscious
thought striving for expression in our minds, or to credit the
adroitness displayed by the dream-work in killing—so to
speak—seven flies at one stroke, like the journeyman tailor in
the fairy-tale, by means of its ambiguous modes of expression.
The reader will constantly be inclined to reproach the author
for a superfluous display of ingenuity, but anyone who has had
personal experience of dream-interpretation will know better
than to do so.

On the other hand, I cannot accept the opinion first ex-
pressed by H. Silberer, that every dream—or even that many
dreams, and certain groups of dreams—calls for two differ-
ent interpretations, between which there is even supposed
to be a fixed relation. One of these, which Silberer calls the
psychoanalytic interpretation, attributes to the dream any
meaning you please, but in the main an infantile sexual one.
The other, the more important interpretation, which he calls
the anagogic interpretation, reveals the more serious and often
profound thoughts which the dream-work has used as its
material. Silberer does not prove this assertion by citing a
number of dreams which he has analysed in these two directions.
I am obliged to object to this opinion on the ground that it is
contrary to facts. The majority of dreams require no over-
interpretation, and are especially insusceptible of an anagogic
interpretation. The influence of a tendency which seeks to veil

484 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the fundamental conditions of dream-formation and divert our
interest from its instinctual roots is as evident in Silberer’s
theory as in other theoretical efforts of the last few years. In
a number of cases I can confirm Silberer’s assertions; but in
these the analysis shows me that the dream-work was con-
fronted with the task of transforming a series of highly abstract
thoughts, incapable of direct representation, from waking life
into a dream. The dream-work attempted to accomplish this
task by seizing upon another thought-material which stood in
loose and often allegorical relation to the abstract thoughts, and
thereby diminished the difficulty of representing them. The
abstract interpretation of a dream originating in this manner
will be given by the dreamer immediately, but the correct
interpretation of the substituted material can be obtained only
by means of the familiar technique.

The question whether every dream can be interpreted is to
be answered in the negative. One should not forget that in the
work of interpretation one is opposed by the psychic forces
that are responsible for the distortion of the dream. Whether
one can master the inner resistances by one’s intellectual
interest, one’s capacity for self-control, one’s psychological
knowledge, and one’s experience in dream-interpretation
depends on the relative strength of the opposing forces. It is
always possible to make some progress ; one can at all events
go far enough to become convinced that a dream has meaning,
and generally far enough to gain some idea of its meaning. It
very often happens that a second dream enables us to confirm
and continue the interpretation assumed for the first. A whole
series of dreams, continuing for weeks or months, may have a
common basis, and should therefore be interpreted as a
continuity. In dreams that follow one another we often observe
that one dream takes as its central point something that is
only alluded to in the periphery of the next dream, and
conversely, so that even in their interpretations the two
supplement each other. That different dreams of the same
night are always to be treated, in the work of interpretation,
as a whole, I have already shown by examples.

In the best interpreted dreams we often have to leave one
passage in obscurity because we observe during the inter-
pretation that we have here a tangle of dream-thoughts which

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 485

cannot be unravelled, and which furnishes no fresh contribution
to the dream-content. This, then, is the keystone of the dream,
the point at which it ascends into the unknown. For the
dream-thoughts which we encounter during the interpretation
commonly have no termination, but run in all directions into
the net-like entanglement of our intellectual world. It is from
some denser part of this fabric that the dream-wish then arises,
like the mushroom from its mycelium.

Let us now return to the facts of dream-forgetting. So far,
of course, we have failed to draw any important conclusion
from them. When our waking life shows an unmistakable
intention to forget the dream which has been formed during
the night, either as a whole, immediately after waking, or little
by little in the course of the day, and when we recognize as
the chief factor in this process of forgetting the psychic resistance
against the dream which has already done its best to oppose
the dream at night, the question then arises: What actually
has made the dream-formation possible against this resistance?
Let us consider the most striking case, in which the waking life
has thrust the dream aside as though it had never happened.
If we take into consideration the play of the psychic forces, we
are compelled to assert that the dream would never have come
into existence had the resistance prevailed at night as it did
by day. We conclude, then, that the resistance loses some part
of its force during the night; we know that it has not been
discontinued, as we have demonstrated its share in the formation
of dreams—namely, the work of distortion. We have therefore
to consider the possibility that at night the resistance is merely
diminished, and that dream-formation becomes possible because
of this slackening of the resistance ; and we shall readily under-
stand that as it regains its full power on waking it immediately
thrusts aside what it was forced to admit while it was feeble.
Descriptive psychology teaches us that the chief deter-
minant of dream-formation is the dormant state of the
psyche; and we may now add the following explanation:
The state of sleep makes dream-formation possible by reducing the
endopsychic censorship.

We are certainly tempted to look upon this as the only
possible conclusion to be drawn from the facts of dream-
forgetting, and to develop from this conclusion further

486 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

deductions as to the comparative energy operative in the
sleeping and waking states. But we shall stop here for the
present. When we have penetrated a little farther into the
psychology of dreams we shall find that the origin of dream-
formation may be differently conceived. The resistance which
tends to prevent the dream-thoughts from becoming conscious
may perhaps be evaded without suffering reduction. It is also
plausible that both the factors which favour dream-formation,
the reduction as well as the evasion of the resistance,
may be simultaneously made possible by the sleeping state.
But we shall pause here, and resume the subject a little later.
We must now consider another series of objections against
our procedure in dream-interpretation. For we proceed by
dropping all the directing ideas which at other times control
reflection, directing our attention to a single element of the
dream, noting the involuntary thoughts that associate them-
selves with this element. We then take up the next component
of the dream-content, and repeat the operation with this; and,
regardless of the direction taken by the thoughts, we allow
ourselves to be led onwards by them, rambling from one
subject to another. At the same time, we harbour the confident
hope that we may in the end, and without intervention on our
part, come upon the dream-thoughts from which the dream
originated. To this the critic may make the following objection :
That we arrive somewhere if we start from a single element of
the dream is not remarkable. Something can be associatively
connected with every idea. The only thing that is remarkable
is that one should succeed in hitting upon the dream-thoughts
in this arbitrary and aimless excursion. It is probably a self-
deception ; the investigator follows the chain of associations
from the one element which is taken up until he finds the
chain breaking off, whereupon he takes up a second element;
itis thus only natural that the originally unconfined associations
should now become narrowed down. He has the former chain
of associations still in mind, and will therefore in the analysis
of the second dream-idea hit all the more readily upon single
associations which have something in common with the
associations of the first chain. He then imagines that he has
found a thought which represents a point of junction between
two of the dream-elements. As he allows himself all possible

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 487

freedom of thought-connection, excepting only the transitions
from one idea to another which occur in normal thinking, it is
not difficult for him finally to concoct, out of a series of
“intermediary thoughts,” something which he calls the dream-
thoughts; and without any guarantee, since they are otherwise
unknown, he palms these off as the psychic equivalent of the
dream. But all this is a purely arbitrary procedure, an
ingenious-looking exploitation of chance, and anyone who will
go to this useless trouble can in this way work out any desired
interpretation for any dream whatever.

If such objections are really advanced against us, we may
in defence refer to the impression produced by our dream-
interpretations, the surprising connections with other dream-
elements which appear while we are following up the individual
ideas, and the improbability that anything which so perfectly
covers and explains the dream as do our dream-interpretations
could be achieved otherwise than by following previously
established psychic connections. We might also point to the
fact that the procedure in dream-interpretation is identical
with the procedure followed in the resolution of hysterical
symptoms, where the correctness of the method is attested by
the emergence and disappearance of the symptoms—that is,
where the interpretation of the text is confirmed by the
interpolated illustrations. But we have no reason to avoid this
problem—namely, how one can arrive at a pre-existent aim
by following an arbitrarily and aimlessly maundering chain of
thoughts—since we shall be able not to solve the problem, it
is true, but to get rid of it entirely.

For it is demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon
ourselves to an aimless excursion of thought when, as in the
interpretation of dreams, we renounce reflection and allow the
involuntary ideas to come to the surface. It can be shown that
we are able to reject only those directing ideas which are
known to us, and that with the cessation of these the unknown—
or, as we inexactly say, unconscious—directing ideas im-
mediately exert their influence, and henceforth determine
the flow of the involuntary ideas. Thinking without directing
ideas cannot be ensured by any influence we ourselves exert
on our own psychic life; neither do I know of any state of
psychic derangement in which such a mode of thought

488 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

establishes itself. The psychiatrists have here far too pre-
maturely relinquished the idea of the solidity of the psychic
structure. I know that an unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid
of directing ideas, can occur as little in the realm of hysteria
and paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams. Perhaps
it does not occur at all in the endogenous psychic affections,
and, according to the ingenious hypothesis of Lauret, even the
deliria observed in confused psychic states have meaning and
are incomprehensible to us only because of omissions. I have
had the same conviction whenever I have had an opportunity
of observing such states. The deliria are the work of a
censorship which no longer makes any effort to conceal its
sway, which, instead of lending its support to a revision that
is no longer obnoxious to it, cancels regardlessly anything to
which it objects, thus causing the remnant to appear dis-
connected. This censorship proceeds like the Russian censorship

+ Only recently has my attention been called to the fact that Ed. von Hartmann
took the same view with regard to this psychologically important point : “Incidental
to the discussion of the råle of the unconscious in artistic creation (Philos. d.
Unbew., Bd. i, Abschn. B., Kap. V) Eduard von Hartmann clearly enunciated the
law of association of ideas which is directed by unconscious directing ideas, with-
out however realizing the scope of this law. With him it was a question of demon-
strating that “every combination of a sensuous idea when it is not left entirely to
chance, but is directed to a definite end, is in need of help from the unconscious,”
and that the conscious interest in any particular thought-association is a stimulus
for the unconscious to discover from among the numberless possible ideas the
one which corresponds to the directing idea. “It is the unconscious that selects,
and appropriately, in accordance with the aims of the interest: and this holds
true for the associations in abstract thinking (as sensible representations and artistic com-
binations as well as for flashes of wit)." Hence a limiting of the association of ideas to
ideas that evoke and are evoked in the sense of pure association-psychology is
untenable. Such a restriction “would be justified only if there were states in
human life in which man was free not only from any conscious purpose, but also
from the domination or co-operation of any unconscious interest, any passing
mood. But such a state hardly ever comes to pass, for even if one leaves one's train of
thought seemingly altogether to chance, or if one surrenders oneself entirely to the involuntary
dreams of phantasy, yet always other leading interests, dominant feelings and moods prevail
at one time rather than another, and these will always exert an influence on the association
of ideas” (Philos. d. Unbew., 11% Aufl. i, 246). In semi-conscious dreams there
always appear only such ideas as correspond to the (unconscious) momentary
main interest. By rendering prominent the feelings and moods over the free
thought-series, the methodical procedure of psycho-analysis is thoroughly justified
even from the standpoint of Hartmann’s Psychology (N. E. Pohorilles, Internat.
Zeitschrift. f. Ps.A., 1, 1913, р. 605).—Du Prel concludes from the fact that a name
which we vainly try to recall suddenly occurs to the mind that there is an uncon-
scious but none the less purposeful thinking, whose result then appears in con-
sciousness (Philos. d. Mystik, p. 107).

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 489

on the frontier, which allows only those foreign journals which
have had certain passages blacked out to fall into the hands
of the readers to be protected.

The free play of ideas following any chain of associations
may perhaps occur in cases of destructive organic affections
of the brain. What, however, is taken to be such in the
psychoneuroses may always be explained as the influence of
the censorship on a series of thoughts which have been pushed
into the foreground by the concealed directing ideas. It has
been considered an unmistakable sign of free association
unencumbered by directing ideas if the emerging ideas (or
images) appear to be connected by means of the so-called
superficial associations—that is, by assonance, verbal ambiguity,
and temporal coincidence, without inner relationship of
meaning; in other words, if they are connected by all those
associations which we allow ourselves to exploit in wit and in
playing upon words. This distinguishing mark holds good with
associations which lead us from the elements of the dream-
content to the intermediary thoughts, and from these to the
dream-thoughts proper; in many analyses of dreams we have
found surprising examples of this. In these no connection was
too loose and no witticism too objectionable to serve as a bridge
from one thought to another. But the correct understanding
of such surprising tolerance is not far to seek. Whenever one
psychic element is connected with another by an obnoxious and superficial
association, there exists also a correct and more profound connection
between the two, which succumbs to the resistance of the censorship.

The correct explanation for the predominance of the
superficial associations is the pressure of the censorship, and
not the suppression of the directing ideas. Whenever the
censorship renders the normal connective paths impassable,
the superficial associations will replace the deeper ones in the
representation. It is as though in a mountainous region a
general interruption of traffic, for example an inundation,
should render the broad highways impassable: traffic would
then have to be maintained by steep and inconvenient tracks
used at other times only by the hunter.

* Jung has brilliantly corroborated this statement by analyses of dementia praecox.
(Cf. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, translated by F. Peterson and A. A. Brill.

Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co.,
New York.)

490 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

We can here distinguish two cases which, however, are
essentially one. In the first case, the censorship is directed only
against the connection of two thoughts which, being detached
from one another, escape its opposition. The two thoughts then
enter successively into consciousness ; their connection remains
concealed; but in its place there occurs to us a superficial
connection between the two which would not otherwise have
occurred to us, and which as a rule connects with another
angle of the conceptual complex instead of that from which
the suppressed but essential connection proceeds. Or, in the
second case, both thoughts, owing to their content, succumb
to the censorship; both then appear not in their correct form
but in a modified, substituted form; and both substituted
thoughts are so selected as to represent, by a superficial
association, the essential relation which existed between those
that they have replaced. Under the pressure of the censorship, the
displacement of a normal and vital association by one superficial and
apparently absurd has thus occurred in both cases.

Because we know of these displacements, we unhesitatingly
rely upon even the superficial associations which occur in the
course of dream-interpretation.*

The psychoanalysis of neurotics makes abundant use of the
two principles: that with the abandonment of the conscious
directing ideas the control over the flow of ideas is transferred
to the concealed directing ideas; and that superficial asso-
ciations are only a displacement-substitute for suppressed and
more profound ones. Indeed, psychoanalysis makes these
two principles the foundation-stones of its technique. When
I request a patient to dismiss all reflection, and to report to
me whatever comes into his mind, I firmly cling to the assump-
tion that he will not be able to drop the directing idea of the
treatment, and I feel justified in concluding that what he
reports, even though it may seem to be quite ingenuous
and arbitrary, has some connection with his morbid state.

+ The same considerations naturally hold good of the case in which superficial
associations are exposed in the dream-content, as, for example, in both the dreams
reported by Maury (p. 50, pélerinage—pelletier—pelle, kilometer—kilogram—gilolo,
Lobelia—Lopez—Lotto). I know from my work with neurotics what kind of remini-
scence is prone to represent itself in this manner. It is the consultation of encyclo-
paedias by which most people have satisfied their need of an explanation of the
sexual mystery when obsessed by the curiosity of puberty.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES A491

Another directing idea of which the patient has no suspicion
is my own personality. The full appreciation, as well as the
detailed proof of both these explanations, belongs to the
description of the psychoanalytic technique as a therapeutic
method. We have here reached one of the junctions, so to speak,
at which we purposely drop the subject of dream-interpretation."
Of all the objections raised only one is justified, and still
remains to be met: namely, that we ought not to ascribe
all the associations of the interpretation-work to the nocturnal
dream-work. By interpretation in the waking state we are
actually opening a path running back from the dream-elements
to the dream-thoughts. The dream-work has followed the
contrary direction, and it is not at all probable that these
paths are equally passable in opposite directions. On the
contrary, it appears that during the day, by means of new
thought-connections, we sink shafts that strike the intermediary
thoughts and the dream-thoughts now in this place, now in
that. We can see how the recent thought-material of the day
forces its way into the interpretation-series, and how the addi-
tional resistance which has appeared since the night probably
compels it to make new and further detours. But the number
and form of the collaterals which we thus contrive during the
day is, psychologically speaking, indifferent, so long as they
point the way to the dream-thoughts which we are seeking.

B
REGRESSION

Now that we have defended ourselves against the objections
raised, or have at least indicated our weapons of defence, we
must no longer delay entering upon the psychological investi-
gations for which we have so long been preparing. Let us
summarize the main results of our recent investigations: The
dream is a psychic act full of import; its motive power is
invariably a wish craving fulfilment ; the fact that it is unrecog-
+ The above statements, which when written sounded very improbable, have

since been corroborated and applied experimentally by Jung and his pupils in
the Diagnostiche Assoziationsstudien.

492 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

nizable as a wish, and its many peculiarities and absurdities,
are due to the influence of the psychic censorship to which it
has been subjected during its formation. Besides the necessity
of evading the censorship, the following factors have played
a part in its formation: first, a need for condensing the
psychic material ; second, regard for representability in sensory
images; and third (though not constantly), regard for a
rational and intelligible exterior of the dream-structure. From
each of these propositions a path leads onward to psychological
postulates and assumptions. Thus, the reciprocal relation of
the wish-motive, and the four conditions, as well as the mutual
relations of these conditions, must now be investigated; the
dream must be inserted in the context of the psychic life.

At the beginning of this section we cited a certain dream in
order that it might remind us of the problems that are still
unsolved. The interpretation of this dream (of the burning
child) presented no difficulties, although in the analytical sense
it was not given in full. We asked ourselves why, after all, it
was necessary that the father should dream instead of waking,
and we recognized the wish to represent the child as living as
a motive of the dream. That there was yet another wish
operative in the dream we shall be able to show after further
discussion. For the present, however, we may say that for the
sake of the wish-fulfilment the thought-process of sleep was
transformed into a dream.

If the wish-fulfilment is cancelled out, only one character-
istic remains which distinguishes the two kinds of psychic
events. The dream-thought would have been : “I see a glimmer
coming from the room in which the body is lying. Perhaps a
candle has fallen over, and the child is burning!” The dream
reproduces the result of this reflection unchanged, but repre-
sents it in a situation which exists in the present and is per-
ceptible by the senses like an experience of the waking state.
This, however, is the most common and the most striking
psychological characteristic of the dream; a thought, usually
the one wished for, is objectified in the dream, and represented
as a scene, or—as we think—experienced.

But how are we now to explain this characteristic peculiarity
of the dream-work, or—to put it more modestly—how are we
to bring it into relation with the psychic processes?

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 493

On closer examination, it is plainly evident that the manifest
form of the dream is marked by two characteristics which are
almost independent of each other. One is its representation as
a present situation with the omission of “perhaps”; the other
is the translation of the thought into visual images and speech.

The transformation to which the dream-thoughts are
subjected because the expectation is put into the present tense
is, perhaps, in this particular dream not so very striking. This
is probably due to the special and really subsidiary réle of the
wish-fulfilment in this dream. Let us take another dream, in
which the dream-wish does not break away from the continua-
tion of the waking thoughts in sleep ; for example, the dream of
Irma’s injection. Here the dream-thought achieving represen-
tation is in the conditional: “If only Otto could be blamed
for Irma’s illness!” The dream suppresses the conditional,
and replaces it by a simple present tense: “Yes, Otto is to
blame for Irma’s illness.” This, then, is the first of the trans-
formations which even the undistorted dream imposes on the
dream-thoughts. But we will not linger over this first peculiarity
of the dream. We dispose of it by a reference to the conscious
phantasy, the day-dream, which behaves in a similar fashion
with its conceptual content. When Daudets M. Joyeuse
wanders unemployed through the streets of Paris while his
daughter is led to believe that he has a post and is sitting in
his office, he dreams, in the present tense, of circumstances
that might help him to obtain a recommendation and employ-
ment. The dream, then, employs the present tense in the same
manner and with the same right as the day-dream. The present
is the tense in which the wish is represented as fulfilled.

The second quality peculiar to the dream alone, as distin-
guished from the day-dream, is that the conceptual content is
not thought, but is transformed into visual images, to which
we give credence, and which we believe that we experience.
Let us add, however, that not all dreams show this transforma-
tion of ideas into visual images. There are dreams which consist
solely of thoughts, but we cannot on that account deny that
they are substantially dreams. My dream “Autodidasker—
the day-phantasy about Professor N.” is of this character; it
is almost as free of visual elements as though I had thought
its content during the day. Moreover, every long dream con-

404 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

tains elements which have not undergone this transformation
into the visual, and which are simply thought or known as
we are wont to think or know in our waking state. And we must
here reflect that this transformation of ideas into visual images
does not occur in dreams alone, but also in hallucinations and
visions, which may appear spontaneously in health, or as
symptoms in the psychoneuroses. In brief, the relation which
we are here investigating is by no means an exclusive one;
the fact remains, however, that this characteristic of the dream,
whenever it occurs, seems to be its most noteworthy charac-
teristic, so that we cannot think of the dream-life without it.
To understand it, however, requires a very exhaustive discus-
sion.

Among all the observations relating to the theory of dreams
to be found in the literature of the subject, I should like to lay
stress upon one as being particularly worthy of mention. The
famous G. T. H. Fechner makes the conjecture,” in a discussion
as to the nature of the dreams, that the dream is staged elsewhere
than in the waking ideation. No other assumption enables us to
comprehend the special peculiarities of the dream-life.

The idea which is thus put before us is one of psychic locality.
We shall wholly ignore the fact that the psychic apparatus
concerned is known to us also as an anatomical preparation,
and we shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine the
psychic locality in any anatomical sense. We shall remain on
psychological ground, and we shall do no more than accept
the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the
psychic activities much as we think of a compound microscope,
a photographic camera, or other apparatus. The psychic
locality, then, corresponds to a place within such an apparatus
in which one of the preliminary phases of the image comes into
existence. As is well known, there are in the microscope and
the telescope such ideal localities or planes, in which no tangible
portion of the apparatus is located. I think it superfluous to
apologize for the imperfections of this and all similar figures.
These comparisons are designed only to assist us in our attempt
to make intelligible the complication of the psychic performance
by dissecting it and referring the individual performances to
the individual components of the apparatus. So far as I am

‎Psychophysik, Part II, p. 520,‏ ג

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 495

aware, no attempt has yet been made to divine the construction
of the psychic instrument by means of such dissection. I see
no harm in such an attempt; I think that we should give free
rein to our conjectures, provided we keep our heads and do not
mistake the scaffolding for the building. Since for the first
approach to any unknown subject we need the help only
of auxiliary ideas, we shall prefer the crudest and most tangible
hypothesis to all others.

Accordingly, we conceive the psychic apparatus as a com-
pound instrument, the component parts of which we shall
call instances, or, for the sake of clearness, systems. We shall then
anticipate that these systems may perhaps maintain a constant
spatial orientation to one another, very much as do the different
and successive systems of lenses of a telescope. Strictly speaking,
there is no need to assume an actual spatial arrangement of
the psychic system. It will be enough for our purpose if a definite
sequence is established, so that in certain psychic events the
system will be traversed by the excitation in a definite temporal
order. This order may be different in the case of other processes ;
such a possibility is left open. For the sake of brevity, we shall
henceforth speak of the component parts of the apparatus as
““y-systems.””

The first thing that strikes us is the fact that the apparatus
composed of か -systems has a direction. All our psychic activi-
ties proceed from (inner or outer) stimuli and terminate in
innervations. We thus ascribe to the apparatus a sensory and
a motor end; at the sensory end we find a system which receives
the perceptions, and at the motor end another which opens
the sluices of motility. The psychic process generally runs
from the perceptive end to the motor end. The most general
scheme of the psychic apparatus has therefore the following
appearance as shown in Fig. 1 on page 496. But this is
only in compliance with the requirement, long familiar to
us, that the psychic apparatus must be constructed like a
reflex apparatus. The reflex act remains the type of every
psychic activity as well.

We now have reason to admit a first differentiation at the
sensory end. The percepts that come to us leave in our psychic
apparatus a trace, which we may call a memory-trace. The
function related to this memory-trace we call “the memory.”

496 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

If we hold seriously to our resolution to connect the psychic
processes into systems, the memory-trace can consist only of
lasting changes in the elements of the systems. But, as has

P M

И A

Nad TES

Fic. 1

already been shown elsewhere, obvious difficulties arise when
one and the same system is faithfully to preserve changes in
its elements and still to remain fresh and receptive in respect of
new occasions of change. In accordance with the principle
which is directing our attempt, we shall therefore ascribe these
two functions to two different systems. We assume that an
initial system of this apparatus receives the stimuli of perception
but retains nothing of them—that is, it has no memory; and
that behind this there lies a second system, which transforms
the momentary excitation of the first into lasting traces.
The following would then be the diagram of our psychic
apparatus :—

P Mem Mem’ Mem” M

/ 5

BREST. JOB M

Fic. 2

We know that of the percepts which act upon the P-system,
we retain permanently something else as well as the content

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 497

itself. Our percepts prove also to be connected with one
another in the memory, and this is especially so if they originally
occurred simultaneously. We call this the fact of association.
Itis now clear that, if the P-system is entirely lacking in memory,
it certainly cannot preserve traces for the associations; the
individual P-elements would be intolerably hindered in their
functioning if a residue of a former connection should make
its influence felt against a new perception. Hence we must
rather assume that the memory-system is the basis of association.
The fact of association, then, consists in this—that in conse-
quence of a lessening of resistance and a smoothing of the ways
from one of the mem-elements, the excitation transmits itself to
a second rather than to a third mem-element.

On further investigation we find it necessary to assume not
one but many such mem-systems, in which the same excitation
transmitted by the P-elements undergoes a diversified fixation.
The first of these mem-systems will in any case contain the fixa-
tion of the association through simultaneity, while in those
lying farther away the same material of excitation will be
arranged according to other forms of combination; so that
relationships of similarity, etc., might perhaps be represented
by these later systems. It would, of course, be idle to attempt to
express in words the psychic significance of such a system. Its
characteristic would lie in the intimacy of its relations to ele-
ments of raw material of memory—that is (if we wish to hint
at a more comprehensive theory) in the gradations of the
conductive resistance on the way to these elements.

An observation of a general nature, which may possibly
point to something of importance, may here be interpolated.
The P-system, which possesses no capacity for preserving
changes, and hence no memory, furnishes to consciousness
the complexity and variety of the sensory qualities. Our
memories, on the other hand, are unconscious in themselves;
those that are most deeply impressed form no exception. They
can be made conscious, but there is no doubt that they unfold
all their activities in the unconscious state. What we term our
character is based, indeed, on the memory-traces of our
impressions, and it is precisely those impressions that have
affected us most strongly, those of our early youth, which

hardly ever become conscious. But when memories become
u

498 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

conscious again they show no sensory quality, or a very negli-
gible one in comparison with the perceptions. If, now, it
can be confirmed that for consciousness memory and quality are
mutually exclusive in the Y-systems, we have gained a most promis-
ing insight into the determinations of the neuron-excitations.*

What we have so far assumed concerning the composition
of the psychic apparatus at the sensible end has been assumed
regardless of dreams and of the psychological explanations
which we have hitherto derived from them. Dreams, however,
will serve as a source of evidence for our knowledge of another
part of the apparatus. We have seen that it was impossible to
explain dream-formation unless we ventured to assume
two psychic “instances,” one of which subjected the activities
of the other to criticism, the result of which was exclusion from
consciousness.

We have concluded that the criticizing “instance” maintains
closer relations with the consciousness than the “instance”
criticized. It stands between the latter and the consciousness
like a screen. Further, we have found that there is reason to
identify the criticizing “instance” with that which directs our
waking life and determines our voluntary conscious activities.
If, in accordance with our assumptions, we now replace these
“instances” by systems, the criticizing system will therefore
be moved to the motor end. We now enter both systems in
our diagram, expressing, by the names given them, their
relation to consciousness.

P Mem Mem’ Ad hss. PA.

E

Fic. 3

r Since writing I have thought that consciousness occurs actually in the locality
of the memory-trace. (Cf. Notiz über den Wunderblock, 1925, Ges. Schriften,
Bd. vi.) x

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 499

The last of the systems at the motor end we call the pre-
conscious (Pcs.) to denote that the exciting processes in this
system can reach consciousness without any further detention,
provided certain other conditions are fulfilled, e.g. the attain-
ment of a definite degree of intensity, a certain apportionment
of that function which we must call attention, etc. This is
at the same time the system which holds the keys of voluntary
motility. The system behind it we call the unconscious (Ucs.),
because it has no access to consciousness except through the
preconscious, in the passage through which the excitation-process
must submit to certain changes."

In which of these systems, then, do we localize the impetus
to dream-formation? For the sake of simplicity, let us say in
the system Ucs. We shall find, it is true, in subsequent discussions,
that this is not altogether correct; that dream-formation is
obliged to make connection with dream-thoughts which belong
to the system of the preconscious. But we shall learn elsewhere,
when we come to deal with the dream-wish, that the motive-
power of the dream is furnished by the Ucs., and on account of
this factor we shall assume the unconscious system as the
starting-point for dream-formation. This dream-excitation,
like all the other thought-structures, will now strive to continue
itself in the Pcs., and thence to gain admission to the con-
sciousness.

Experience teaches us that the path leading through the
preconscious to consciousness is closed to the dream-thoughts
during the day by the resisting censorship. At night they gain
admission to consciousness; the question arises, In what way
and because of what changes? If this admission were rendered
possible to the dream-thoughts by the weakening, during the
night, of the resistance watching on the boundary between
the unconscious and the preconscious, we should then have
dreams in the material of our ideas, which would not display
the hallucinatory character that interests us at present.

The weakening of the censorship between the two systems,
Ucs. and Pcs., can explain to us only such dreams as the “Auto-
didasker”” dream, but not dreams like that of the burning child,

* The further elaboration of this linear diagram will have to reckon with the
assumption that the system following the Pcs. represents the one to which we must
attribute consciousness (Cs.), so that P = Cs.

500 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

which—as will be remembered—we stated as a problem at
the outset in our present investigations.

What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe
in no other way than by saying that the excitation follows a
retrogressive course. It communicates itself not to the motor
end of the apparatus, but to the sensory end, and finally reaches
the system of perception. If we call the direction which the
psychic process follows from the unconscious into the waking
state progressive, we may then speak of the dream as having a
regressive character.

This regression is therefore assuredly one of the most impor-
tant psychological peculiarities of the dream-process; but
we must not forget that it is not characteristic of the dream
alone. Intentional recollection and other component processes
of our normal thinking likewise necessitate a retrogression in
the psychic apparatus from some complex act of ideation to
the raw material of the memory-traces which underlie it.
But during the waking state this turning backwards does not
reach beyond the memory-images ; it is incapable of producing
the hallucinatory revival of the perceptual images. Why is it
otherwise in dreams? When we spoke of the condensation-
work of the dream we could not avoid the assumption that by
the dream-work the intensities adhering to the ideas are com-
pletely transferred from one to another. It is probably this
modification of the usual psychic process which makes possible
the cathexis? of the system of P to its full sensory vividness in
the reverse direction to thinking.

I hope that we are not deluding ourselves as regards the
importance of this present discussion. We have done nothing
more than give a name to an inexplicable phenomenon. We
call it regression if the idea in the dream is changed back into
the visual image from which it once originated. But even this
step requires justification. Why this definition if it does not

+ The first indication of the element of regression is already encountered in the
writings of Albertus Magnus. According to him the imaginatio constructs the
dream out of the tangible objects which it has retained. The process is the con-
verse of that operating in the waking state (quoted from Diepgen, p. 14). Hobbes
states (Leviathan, 1651) : "In sum our dreams are the reverse of our imagination,
the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream at
another" (quoted by Havelock Ellis, loc. cit., p. 112).

2 [From the Greek Kathexo, to occupy, used here in place of the author's term
Besetzung, to signify a charge or investment of energy.—TRaws.]

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 501

teach us anything new? Well, I believe that the word regression
is of service to us, inasmuch as it connects a fact familiar to us
with the scheme of the psychic apparatus endowed with
direction. At this point, and for the first time, we shall profit
by the fact that we have constructed such a scheme. For with
the help of this scheme we shall perceive, without further
reflection, another peculiarity of dream-formation. If we look
upon the dream as a process of regression within the hypothetical
psychic apparatus, we have at once an explanation of the
empirically proven fact that all thought-relations of the dream-
thoughts are either lost in the dream-work or have difficulty
in achieving expression. According to our scheme, these
thought-relations are contained not in the first mem-systems,
but in those lying farther to the front, and in the regression to
the perceptual images they must forfeit expression. In regression
the structure of the dream-thoughts breaks up into its raw material.

But what change renders possible this regression which is
impossible during the day? Let us here be content with an
assumption. There must evidently be changes in the cathexis
of the individual systems, causing the latter to become more
accessible or inaccessible to the discharge of the excitation;
but in any such apparatus the same effect upon the course
of the excitation might be produced by more than one kind of
change. We naturally think of the sleeping state, and of the
many cathectic changes which this evokes at the sensory end
of the apparatus. During the day there is a continuous stream
flowing from the j-system of the P toward the motility end;
this current ceases at night, and can no longer block the flow
of the current of excitation in the opposite direction. This
would appear to be that “seclusion from the outer world”
which according to the theory of some writers is supposed to
explain the psychological character of the dream.’ In the
explanation of the regression of the dream we shall, however,
have to take into account those other regressions which occur
during morbid waking states. In these other forms of regression
the explanation just given plainly leaves us in the lurch.
Regression occurs in spite of the uninterrupted sensory current
in a progressive direction.

The hallucinations of hysteria and paranoia, as well as the

* Cf. p.51.

502 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

visions of mentally normal persons, I would explain as corre-
sponding, in fact, to regressions, i.e. to thoughts transformed
into images ; and would assert that only such thoughts undergo
this transformation as are in intimate connection with sup-
pressed memories, or with memories which have remained
unconscious. As an example I will cite the case of one of my
youngest hysterical patients—a boy of twelve, who was pre-
vented from falling asleep by “green faces with red eyes,”
which terrified him. The source of this manifestation was the
suppressed, but once conscious memory of a boy whom he had
often seen four years earlier, and who offered a warning
example of many bad habits, including masturbation, for which
he was now reproaching himself. At that time his mother had
noticed that the complexion of this ill-mannered boy was
greenish and that he had red (i.e. red-rimmed) eyes. Hence
his terrifying vision, which merely determined his recollection
of another saying of his mother’s, to the effect that such boys
become demented, are unable to learn anything at school,
and are doomed to an early death. A part of this prediction
came true in the case of my little patient; he could not get on
at school, and, as appeared from his involuntary associations,
he was in terrible dread of the remainder of the prophecy.
However, after a brief period of successful treatment his sleep
was restored, his anxiety removed, and he finished his scholastic
year with an excellent record.

Here I may add the interpretation of a vision described to
me by an hysterical woman of forty, as having occurred when
she was in normal health. One morning she opened her eyes
and saw her brother in the room, although she knew him to be
confined in an insane asylum. Her little son was asleep by her
side. Lest the child should be frightened on seeing his uncle, and
fall into convulsions, she pulled the sheet over his face. This done,
the phantom disappeared. This apparition was the revision
of one of her childish memories, which, although conscious,
was most intimately connected with all the unconscious material
in her mind. Her nurserymaid had told her that her mother,
who had died young (my patient was then only eighteen months
old), had suffered from epileptic or hysterical convulsions,
which dated back to a fright caused by her brother (the
patient’s uncle) who appeared to her disguised as a spectre with

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 503

a sheet over his head. The vision contains the same elements
as the reminiscence, viz. the appearance of the brother, the
sheet, the fright, and its effect. These elements, however, are
arranged in a fresh context, and are transferred to other
persons. The obvious motive of the vision, and of the thought
which it replaced, was her solicitude lest her little son, who
bore a striking resemblance to his uncle, should share the
latter’s fate.

Both examples here cited are not entirely unrelated to the
state of sleep, and may for that reason be unfitted to afford the
evidence for the sake of which I have cited them. I will there-
fore refer to my analysis of an hallucinatory paranoic woman
patient! and to the results of my hitherto unpublished studies
on the psychology of the psychoneuroses, in order to emphasize
the fact that in these cases of regressive thought-transformation
one must not overlook the influence of a suppressed memory,
or one that has remained unconscious, this being usually of
an infantile character. This memory draws into the regression,
as it were, the thoughts with which it is connected, and which
are kept from expression by the censorship—that is, into that
form of representation in which the memory itself is psychically
existent. And here I may add, as a result of my studies of hys-
teria, that if one succeeds in bringing to consciousness infantile
scenes (whether they are recollections or phantasies) they appear
as hallucinations, and are divested of this character only when
they are communicated. It is known also that even in persons
whose memories are not otherwise visual, the earliest infantile
memories remain vividly visual until late in life.

If, now, we bear in mind the part played in the dream-
thoughts by the infantile experiences, or by the phantasies
based upon them, and recollect how often fragments of these
re-emerge in the dream-content, and how even the dream-wishes
often proceed from them, we cannot deny the probability
that in dreams, too, the transformation of thoughts into visual
images may be the result of the attraction exercised by the
visually represented memory, striving for resuscitation, upon
the thoughts severed from consciousness and struggling for
expression. Pursuing this conception, we may further describe

1 Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses, p. 165, translated by A. A. Brill,
Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co.

504 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the dream as the substitute for the infantile scene modified by trans-
Jerence to recent material. The infantile scene cannot enforce its
own revival, and must therefore be satisfied to return as a
dream.

This reference to the significance of the infantile scenes (or
of their phantastic repetitions) as in a certain degree furnishing
the pattern for the dream-content renders superfluous the
assumption made by Scherner and his pupils concerning
inner sources of stimuli. Scherner assumes a state of “visual
excitation,” of internal excitation in the organ of sight, when
the dreams manifest a special vividness or an extraordinary
abundance of visual elements. We need raise no objection to
this assumption ; we may perhaps content ourselves with assum-
ing such a state of excitation only for the psychic perceptive
system of the organ of vision; we shall, however, insist that
this state of excitation is a reanimation by the memory of a
former actual visual excitation. I cannot, from my own experi-
ence, give a good example showing such an influence of an
infantile memory; my own dreams are altogether less rich in
perceptual elements than I imagine those of others to be;
but in my most beautiful and most vivid dream of late years
I can easily trace the hallucinatory distinctness of the dream-
contents to the visual qualities of recently received impressions.
On p. 429 I mentioned a dream in which the dark blue of the
water, the brown of the smoke issuing from the ship’s funnels,
and the sombre brown and red of the buildings which I saw
made a profound and lasting impression upon my mind. This
dream, if any, must be attributed to visual excitation, but what
was it that had brought my organ of vision into this excitable
state? It was a recent impression which had joined itself to a
series of former impressions. The colours I beheld were in the
first place those of the toy blocks with which my children had
erected a magnificent building for my admiration, on the day
preceding the dream. There was the sombre red on the large
blocks, the blue and brown on the small ones. Joined to these
were the colour impressions of my last journey in Italy: the
beautiful blue of the Isonzo and the lagoons, the brown hue
of the Alps. The beautiful colours seen in the dream were but
a repetition of those seen in memory.

Let us summarize what we have learned about this peculi-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 505

arity of dreams: their power of recasting their idea-content
in visual images. We may not have explained this character
of the dream-work by referring it to the known laws of psy-
chology, but we have singled it out as pointing to unknown
relations, and have given it the name of the regressive character.
Wherever such regression has occurred, we have regarded it
as an effect of the resistance which opposes the progress of
thought on its normal way to consciousness, and of the simul-
taneous attraction exerted upon it by vivid memories. The
regression in dreams is perhaps facilitated by the cessation
of the progressive stream flowing from the sense-organs during
the day; for which auxiliary factor there must be some compen-
sation, in the other forms of regression, by the strengthening of
the other regressive motives. We must also bear in mind that
in pathological cases of regression, just as in dreams, the
process of energy-transference must be different from that
occurring in the regressions of normal psychic life, since it
renders possible a full hallucinatory cathexis of the perceptive
system. What we have described in the analysis of the dream-
work as "regard for representability” may be referred to the
selective attraction of visually remembered scenes touched by the
dream-thoughts.

As to the regression, we may further observe that it plays a
no less important part in the theory of neurotic symptom-
formation than in the theory of dreams. We may therefore
distinguish a threefold species of regression: (a) a topical one,
in the sense of the scheme of the 『-systems here expounded :
(5) a temporal one, in so far as it is a regression to older psychic
formations; and (c) a formal one, when primitive modes of
expression and representation take the place of the customary
modes. These three forms of regression are, however, basically
one, and in the majority of cases they coincide, for that which
is older in point of time is at the same time formally primitive
and, in the psychic topography, nearer to the perception-end.

We cannot leave the theme of regression in dreams without
giving utterance to an impression which has already and

* In a statement of the theory of repression it should be explained that a thought
passes into repression owing to the co-operation of two of the factors which
influence it. On the one side (the censorship of Cs.) it is pushed, and from the
other side (the Ucs.) it is pulled, much as one is helped to the top of the Great
Pyramid. (Cf. the Chapter Die Verdrångung in Ges. Schriften, Bd. v.)

506 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

repeatedly forced itself upon us, and which will return to us
reinforced after a deeper study of the psychoneuroses : namely,
that dreaming is on the whole an act of regression to the earliest
relationships of the dreamer, a resuscitation of his childhood,
of the impulses which were then dominant and the modes of
expression which were then available. Behind this childhood of
the individual we are then promised an insight into the phyloge-
netic childhood, into the evolution of the human race, of which
the development of the individual is only an abridged repetition
influenced by the fortuitous circumstances of life. We begin
to suspect that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said
that in a dream “there persists a primordial part of humanity
which we can no longer reach by a direct path,” and we are
encouraged to expect, from the analysis of dreams, a knowledge
of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of psychical
things in him that are innate. It would seem that dreams and
neuroses have preserved for us more of the psychical antiquities
than we suspected ; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high
rank among those sciences which endeavour to reconstruct
the oldest and darkest phases of the beginnings of mankind.
It is quite possible that we shall not find this first part of
our psychological evaluation of dreams particularly satisfying.
We must, however, console ourselves with the thought that we
are, after all, compelled to build out into the dark. If we have
not gone altogether astray, we shall surely reach approximately
the same place from another starting-point, and then, perhaps,
we shall be better able to find our bearings.

[ej
THE WisH-FULFILMENT

The dream of the burning child (cited above) affords us a
welcome opportunity for appreciating the difficulties con-
fronting the theory of wish-fulfilment. That a dream should
be nothing but a wish-fulfilment must undoubtedly seem
strange to us all—and not only because of the contradiction
offered by the anxiety-dream. Once our first analyses had given
us the enlightenment that meaning and psychic value are

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES 507

concealed behind our dreams, we could hardly have expected
so unitary a determination of this meaning. According to the
correct but summary definition of Aristotle, the dream is a
continuation of thinking in sleep. Now if, during the day, our
thoughts perform such a diversity of psychic acts—judg-
ments, conclusions, the answering of objections, expectations,
intentions, etc.—why should they be forced at night to confine
themselves to the production of wishes only? Are there not,
on the contrary, many dreams that present an altogether
different psychic act in dream-form—for example, anxious
care—and is not the father’s unusually transparent dream of
the burning child such a dream? From the gleam of light that
falls upon his eyes while he is asleep the father draws the appre-
hensive conclusion that a candle has fallen over and may
be burning the body; he transforms this conclusion into a
dream by embodying it in an obvious situation enacted in the
present tense. What part is played in this dream by the wish-
fulfilment? And how can we possibly mistake the predominance
of the thought continued from the waking state or evoked by
the new sensory impression?

All these considerations are justified, and force us to look
more closely into the råle of the wish-fulfilment in dreams, and
the significance of the waking thoughts continued in sleep.

It is precisely the wish-fulfilment that has already caused us
to divide all dreams into two groups. We have found dreams
which were plainly wish-fulfilments ; and others in which the
wish-fulfilment was unrecognizable and was often concealed
by every available means. In this latter class of dreams we
recognized the influence of the dream-censorship. The undis-
guised wish-dreams were found chiefly in children; short,
frank wish-dreams seemed (I purposely emphasize this word)
to occur also in adults.

We may now ask whence in each case does the wish that is
realized in the dream originate? But to what opposition or to
what diversity do we relate this "whence”? I think to the
opposition between conscious daily life and an unconscious
psychic activity which is able to make itself perceptible only
at night. I thus find a threefold possibility for the origin of a
wish. Firstly, it may have been excited during the day, and
owing to external circumstances may have remained unsatis-

508 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

fied; there is thus left for the night an acknowledged and
unsatisfied wish. Secondly, it may have emerged during the
day, only to be rejected; there is thus left for the night an
unsatisfied but suppressed wish. Thirdly, it may have no
relation to daily life, but may belong to those wishes which
awake only at night out of the suppressed material in us. If
we turn to our scheme of the psychic apparatus, we can localize
a wish of the first order in the system Pcs. We may assume that
a wish of the second order has been forced back from the Pes.
system into the Ucs. system, where alone, if anywhere, can it
maintain itself; as for the wish-impulse of the third order, we
believe that it is wholly incapable of leaving the Ucs. system.
Now, have the wishes arising from these different sources
the same value for the dream, the same power to incite a
dream?

On surveying the dreams at our disposal with a view to
answering this question, we are at once moved to add as a
fourth source of the dream-wish the actual wish-impetus which
arises during the night (for example, the stimulus of thirst,
and sexual desire). It then seems to us probable that the source
of the dream-wish does not affect its capacity to incite a dream.
I have in mind the dream of the child who continued the
voyage that had been interrupted during the day, and the other
children’s dreams cited in the same chapter ; they are explained
by an unfulfilled but unsuppressed wish of the daytime. That
wishes suppressed during the day assert themselves in dreams
is shown by a great many examples. I will mention a very
simple dream of this kind. A rather sarcastic lady, whose
younger friend has become engaged to be married, is asked
in the daytime by her acquaintances whether she knows her
friend's fiancé, and what she thinks of him. She replies with
unqualified praise, imposing silence on her own judgment,
although she would have liked to tell the truth, namely, that
he is a commonplace fellow—one meets such by the dozen (Duizend-
mensch). The following night she dreams that the same question
is put to her, and that she replies with the formula: “In case
of subsequent orders, it will suffice to mention the reference number.”
Finally, as the result of numerous analyses, we learn that the
wish in all dreams that have been subject to distortion has its
origin in the unconscious, and could not become perceptible

509

by day. At first sight, then, it seems that in respect of
dream-formation all wishes are of equal value and equal
power.

I cannot prove here that this is not really the true state of
affairs, but I am strongly inclined to assume a stricter deter-
mination of the dream-wish. Children’s dreams leave us in
no doubt that a wish unfulfilled during the day may instigate
a dream. But we must not forget that this is, after all, the wish
of a child; that it is a wish-impulse of the strength peculiar
to childhood. I very much doubt whether a wish unfulfilled
in the daytime would suffice to create a dream in an adult.
It would rather seem that as we learn to control our instinctual
life by intellection we more and more renounce as unprofitable
the formation or retention of such intense wishes as are natural
to childhood. In this, indeed, there may be individual varia-
tions ; some retain the infantile type of the psychic processes
longer than others ; just as we find such differences in the gradual
decline of the originally vivid visual imagination. In general,
however, I am of the opinion that unfulfilled wishes of the day
are insufficient to produce a dream in adults. I will readily
admit that the wish-impulses originating in consciousness
contribute to the instigation of dreams, but they probably do
no more. The dream would not occur if the preconscious wish
were not reinforced from another source.

That source is the unconscious. I believe that the conscious
wish becomes effective in exciting a dream only when it succeeds in
arousing a similar unconscious wish which reinforces it. From the
indications obtained in the psychoanalysis of the neuroses,
I believe that these unconscious wishes are always active and
ready to express themselves whenever they find an opportunity
of allying themselves with an impulse from consciousness, and
transferring their own greater intensity to the lesser intensity
of the latter.¹ It must therefore seem that the conscious wish

¹They share this character of indestructibility with all other psychic acts that
are really unconscious—that is, with psychic acts belonging solely to the system
Ucs. These paths are opened once and for all; they never fall into disuse; they
conduct the excitation-process to discharge as often as they are charged again
with unconscious excitation. To speak metaphorically, they suffer no other form
of annihilation than did the shades of the lower regions in the Odyssey, who awoke
to new life the moment they drank blood. The processes depending on the pre-
conscious system are destructible in quite another sense. The psychotherapy of
the neuroses is based on this difference.

510

alone has been realized in the dream; but a slight peculiarity
in the form of the dream will put us on the track of the powerful
ally from the unconscious. These ever-active and, as it were,
immortal wishes of our unconscious recall the legendary
Titans who, from time immemorial, have been buried under
the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the
victorious gods, and even now quiver from time to time at
the convulsions of their mighty limbs. These wishes, existing
in repression, are themselves of infantile origin, as we learn
from the psychological investigation of the neuroses. Let me,
therefore, set aside the view previously expressed, that it
matters little whence the dream-wish originates, and replace
it by another, namely: the wish manifested in the dream must be
an infantile wish. In the adult it originates in the Ucs., while
in the child, in whom no division and censorship exist as yet
between the Pcs. and Ucs. or in whom these are only in
process of formation, it is an unfulfilled and unrepressed wish
from the waking state. I am aware that this conception cannot
be generally demonstrated, but I maintain that it can often
be demonstrated even where one would not have suspected
it, and that it cannot be generally refuted.

In dream-formation, the wish-impulses which are left
over from the conscious waking life are therefore to be
relegated to the background. I cannot admit that they play
any part except that attributed to the material of actual
sensations during sleep in relation to the dream-content
(see p. 38). If I now take into account those other psychic
instigations left over from the waking life of the day, which
are not wishes, I shall merely be adhering to the course mapped
out for me by this line of thought. We may succeed in pro-
visionally disposing of the energic cathexis of our waking
thoughts by deciding to go to sleep. He is a good sleeper
who can do this; Napoleon I is reputed to have been a model
of this kind. But we do not always succeed in doing it, or in
doing it completely. Unsolved problems, harassing cares,
overwhelming impressions, continue the activity of our thought
even during sleep, maintaining psychic processes in the system
which we have termed the preconscious. The thought-impulses
continued into sleep may be divided into the following
groups:—

511

1. Those which have not been completed during the day,
owing to some accidental cause.

2. Those which have been left uncompleted because our
mental powers have failed us, i.e. unsolved problems.

3. Those which have been turned back and suppressed
during the day. This is reinforced by a powerful fourth
group:—

4. Those which have been excited in our Ucs. during the
day by the workings of the Pcs.; and finally we may add
a fifth group, consisting of:—

5. The indifferent impressions of the day, which have
therefore been left unsettled.

We need not underrate the psychic intensities introduced
into sleep by these residues of the day’s waking life, especially
those emanating from the group of the unsolved issues. It is
certain that these excitations continue to strive for expression
during the night, and we may assume with equal certainty
that the state of sleep renders impossible the usual continuance
of the process of excitation in the preconscious and its ter-
mination in becoming conscious. In so far as we can become
conscious of our mental processes in the ordinary way, even
during the night, to that extent we are simply not asleep. I
cannot say what change is produced in the Pcs. system by the
state of sleep,¹ but there is no doubt that the psychological
characteristics of sleep are to be sought mainly in the cathectic
changes occurring just in this system, which dominates, more-
over, the approach to motility, paralysed during sleep. On the
other hand, I have found nothing in the psychology of dreams
to warrant the assumption that sleep produces any but secon-
dary changes in the conditions of the Ucs. system. Hence, for
the nocturnal excitations in the Pcs. there remains no other
path than that taken by the wish-excitations from the Ucs.;
they must seek reinforcement from the Ucs., and follow the
detours of the unconscious excitations. But what is the relation

¹I have endeavoured to penetrate farther into the relations of the sleeping
state and the conditions of hallucination in my essay, Metapsychological Supple-
ment to the Theory of Dreams. Collected Papers, vol. iv, p. 137 (Metapsychologische
Ergänzung zur Traumlehre. Int. Zeitschr. f. Ps.A. iv, 1916–18, Ges. Schriften, Bd. v,
p. 520).

512

of the preconscious day-residues to the dream? There is no
doubt that they penetrate abundantly into the dream; that
they utilize the dream-content to obtrude themselves upon
consciousness even during the night; indeed, they sometimes
even dominate the dream-content, and impel it to continue
the work of the day; it is also certain that the day-residues may
just as well have any other character as that of wishes. But it
is highly instructive, and for the theory of wish-fulfilment
of quite decisive importance, to see what conditions they must
comply with in order to be received into the dream.

Let us pick out one of the dreams cited above, e.g. the dream
in which my friend Otto seems to show the symptoms of
Basedow’s disease (p. 262). Otto’s appearance gave me some
concern during the day, and this worry, like everything else
relating to him, greatly affected me. I may assume that this
concern followed me into sleep. I was probably bent on
finding out what was the matter with him. During the night
my concern found expression in the dream which I have
recorded. Not only was its content senseless, but it failed to
show any wish-fulfilment. But I began to search for the source
of this incongruous expression of the solicitude felt during
the day, and analysis revealed a connection. I identified my
friend Otto with a certain Baron L. and myself with a Professor
R. There was only one explanation of my being impelled
to select just this substitute for the day-thought. I must always
have been ready in the Ucs. to identify myself with Professor R.,
as this meant the realization of one of the immortal infantile
wishes, viz. the wish to become great. Repulsive ideas respecting
my friend, ideas that would certainly have been repudiated
in a waking state, took advantage of the opportunity to creep
into the dream; but the worry of the day had likewise found
some sort of expression by means of a substitute in the dream-
content. The day-thought, which was in itself not a wish, but
on the contrary a worry, had in some way to find a connection
with some infantile wish, now unconscious and suppressed,
which then allowed it-
duly dressed up-to “arise” for con-
sciousness. The more domineering the worry the more forced
could be the connection to be established; between the content
of the wish and that of the worry there need be no connection,
nor was there one in our example.

513

It would perhaps be appropriate, in dealing with this prob-
lem, to inquire how a dream behaves when material is offered
to it in the dream-thoughts which flatly opposes a wish-fulfil-
ment; such as justified worries, painful reflections and distress-
ing realizations. The many possible results may be classified
as follows: (a) The dream-work succeeds in replacing all
painful ideas by contrary ideas, and suppressing the painful
affect belonging to them. This, then, results in a pure and simple
satisfaction-dream, a palpable “wish-fulfilment,” concerning
which there is nothing more to be said. (b) The painful ideas
find their way into the manifest dream-content, more or less
modified, but nevertheless quite recognizable. This is the case
which raises doubts about the wish-theory of dreams, and thus
calls for further investigation. Such dreams with a painful
content may either be indifferent in feeling, or they may
convey the whole painful affect, which the ideas contained in
them seem to justify, or they may even lead to the development
of anxiety to the point of waking.

Analysis then shows that even these painful dreams are wish-
fulfilments. An unconscious and repressed wish, whose fulfil-
ment could only be felt as painful by the dreamer’s ego, has
seized the opportunity offered by the continued cathexis of
painful day-residues, has lent them its support, and has thus
made them capable of being dreamed. But whereas in case (a)
the unconscious wish coincided with the conscious one, in case
(b) the discord between the unconscious and the conscious
–the repressed material and the ego–is revealed, and the
situation in the fairy-tale, of the three wishes which the fairy
offers to the married couple, is realized (see below, p. 535).

The gratification in respect of the fulfilment of the repressed
wish may prove to be so great that it balances the painful affects
adhering to the day-residues; the dream is then indifferent
in its affective tone, although it is on the one hand the fulfil-
ment of a wish, and on the other the fulfilment of a fear. Or
it may happen that the sleeping ego plays an even more
extensive part in the dream-formation, that it reacts with
violent resentment to the accomplished satisfaction of the
repressed wish, and even goes so far as to make an end of the
dream by means of anxiety. It is thus not difficult to recognize
that dreams of pain and anxiety are, in accordance with our

514

theory, just as much wish-fulfilments as are the straightforward
dreams of gratification.

Painful dreams may also be “punishment dreams.” It must
be admitted that the recognition of these dreams adds some-
thing that is, in a certain sense, new to the theory of dreams.
What is fulfilled by them is once more an unconscious wish–
the wish for the punishment of the dreamer for a repressed,
prohibited wish-impulse. To this extent these dreams comply
with the requirement here laid down: that the motive-power
behind the dream-formation must be furnished by a wish
belonging to the unconscious. But a finer psychological dissec-
tion allows us to recognize the difference between this and the
other wish-dreams. In the dreams of group (b) the unconscious
dream-forming wish belonged to the repressed material. In
the punishment-dreams it is likewise an unconscious wish,
but one which we must attribute not to the repressed material
but to the “ego.”

Punishment-dreams point, therefore, to the possibility of
a still more extensive participation of the ego in dream-
formation. The mechanism of dream-formation becomes
indeed in every way more transparent if in place of the anti-
thesis “conscious” and “unconscious,” we put the antithesis:
“ego” and “repressed.” This, however, cannot be done without
taking into account what happens in the psycho-
neuroses, and for this reason it has not been done in this book. Here I need
only remark that the occurrence of punishment-dreams is
not generally subject to the presence of painful day-residues.
They originate indeed most readily if the contrary is true, if
the thoughts which are day-residues are of a gratifying nature,
but express illicit gratifications. Of these thoughts nothing
then finds its way into the manifest dream except their contrary,
just as was the case in the dreams of group (a). Thus it would
be the essential characteristic of punishment-dreams that in
them it is not the unconscious wish from the repressed material
(from the system Ucs.) that is responsible for dream-
formation, but the punitive wish reacting against it, a wish pertaining
to the ego, even though it is unconscious (i.e. preconscious).¹

I will elucidate some of the foregoing observations by

¹Here is the place to insert the idea of the super-ego which was later recognized
by psychoanalysis.

515

means of a dream of my own, and above all I will try to show
how the dream-work deals with a day-residue involving painful
expectation :

Indistinct beginning. I tell my wife I have some news for her,
something very special. She becomes frightened, and does not wish to
hear it. I assure her that on the contrary it is something which will
please her greatly, and I begin to tell her that our son’s Officers’ Corps
has sent a sum of money (5,000 k.?) … something about honourable
mention … distribution … at the same time I have gone with
her into a small room, like a store-room, in order to fetch something
from it. Suddenly I see my son appear; he is not in uniform but rather
in a tight-fitting sports suit (like a seal?) with a small cap. He climbs
on to a basket which stands to one side near a chest, in order to put
something on this chest. I address him; no answer. It seems to me
that his face or forehead is bandaged, he arranges something in his
mouth, pushing something into it. Also his hair shows a glint of grey.
I reflect: Can he be so exhausted? And has he false teeth? Before I can
address him again I awake without anxiety, but with palpitations.
My clock points to 2.30 a.m.

To give a full analysis is once more impossible. I shall there-
fore confine myself to emphasizing some decisive points.
Painful expectations of the day had given occasion for this
dream; once again there had been no news for over a week
from my son, who was fighting at the Front. It is easy to see
that in the dream-content the conviction that he has been
killed or wounded finds expression. At the beginning of the
dream one can observe an energetic effort to replace the
painful thoughts by their contrary. I have to impart something
very pleasing, something about sending money, honourable
mention, and distribution. (The sum of money originates in a
gratifying incident of my medical practice; it is therefore
trying to lead the dream away altogether from its theme.)
But this effort fails. The boy’s mother has a presentiment of
something terrible and does not wish to listen. The disguises
are too thin; the reference to the material to be suppressed
shows through everywhere. If my son is killed, then his com-
rades will send back his property; I shall have to distribute
whatever he has left among his sisters, brothers and other
people. Honourable mention is frequently awarded to an
officer after he has died the “hero’s death.” The dream thus

516

strives to give direct expression to what it at first wished to
deny, whilst at the same time the wish-fulfilling tendency
reveals itself by distortion. (The change of locality in the dream
is no doubt to be understood as threshold symbolism, in line
with Silberer’s view.) We have indeed no idea what lends it
the requisite motive-power. But my son does not appear as
“falling” (on the field of battle) but “climbing.”—He was,
in fact, a daring mountaineer.—He is not in uniform, but in
a sports suit; that is, the place of the fatality now dreaded
has been taken by an accident which happened to him at
one time when he was ski-
running, when he fell and fractured
his thigh. But the nature of his costume, which makes him look
like a seal, recalls immediately a younger person, our comical
little grandson; the grey hair recalls his father, our son-
in
law, who has had a bad time in the War. What does this
signify? But let us leave this: the locality, a pantry, the chest,
from which he wants to take something (in the dream, to put
something on it), are unmistakable allusions to an accident
of my own, brought upon myself when I was between two and
three years of age. I climbed on a foot-
stool in the pantry, in
order to get something nice which was on a chest or table.
The foot-
stool tumbled over and its edge struck me behind the
lower jaw. I might very well have knocked all my teeth out.
At this point, an admonition presents itself: it serves you right
—like a hostile impulse against the valiant warrior. A pro-
founder analysis enables me to detect the hidden impulse,
which would be able to find satisfaction in the dreaded mishap
to my son. It is the envy of youth which the elderly man believes
that he has thoroughly stifled in actual life. There is no mis-
taking the fact that it was the very intensity of the painful
apprehension lest such a misfortune should really happen that
searched out for its alleviation such a repressed wish-
fulfilment.

I can now clearly define what the unconscious wish means
for the dream. I will admit that there is a whole class of dreams
in which the incitement originates mainly or even exclusively
from the residues of the day; and returning to the dream about
my friend Otto, I believe that even my desire to become at
last a professor extraordinarius would have allowed me to sleep
in peace that night, had not the day’s concern for my friend’s
health continued active. But this worry alone would not have

517

produced a dream; the motive-
power needed by the dream had
to be contributed by a wish, and it was the business of my
concern to find such a wish for itself, as the motive-power of
the dream. To put it figuratively, it is quite possible that a
day-thought plays the part of the entrepreneur in the dream;
but the entrepreneur, who, as we say, has the idea, and feels
impelled to realize it, can do nothing without capital; he needs
a capitalist who will defray the expense, and this capitalist, who
contributes the psychic expenditure for the dream, is invariably
and indisputably, whatever the nature of the waking thoughts,
a wish from the unconscious.

In other cases the capitalist himself is the entrepreneur; this,
indeed, seems to be the more usual case. An unconscious wish
is excited by the day’s work, and this now creates the dream.
And the dream-processes provide a parallel for all the other
possibilities of the economic relationship here used as an illus-
tration. Thus the entrepreneur may himself contribute a little
of the capital, or several entrepreneurs may seek the aid of the
same capitalist, or several capitalists may jointly supply the
capital required by the entrepreneurs. Thus there are dreams
sustained by more than one dream-wish, and many similar
variations, which may be readily imagined, and which are of
no further interest to us. What is still lacking to our discussion
of the dream-wish we shall only be able to complete later on.

The tertium comparationis in the analogies here employed,
the quantitative element of which an allotted amount is placed
at the free disposal of the dream, admits of a still closer appli-
cation to the elucidation of the dream-structure. As shown on
p. 294, we can recognize in most dreams a centre supplied
with a special sensory intensity. This is as a rule the direct
representation of the wish-fulfilment; for if we reverse the
displacements of the dream-work we find that the psychic
intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts is replaced by
the sensory intensity of the elements in the dream-content.
The elements in the neighbourhood of the wish-fulfilment
have often nothing to do with its meaning, but prove to be
the offshoots of painful thoughts which are opposed to the
wish. But owing to their connection with the central element,
often artificially established, they secure so large a share of
its sensory intensity as to become capable of representation. Thus

518

the representative energy of the wish-fulfilment diffuses itself
over a certain sphere of association, within which all elements
are raised to representation, including even those that are in
themselves without resources. In dreams containing several
dynamic wishes we can easily separate and delimit the spheres
of the individual wish-fulfilments, and we shall find that the
gaps in the dream are often of the nature of boundary-
zones.

Although the foregoing remarks have restricted the signifi-
cance of the day-residues for the dream, they are none the
less deserving of some further attention. For they must be a
necessary ingredient in dream-formation, inasmuch as experi-
ence reveals the surprising fact that every dream shows in
its content a connection with a recent waking impression,
often of the most indifferent kind. So far we have failed to
understand the necessity for this addition to the dream-
mixture (p. 181). This necessity becomes apparent only
when we bear in mind the part played by the unconscious
wish, and seek further information in the psychology of the
neuroses. We shall then learn that an unconscious idea, as such,
is quite incapable of entering into the preconscious, and that
it can exert an influence there only by establishing touch with
a harmless idea already belonging to the preconscious, to
which it transfers its intensity, and by which it allows itself
to be screened. This is the fact of transference, which furnishes
the explanation of so many surprising occurrences in the
psychic life of neurotics. The transference may leave the idea
from the preconscious unaltered, though the latter will thus
acquire an unmerited intensity, or it may force upon this
some modification derived from the content of the transferred
idea. I trust the reader will pardon my fondness for compari-
sons with daily life, but I feel tempted to say that the situation
for the repressed idea is like that of the American dentist in
Austria, who may not carry on his practice unless he can get
a duly installed doctor of medicine to serve him as a signboard
and legal “cover.” Further, just as it is not exactly the busiest
physicians who form such alliances with dental practitioners,
so in the psychic life the choice as regards covers for repressed
ideas does not fall upon such preconscious or conscious ideas
as have themselves attracted enough of the attention active
in the preconscious. The unconscious prefers to entangle with

519

its connections either those impressions and ideas of the
preconscious which have remained unnoticed as being indiffer-
ent or those which have immediately had attention withdrawn
from them again (by rejection). It is a well-known proposition
of the theory of associations, confirmed by all experience, that
ideas which have formed a very intimate connection in one
direction assume a negative type of attitude towards whole
groups of new connections. I have even attempted at one time
to base a theory of hysterical paralysis on this principle.
If we assume that the same need of transference on the part
of the repressed ideas, of which we have become aware through
the analysis of the neurosis, makes itself felt in dreams also,
we can at once explain two of the problems of the dream:
namely, that every dream-analysis reveals an interweaving
of a recent impression, and that this recent element is often of
the most indifferent character. We may add what we have
already learned elsewhere, that the reason why these recent
and indifferent elements so frequently find their way into the
dream-content as substitutes for the very oldest elements of
the dream-thoughts is that they have the least to fear from the
resisting censorship. But while this freedom from censorship
explains only the preference shown to the trivial elements,
the constant presence of recent elements points to the necessity
for transference. Both groups of impressions satisfy the demand
of the repressed ideas for material still free from associations,
the indifferent ones because they have offered no occasion for
extensive associations, and the recent ones because they have
not had sufficient time to form such associations.
We thus see that the day-residues, among which we may
now include the indifferent impressions, not only borrow
something from the Ucs. when they secure a share in dream-
formation–namely, the motive-power at the disposal of the
repressed wish–but they also offer to the unconscious something
that is indispensable to it, namely, the points of attachment
necessary for transference. If we wished to penetrate more
deeply into the psychic processes, we should have to throw a
clearer light on the play of excitations between the pre-
conscious and the unconscious, and indeed the study of the
psychoneuroses would impel us to do so; but dreams, as it
happens, give us no help in this respect.

520

Just one further remark as to the day-residues. There is no
doubt that it is really these that disturb our sleep, and not our
dreams which, on the contrary, strive to guard our sleep. But
we shall return to this point later.

So far we have discussed the dream-wish; we have traced it
back to the sphere of the Ucs., and have analysed its relation
to the day-residues, which, in their turn, may be either wishes,
or psychic impulses of any other kind, or simply recent
impressions. We have thus found room for the claims that can
be made for the dream-forming significance of our waking
mental activity in all its multifariousness. It might even prove
possible to explain, on the basis of our train of thought, those
extreme cases in which the dream, continuing the work of the
day, brings to a happy issue an unsolved problem of waking
life. We merely lack a suitable example to analyse, in order
to uncover the infantile or repressed source of wishes, the
tapping of which has so successfully reinforced the efforts of
the preconscious activity. But we are not a step nearer to
answering the question: Why is it that the unconscious can
furnish in sleep nothing more than the motive-power for a
wish-fulfilment? The answer to this question must elucidate
the psychic nature of the state of wishing; and it will be given
with the aid of the notion of the psychic apparatus.

We do not doubt that this apparatus, too, has only arrived
at its present perfection by a long process of evolution. Let us
attempt to restore it as it existed in an earlier stage of capacity.
From postulates to be confirmed in other ways we know that
at first the apparatus strove to keep itself as free from stimulation
as possible, and therefore, in its early structure, adopted the
arrangement of a reflex apparatus, which enabled it promptly
to discharge by the motor paths any sensory excitation reaching
it from without. But this simple function was disturbed by the
exigencies of life, to which the apparatus owes the impetus
toward further development. The exigencies of life first con-
fronted it in the form of the great physical needs. The excitation
aroused by the inner need seeks an outlet in motility, which
we may describe as “internal change” or “expression of the
emotions.” The hungry child cries or struggles helplessly. But
its situation remains unchanged; for the excitation proceeding
from the inner need has not the character of a momentary

521

impact, but of a continuing pressure. A change can occur only
if, in some way (in the case of the child by external assistance),
there is an experience of satisfaction, which puts an end to the
internal excitation. An essential constituent of this experi-
ence is the appearance of a certain percept (of food in our
example), the memory-image of which is henceforth associated
with the memory-trace of the excitation arising from the need.
Thanks to the established connection, there results, at the
next occurrence of this need, a psychic impulse which seeks
to revive the memory-image of the former percept, and to
re-evoke the former percept itself; that is, it actually seeks to
re-establish the situation of the first satisfaction. Such an
impulse is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the
perception constitutes the wish-fulfilment, and the full cathexis
of the perception, by the excitation springing from the need,
constitutes the shortest path to the wish-fulfilment. We may
assume a primitive state of the psychic apparatus in which this
path is actually followed, i.e. in which the wish ends in
hallucination. This first psychic activity therefore aims at an
identity of perception: that is, at a repetition of that perception
which is connected with the satisfaction of the need.

This primitive mental activity must have been modified by
bitter practical experience into a secondary and more appro-
priate activity. The establishment of identity of perception by
the short regressive path within the apparatus does not produce
the same result in another respect as follows upon cathexis
of the same perception coming from without. The satisfaction
does not occur, and the need continues. In order to make the
internal cathexis equivalent to the external one, the former
would have to be continuously sustained, just as actually
happens in the hallucinatory psychoses and in hunger-
phantasies, which exhaust their performance in maintaining their
hold on the object desired. In order to attain to more appropriate
use of the psychic energy, it becomes necessary to suspend the
full regression, so that it does not proceed beyond the memory-
image, and thence can seek other paths, leading ultimately to
the production of the desired identity from the side of the
outer world.¹ This inhibition, as well as the subsequent
deflection of the excitation, becomes the task of a second

¹ In other words: the introduction of a “test of reality” is recognized as necessary.

522

system, which controls voluntary motility, i.e. a system whose
activity first leads on to the use of motility for purposes
remembered in advance. But all this complicated mental
activity, which works its way from the memory-image to the
production of identity of perception via the outer world, merely
represents a roundabout way to wish-fulfilment made necessary by
experience.¹ Thinking is indeed nothing but a substitute for
the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream is called a wish-
fulfilment, this becomes something self-evident, since nothing
but a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity. The
dream, which fulfils its wishes by following the short regressive
path, has thereby simply preserved for us a specimen of the
primary method of operation of the psychic apparatus, which
has been abandoned as inappropriate. What once prevailed in
the waking state, when our psychic life was still young and
inefficient, seems to have been banished into our nocturnal life;
just as we still find in the nursery those discarded primitive
weapons of adult humanity, the bow and arrow. Dreaming is a
fragment of the superseded psychic life of the child. In the psychoses
those modes of operation of the psychic apparatus which are
normally suppressed in the waking state reassert themselves,
and thereupon betray their inability to satisfy our demands in
the outer world.²

The unconscious wish-impulses evidently strive to assert
themselves even during the day, and the fact of transference,
as well as the psychoses, tells us that they endeavour to force
their way through the preconscious system to consciousness
and the command of motility. Thus, in the censorship between
Ucs. and Pcs., which the dream forces us to assume, we must
recognize and respect the guardian of our psychic health. But
is it not carelessness on the part of this guardian to diminish
his vigilance at night, and to allow the suppressed impulses of
the Ucs. to achieve expression, thus again making possible the

¹ Le Lorrain justly extols the wish-fulfilments of dreams: “Sans fatigue sérieuse,
sans être obligé de recourir à cette lutte opiniâtre et longue qui use et corrode les jouissances
poursuivies.”

² I have further elaborated this train of thought elsewhere, where I have dis-
tinguished the two principles involved as the pleasure-principle and the reality-
principle. “Formulations regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning,”
Collected Papers, vol. iv, p. 13 (Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen
Geschehens in Ges. Schriften, Bd. v, s. 409).

523

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES

process of hallucinatory regression? I think not, for when the
critical guardian goes to rest—and we have proof that his
slumber is not profound—he takes care to close the gate to
motility. No matter what impulses from the usually inhibited
Ucs. may bustle about the stage, there is no need to interfere
with them; they remain harmless, because they are not in a
position to set in motion the motor apparatus which alone
can operate to produce any change in the outer world. Sleep
guarantees the security of the fortress which has to be guarded.
The state of affairs is less harmless when a displacement of
energies is produced, not by the decline at night in the energy
put forth by the critical censorship, but by the pathological
enfeeblement of the latter, or the pathological reinforcement
of the unconscious excitations, and this while the preconscious
is cathected and the gates of motility are open. The guardian
is then overpowered; the unconscious excitations subdue the
Pcs., and from the Pcs. they dominate our speech and action,
or they enforce hallucinatory regressions, thus directing an
apparatus not designed for them by virtue of the attraction
exerted by perceptions on the distribution of our psychic
energy. We call this condition psychosis.

We now find ourselves in the most favourable position for
continuing the construction of our psychological scaffolding,
which we left after inserting the two systems, Ucs. and Pcs.
However, we still have reason to give further consideration to
the wish as the sole psychic motive-power in the dream. We
have accepted the explanation that the reason why the dream
is in every case a wish-fulfilment is that it is a function of the
system Ucs., which knows no other aim than wish-fulfilment,
and which has at its disposal no forces other than the wish
impulses. Now if we want to continue for a single moment
longer to maintain our right to develop such far-reaching
psychological speculations from the facts of dream-interpreta-
tion, we are in duty bound to show that they insert the dream
into a context which can also embrace other psychic structures.
If there exists a system of the Ucs.—or something sufficiently
analogous for the purposes of our discussion—the dream cannot
be its sole manifestation; every dream may be a wish-fulfilment,
but there must be other forms of abnormal wish-fulfilment as
well as dreams. And in fact the theory of all psychoneurotic

524

symptoms culminates in the one proposition that they, too, must
be conceived as wish-fulfilments of the unconscious.¹ Our explanation
makes the dream only the first member of a series of the
greatest importance for the psychiatrist, the understanding of
which means the solution of the purely psychological part of
the psychiatric problem.² But in other members of this group
of wish-fulfilments—for example, in the hysterical symptoms—
I know of one essential characteristic which I have so far failed
to find in the dream. Thus, from the investigations often alluded
to in this treatise, I know that the formation of a hysterical
symptom needs a junction of both the currents of our psychic
life. The symptom is not merely the expression of a realized
unconscious wish; the latter must be joined by another wish
from the preconscious, which is fulfilled by the same symptom;
so that the symptom is at least doubly determined, once by
each of the conflicting systems. Just as in dreams, there is no
limit to further over-determination. The determination which
does not derive from the Ucs. is, as far as I can see, invariably
a thought-stream of reaction against the unconscious wish;
for example, a self-punishment. Hence I can say, quite
generally, that a hysterical symptom originates only where two
contrary wish-fulfilments, having their source in different psychic
systems, are able to meet in a single expression.³ Examples would
help us but little here, as nothing but a complete unveiling of
the complications in question can carry conviction. I will
therefore content myself with the bare assertion, and will cite
one example, not because it proves anything, but simply as an
illustration. The hysterical vomiting of a female patient proved,
on the one hand, to be the fulfilment of an unconscious
phantasy from the years of puberty—namely, the wish that she
might be continually pregnant, and have a multitude of
children; and this was subsequently supplemented by the wish

¹Expressed more exactly : One portion of the symptom corresponds to the uncon-
scious wish-fulfilment, while the other corresponds to the reaction-formation
opposed to it.

²Hughlings Jackson has expressed himself as follows : “Find out all about dreams,
and you will have found out all about insanity.”

³Cf. my latest formulation of the origin of hysterical symptoms in the treatise on
“Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality,” Collected Papers, vol. ii,
p. 51. This forms Chapter X in the English edition of Selected Papers on Hysteria
and Other Psychoneuroses.

525

that she might have them by as many fathers as possible.
Against this immoderate wish there arose a powerful defensive
reaction. But as by the vomiting the patient might have spoilt
her figure and her beauty, so that she would no longer find
favour in any man’s eyes, the symptom was also in keeping
with the punitive trend of thought, and so, being admissible
on both sides, it was allowed to become a reality. This is the
same way of acceding to a wish-fulfilment as the queen of
the Parthians was pleased to adopt in the case of the triumvir
Crassus. Believing that he had undertaken his campaign out
of greed for gold, she caused molten gold to be poured into
the throat of the corpse. “Here thou hast what thou hast
longed for!”

Of the dream we know as yet only that it expresses a
wish-fulfilment of the unconscious; and apparently the domin-
ant preconscious system permits this fulfilment when it has
compelled the wish to undergo certain distortions. We are,
moreover, not in fact in a position to demonstrate regularly
the presence of a train of thought opposed to the dream-wish,
which is realized in the dream as well as as its antagonist. Only
now and then have we found in dream-analyses signs of
reaction-products as, for instance, my affection for my friend
R. in the “dream of my uncle” (p. 144). But the contribution
from the preconscious which is missing here may be found in
another place. The dream can provide expression for a wish
from the Ucs. by means of all sorts of distortions, once the
dominant system has withdrawn itself into the wish to sleep,
and has realized this wish by producing the changes of cathexis
within the psychic apparatus which are within its power;
thereupon holding on to the wish in question for the whole
duration of sleep.¹

Now this persistent wish to sleep on the part of the pre-
conscious has a quite general facilitating effect on the formation
of dreams. Let us recall the dream of the father who, by the
gleam of light from the death-chamber, was led to conclude
that his child’s body might have caught fire. We have shown
that one of the psychic forces decisive in causing the father to
draw this conclusion in the dream instead of allowing himself

¹This idea has been borrowed from the theory of sleep of Liébault, who revived
hypnotic research in modern times (Du Sommeil provoqué, etc., Paris, 1889).

526

to be awakened by the gleam of light was the wish to prolong
the life of the child seen in the dream by one moment. Other
wishes originating in the repressed have probably escaped us,
for we are unable to analyse this dream. But as a second source
of motive-power in this dream we may add the father’s desire
to sleep, for, like the life of the child, the father’s sleep is
prolonged for a moment by the dream. The underlying motive
is: “Let the dream go on, or I must wake up.” As in this
dream, so in all others, the wish to sleep lends its support to
the unconscious wish. On page 130 we cited dreams which
were manifestly dreams of convenience. But in truth all dreams
may claim this designation. The efficacy of the wish to go on
sleeping is most easily recognized in the awakening dreams,
which so elaborate the external sensory stimulus that it becomes
compatible with the continuance of sleep; they weave it into
a dream in order to rob it of any claims it might make as a
reminder of the outer world. But this wish to go on sleeping
must also play its part in permitting all other dreams, which
can only act as disturbers of the state of sleep from within.
“Don’t worry; sleep on; it’s only a dream,” is in many cases
the suggestion of the Pcs. to consciousness when the dream gets
too bad; and this describes in a quite general way the attitude
of our dominant psychic activity towards dreaming, even
though the thought remains unuttered. I must draw the
conclusion that throughout the whole of our sleep we are just as
certain that we are dreaming as we are certain that we are sleeping.
It is imperative to disregard the objection that our conscious-
ness is never directed to the latter knowledge, and that it is
directed to the former knowledge only on special occasions,
when the censorship feels, as it were, taken by surprise. On
the contrary, there are persons in whom the retention at night
of the knowledge that they are sleeping and dreaming becomes
quite manifest, and who are thus apparently endowed with
the conscious faculty of guiding their dream-life. Such a
dreamer, for example, is dissatisfied with the turn taken by a
dream; he breaks it off without waking, and begins it afresh,
in order to continue it along different lines, just like a popular
author who, upon request, gives a happier ending to his play.
Or on another occasion, when the dream places him in a
sexually exciting situation, he thinks in his sleep: “I don’t want

527

to continue this dream and exhaust myself by an emission;
I would rather save it for a real situation.”

The Marquis Hervey (Vaschide, p. 139) declared that he
had gained such power over his dreams that he could accelerate
their course at will, and turn them in any direction he wished.
It seems that in him the wish to sleep had accorded a place to
another, a preconscious wish, the wish to observe his dreams
and to derive pleasure from them. Sleep is just as compatible
with such a wish-resolve as it is with some proviso as a condition
of waking up (wet-nurse’s sleep). We know, too, that in all
persons an interest in dreams greatly increases the number of
dreams remembered after waking.

Concerning other observations as to the guidance of dreams,
Ferenczi states: “The dream takes the thought that happens
to occupy our psychic life at the moment, and elaborates it
from all sides. It lets any given dream-picture drop when there
is a danger that the wish-fulfilment will miscarry, and attempts
a new kind of solution, until it finally succeeds in creating a
wish-fulfilment that satisfies in one compromise both instances
of the psychic life.”

D

WAKING CAUSED BY DREAMS. The Function of
DREAMS. The Anxiety-Dream

Now that we know that throughout the night the preconscious
is orientated to the wish to sleep, we can follow the dream-
process with proper understanding. But let us first summarize
what we already know about this process. We have seen that
day-residues are left over from the waking activity of the mind,
residues from which it has not been possible to withdraw all
cathexis. Either one of the unconscious wishes has been aroused
through the waking activity during the day or it so happens
that the two coincide; we have already discussed the multi-
farious possibilities. Either already during the day or only on
the establishment of the state of sleep the unconscious wish
has made its way to the day-residues, and has effected a
transference to them. Thus there arises a wish transferred to
recent material; or the suppressed recent wish is revived by a

528

reinforcement from the unconscious. This wish now endeavours
to make its way to consciousness along the normal path of the
thought processes, through the preconscious, to which indeed
it belongs by virtue of one of its constituent elements. It is,
however, confronted by the censorship which still subsists, and
to whose influence it soon succumbs. It now takes on the
distortion for which the way has already been paved by the
transference to recent material. So far it is on the way to
becoming something resembling an obsession, a delusion, or
the like, i.e. a thought reinforced by a transference, and
distorted in expression owing to the censorship. But its further
progress is now checked by the state of sleep of the preconscious;
this system has presumably protected itself against invasion
by diminishing its excitations. The dream-process, therefore,
takes the regressive course, which is just opened up by the
peculiarity of the sleeping state, and in so doing follows the
attraction exerted on it by memory-groups, which are, in part
only, themselves present as visual cathexis, not as translations
into the symbols of the later systems. On its way to regression
it acquires representability. The subject of compression will be
discussed later. The dream-process has by this time covered
the second part of its contorted course. The first part threads
its way progressively from the unconscious scenes or phantasies
to the preconscious, while the second part struggles back from
the boundary of the censorship to the tract of the perceptions.
But when the dream-process becomes a perception-content, it
has, so to speak, eluded the obstacle set up in the Pcs. by the
censorship and the sleeping state. It succeeds in drawing
attention to itself, and in being remarked by consciousness.
For consciousness, which for us means a sense-organ for the
apprehension of psychic qualities, can be excited in waking
life from two sources: firstly, from the periphery of the whole
apparatus, the perceptive system; and secondly, from the
excitations of pleasure and pain which emerge as the sole
psychic qualities yielded by the transpositions of energy in the
interior of the apparatus. All other processes in the ψ-systems,
even those in the preconscious, are devoid of all psychic
quality, and are therefore not objects of consciousness, inasmuch
as they do not provide either pleasure or pain for its perception.
We shall have to assume that these releases of pleasure and pain

529

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES

automatically regulate the course of the cathectic processes. But in order
to make possible more delicate performances, it subsequently
proved necessary to render the flow of ideas more independent
of pain-signals. To accomplish this, the Pcs. system needed
qualities of its own which could attract consciousness, and
most probably received them through the connection of the
preconscious processes with the memory-system of speech-
symbols, which was not devoid of quality. Through the
qualities of this system, consciousness, hitherto only a sense-
organ for perceptions, now becomes also a sense-organ for a
part of our thought-processes. There are now, as it were, two
sensory surfaces, one turned toward perception and the other
toward the preconscious thought-processes.

I must assume that the sensory surface of consciousness which
is turned to the preconscious is rendered far more unexcitable
by sleep than the surface turned toward the P-system. The
giving up of interest in the nocturnal thought-processes is, of
course, an appropriate procedure. Nothing is to happen in
thought; the preconscious wants to sleep. But once the dream
becomes perception, it is capable of exciting consciousness
through the qualities now gained. The sensory excitation
performs what is in fact its function; namely, it directs a part
of the cathectic energy available in the Pcs. to the exciting
cause in the form of attention. We must therefore admit that
the dream always has a waking effect–that is, it calls into
activity part of the quiescent energy of the Pcs. Under the
influence of this energy, it now undergoes the process which
we have described as secondary elaboration with a view to
coherence and comprehensibility. This means that the dream
is treated by this energy like any other perception-content; it
is subjected to the same anticipatory ideas as far as, at least,
as the material allows. As far as this third part of the
dream-process has any direction, this is once more pro-
gressive.

To avoid misunderstanding, it will not be amiss to say a few
words as to the temporal characteristics of these dream-
processes. In a very interesting discussion, evidently suggested
by Maury’s puzzling guillotine dream, Goblot tries to demon-
strate that a dream takes up no other time than the transition
period between sleeping and waking. The process of waking up

530

requires time; during this time the dream occurs. It is supposed
that the final picture of the dream is so vivid that it forces the
dreamer to wake; in reality it is so vivid only because when it
appears the dreamer is already very near waking. “Un rêve
c’est un réveil qui commence.”

It has already been pointed out by Dugas that Goblot, in
order to generalize his theory, was forced to ignore a great
many facts. There are also dreams from which we do not
awaken; for example, many dreams in which we dream that
we dream. From our knowledge of the dream-work, we can
by no means admit that it extends only over the period of
waking. On the contrary, we must consider it probable that
the first part of the dream-work is already begun during the
day, when we are still under the domination of the preconscious.
The second phase of the dream-work, viz. the alteration by
the censorship, the attraction exercised by unconscious scenes,
and the penetration to perception, continues probably all
through the night, and accordingly we may always be correct
when we report a feeling that we have been dreaming all
night, even although we cannot say what we have dreamed.
I do not, however, think that it is necessary to assume that up
to the time of becoming conscious the dream-processes really
follow the temporal sequence which we have described; viz.
that there is first the transferred dream-wish, then the process
of distortion due to the censorship, and then the change of
direction to regression, etc. We were obliged to construct such
a sequence for the sake of description; in reality, however, it
is probably rather a question of simultaneously trying this path
and that, and of the excitation fluctuating to and fro, until
finally, because it has attained the most apposite concentration,
one particular grouping remains in the field. Certain personal
experiences even incline me to believe that the dream-
work often requires more than one day and one night to produce
its result, in which case the extraordinary art manifested in
the construction of the dream is shorn of its miraculous
character. In my opinion, even the regard for the compre-
hensibility of the dream as a perceptual event may exert its
influence before the dream attracts consciousness to itself.
From this point, however, the process is accelerated, since the
dream is henceforth subjected to the same treatment as any

531

other perception. It is like fireworks, which require hours for
their preparation and then flare up in a moment.

Through the dream-work, the dream-process now either
gains sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself and
to arouse the preconscious (quite independently of the time or
profundity of sleep), or its intensity is insufficient, and it must
wait in readiness until attention, becoming more alert im-
mediately before waking, meets it half-way. Most dreams seem
to operate with relatively slight psychic intensities, for they
wait for the process of waking. This, then, explains the fact
that as a rule we perceive something dreamed if we are suddenly
roused from a deep sleep. Here, as well as in spontaneous
waking, our first glance lights upon the perception-content
created by the dream-work, while the next falls on that
provided by the outer world.

But of greater theoretical interest are those dreams which
are capable of waking us in the midst of our sleep. We may
bear in mind the purposefulness which can be demonstrated
in all other cases, and ask ourselves why the dream, that is,
the unconscious wish, is granted the power to disturb our
sleep, i.e. the fulfilment of the preconscious wish. The explana-
tion is probably to be found in certain relations of energy
which we do not yet understand. If we did so, we should
probably find that the freedom given to the dream and the
expenditure upon it of a certain detached attention represent
a saving of energy as against the alternative case of the
unconscious having to be held in check at night just as it is
during the day. As experience shows, dreaming, even if it
interrupts our sleep several times a night, still remains com-
patible with sleep. We wake up for a moment, and immediately
fall asleep again. It is like driving off a fly in our sleep; we
awake ad hoc. When we fall asleep again we have removed the
cause of disturbance. The familiar examples of the sleep of
wet-nurses, etc., show that the fulfilment of the wish to sleep
is quite compatible with the maintenance of a certain amount
of attention in a given direction.

But we must here take note of an objection which is based
on a greater knowledge of the unconscious processes. We have
ourselves described the unconscious wishes as always active,
whilst nevertheless asserting that in the daytime they are not

532

strong enough to make themselves perceptible. But when the
state of sleep supervenes, and the unconscious wish has shown
its power to form a dream, and with it to awaken the pre-
conscious, why does this power lapse after cognisance has been
taken of the dream? Would it not seem more probable that
the dream should continually renew itself, like the disturbing
fly which, when driven away, takes pleasure in returning again
and again? What justification have we for our assertion that
the dream removes the disturbance to sleep?

It is quite true that the unconscious wishes are always active.
They represent paths which are always practicable, whenever
a quantum of excitation makes use of them. It is indeed an
outstanding peculiarity of the unconscious processes that they
are indestructible. Nothing can be brought to an end in the
unconscious; nothing is past or forgotten. This is impressed
upon us emphatically in the study of the neuroses, and especially
of hysteria. The unconscious path of thought which leads to
the discharge through an attack is forthwith passable again
when there is a sufficient accumulation of excitation. The
mortification suffered thirty years ago operates, after having
gained access to the unconscious sources of affect, during all
these thirty years as though it were a recent experience.
Whenever its memory is touched, it revives, and shows itself
to be cathected with excitation which procures a motor
discharge for itself in an attack. It is precisely here that
psychotherapy must intervene, its task being to ensure that
the unconscious processes are settled and forgotten. Indeed,
the fading of memories and the weak affect of impressions
which are no longer recent, which we are apt to take as
self-
evident, and to explain as a primary effect of time on our
psychic memory-residues, are in reality secondary changes
brought about by laborious work. It is the preconscious that
accomplishes this work; and the only course which psychotherapy
can pursue is to bring the Ucs. under the dominion of the Pcs.

There are, therefore, two possible issues for any single
unconscious excitation-process. Either it is left to itself, in which
case it ultimately breaks through somewhere and secures, on
this one occasion, a discharge for its excitation into motility,
or it succumbs to the influence of the preconscious, and through
this its excitation becomes bound instead of being discharged.

533

It is the latter case that occurs in the dream-process. The cathexis
from the Pcs. which goes to meet the dream once this has
attained to perception, because it has been drawn thither by
the excitation of consciousness, binds the unconscious excitation
of the dream and renders it harmless as a disturber of sleep.
When the dreamer wakes up for a moment, he has really
chased away the fly that threatened to disturb his sleep. We
may now begin to suspect that it is really more expedient and
economical to give way to the unconscious wish, to leave clear
its path to regression so that it may form a dream, and then
to bind and dispose of this dream by means of a small outlay
of preconscious work, than to hold the unconscious in check
throughout the whole period of sleep. It was, indeed, to be
expected that the dream, even if originally it was not a
purposeful process, would have seized upon some definite
function in the play of forces of the psychic life. We now see
what this function is. The dream has taken over the task of
bringing the excitation of the Ucs., which had been left free,
back under the domination of the preconscious; it thus dis-
charges the excitation of the Ucs. acts as a safety-valve for
the latter, and at the same time, by a slight outlay of waking
activity, secures the sleep of the preconscious. Thus, like the
other psychic formations of its group, the dream offers itself
as a compromise, serving both systems simultaneously, by
fulfilling the wishes of both, in so far as they are mutually
compatible. A glance at Robert’s “elimination theory,” referred
to on page 89, will show that we must agree with this author
on his main point, namely, the determination of the function
of dreams, though we differ from him in our general pre-
suppositions and in our estimation of the dream-process.¹⁾

¹⁾Is this the only function which we can attribute to dreams? I know of no other.
A. Maeder, to be sure, has endeavoured to claim for the dream yet other
“secondary” functions. He started from the just observation that many dreams
contain attempts to provide solutions of conflicts, which are afterwards actually
carried through. They thus behave like preparatory practice for waking activities.
He therefore drew a parallel between dreaming and the play of animals and
children, which is to be conceived as a training of the inherited instincts, and a
preparation for their later serious activity, thus setting up a fonction ludique for the
dream. A little while before Maeder, Alfred Adler likewise emphasized the function
of “thinking ahead” in the dream. (An analysis which I published in 1905 con-
tained a dream which may be conceived as a resolution-dream, which was
repeated night after night until it was realized.)

But an obvious reflection must show us that this “secondary” function of the

534

The above qualification—in so far as the two wishes are mutually
compatible—contains a suggestion that there may be cases in
which the function of the dream fails. The dream-process is,
to begin with, admitted as a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious,
but if this attempted wish-fulfilment disturbs the preconscious
so profoundly that the latter can no longer maintain its state
of rest, the dream has broken the compromise, and has failed
to perform the second part of its task. It is then at once broken
off, and replaced by complete awakening. But even here it is
not really the fault of the dream if, though at other times the
guardian, it has now to appear as the disturber of sleep, nor
need this prejudice us against its averred purposive character.
This is not the only instance in the organism in which a
contrivance that is usually to the purpose becomes inappro-
priate and disturbing so soon as something is altered in the
conditions which engender it; the disturbance, then, at all
events serves the new purpose of indicating the change, and of
bringing into play against it the means of adjustment of the
organism. Here, of course, I am thinking of the anxiety-dream,
and lest it should seem that I try to evade this witness against
the theory of wish-fulfilment whenever I encounter it, I will
at least give some indications as to the explanation of the
anxiety-dream.

That a psychic process which develops anxiety may still be
a wish-fulfilment has long ceased to imply any contradiction
for us. We may explain this occurrence by the fact that the wish
belongs to one system (the Ucs.), whereas the other system
(the Pcs.) has rejected and suppressed it.¹⁾ The subjection of

dream has no claim to recognition within the frame-
pretation. Thinking ahead, making resolutions, sketching out attempted solutions
which can then perhaps be realized in waking life—these and many more per-
formances are functions of the unconscious and preconscious activities of the
mind which continue as “day-residues” in the sleeping state, and can then combine
with an unconscious wish to form a dream (see p. 519). The function of “thinking
ahead” in the dream is thus rather a function of preconscious waking thought,
the result of which may be disclosed to us by the analysis of dreams or other
phenomena. After the dream has so long been fused with its manifest content, one
must now guard against confusing it with the latent dream-thoughts.

¹⁾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

535

the Ucs. by the Pcs. is not thoroughgoing even in perfect
psychic health; the extent of this suppression indicates the
degree of our psychic normality. Neurotic symptoms indicate
to us that the two systems are in mutual conflict; the symptoms
are the result of a compromise in this conflict, and they
temporarily put an end to it. On the one hand they afford
the Ucs. a way out for the discharge of its excitation-
serve it as a kind of sally-gate-while, on the other hand, they
give the Pcs. the possibility of dominating the Ucs. in some
degree. It is instructive to consider, for example, the significance
of a hysterical phobia, or of agoraphobia. A neurotic is said to
be incapable of crossing the street alone, and this we should
rightly call a “symptom.” Let someone now remove this
symptom by constraining him to this action which he deems
himself incapable of performing. The result will be an attack
of anxiety, just as an attack of anxiety in the street has often
been the exciting cause of the establishment of an agoraphobia.
We thus learn that the symptom has been constituted in order
to prevent the anxiety from breaking out. The phobia is thrown
up before the anxiety like a frontier fortress.

We cannot enlarge further on this subject unless we examine
the rôle of the affects in these processes, which can only be
done here imperfectly. We will therefore affirm the proposition
that the principal reason why the suppression of the Ucs.
becomes necessary is that if the movement of ideas in the Ucs.
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!” Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, London, 1929, pp. 182–183.

536

were allowed to run its course, it would develop an affect
which originally had the character of pleasure, but which, since
the process of repression, bears the character of pain. The aim,
as well as the result, of the suppression is to prevent the
development of this pain. The suppression extends to the idea-
content of the Ucs., because the liberation of pain might
emanate from this idea-
content. We here take as our basis a
quite definite assumption as to the nature of the development
of affect. This is regarded as a motor or secretory function, the
key to the innervation of which is to be found in the ideas of
the Ucs. Through the domination of the Pcs. these ideas are
as it were strangled, that is, inhibited from sending out the
impulse that would develop the affect. The danger which
arises if cathexis by the Pcs. ceases thus consists in the fact
that the unconscious excitations would liberate an affect that–
in consequence of the repression that has previously occurred–
could only be felt as pain or anxiety.

This danger is released if the dream-
process is allowed to
have its own way. The conditions for its realization are, that
repressions shall have occurred, and that the suppressed wish-
impulses can become sufficiently strong. They therefore fall
entirely outside the psychological framework of dream-
formation. Were it not for the fact that our theme is connected
by just one factor with the theme of the development of
anxiety, namely, by the setting free of the Ucs. during sleep,
I could refrain from the discussion of the anxiety-
dream
altogether, and thus avoid all the obscurities involved in it.

The theory of the anxiety-
dream belongs, as I have already
repeatedly stated, to the psychology of the neuroses. I might
further add that anxiety in dreams is an anxiety-
problem and
not a dream-
problem. Having once exhibited the point of
contact of the psychology of the neuroses with the theme of
the dream-
process, we have nothing further to do with it.
There is only one thing left which I can do. Since I have
asserted that neurotic anxiety has its origin in sexual sources,
I can subject anxiety-
dreams to analysis in order to demonstrate
the sexual material in their dream-
thoughts.

For good reasons I refrain from citing any of the examples
so abundantly placed at my disposal by neurotic patients, and
prefer to give some anxiety-
dreams of children.

537

Personally, I have had no real anxiety-
dream for decades,
but I do recall one from my seventh or eighth year which I
subjected to interpretation some thirty years later. The dream
was very vivid, and showed my beloved mother, with a peculiarly
calm, sleeping countenance, carried into the room and laid on the bed
by two (or three) persons with birds’ beaks. I awoke crying and
screaming, and disturbed my parents’ sleep. The peculiarly
draped, excessively tall figures with beaks I had taken from
the illustrations of Philippson’s Bible; I believe they represented
deities with the heads of sparrowhawks from an Egyptian
tomb-relief. The analysis yielded, however, also the recollection
of a house-porter’s boy, who used to play with us children on
a meadow in front of the house; I might add that his name
was Philip. It seemed to me then that I first heard from this
boy the vulgar word signifying sexual intercourse, which is
replaced among educated persons by the Latin word coitus,
but which the dream plainly enough indicates by the choice
of the birds’ heads.¹ I must have guessed the sexual significance
of the word from the look of my worldly-wise teacher. My
mother’s expression in the dream was copied from the
countenance of my grandfather, whom I had seen a few days
before his death snoring in a state of coma. The interpretation
of the secondary elaboration in the dream must therefore have
been that my mother was dying; the tomb-relief, too, agrees with
this. I awoke with this anxiety, and could not calm myself
until I had waked my parents. I remember that I suddenly
became calm when I saw my mother; it was as though I had
needed the assurance: then she is not dead. But this secondary
interpretation of the dream had only taken place when the
influence of the developed anxiety was already at work. I was
not in a state of anxiety because I had dreamt that my mother
was dying; I interpreted the dream in this manner in the
preconscious elaboration because I was already under the
domination of the anxiety. The latter, however, could be
traced back, through the repression, to a dark, plainly sexual
craving, which had found appropriate expression in the visual
content of the dream.

A man twenty-seven years of age, who had been seriously ill

¹⁾The German of the word bird is “Vogel,” which gives origin to the vulgar ex-
pression vögeln, denoting sexual intercourse.—TRANS.]

538

for a year, had repeatedly dreamed, between the ages of
eleven and thirteen, dreams attended with great anxiety, to
the effect that a man with a hatchet was running after him; he wanted
to run away, but seemed to be paralysed, and could not move from the
spot. This may be taken as a good and typical example of a
very common anxiety-dream, free from any suspicion of a
sexual meaning. In the analysis, the dreamer first thought of
a story told him by his uncle (chronologically later than the
dream), viz. that he was attacked at night in the street by a
suspicious-looking individual; and he concluded from this
association that he might have heard of a similar episode at
the time of the dream. In association with the hatchet, he
recalled that during this period of his life he once hurt his
hand with a hatchet while chopping wood. This immediately
reminded him of his relations with his younger brother, whom
he used to maltreat and knock down. He recalled, in particular,
one occasion when he hit his brother’s head with his boot
and made it bleed, and his mother said: “I’m afraid he will
kill him one day.” While he seemed to be thus held by the
theme of violence, a memory from his ninth year suddenly
emerged. His parents had come home late, and had gone to
bed, whilst he was pretending to be asleep. He soon heard
panting, and other sounds that seemed to him mysterious, and
he could also guess the position of his parents in bed. His
further thoughts showed that he had established an analogy
between this relation between his parents and his own relation
to his younger brother. He subsumed what was happening
between his parents under the notion of “an act of violence and
a fight.” The fact that he had frequently noticed blood in his
mother’s bed corroborated this conception.

That the sexual intercourse of adults appears strange and
alarming to children who observe it, and arouses anxiety in
them, is, I may say, a fact established by everyday experience.
I have explained this anxiety on the ground that we have here
a sexual excitation which is not mastered by the child’s under-
standing, and which probably also encounters repulsion
because their parents are involved, and is therefore transformed
into anxiety. At a still earlier period of life the sexual impulse
towards the parent of opposite sex does not yet suffer repression
but, as we have seen (p. 181–4) expresses itself freely.

539

For the night terrors with hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) so
frequent in children I should without hesitation offer the same
explanation. These, too, can only be due to misunderstood
and rejected sexual impulses which, if recorded, would probably
show a temporal periodicity, since an intensification of sexual
libido may equally be produced by accidentally exciting im-
pressions and by spontaneous periodic processes of development.

I have not the necessary observational material for the full
demonstration of this explanation.¹ On the other hand,
pediatrists seem to lack the point of view which alone makes
intelligible the whole series of phenomena, both from the
somatic and from the psychic side. To illustrate by a comical
example how closely, if one is made blind by the blinkers of
medical mythology, one may pass by the understanding of
such cases, I will cite a case which I found in a thesis on pavor
nocturnus (Debacker, 1881, p. 66).

A boy of thirteen, in delicate health, began to be anxious
and dreamy; his sleep became uneasy, and once almost every
week it was interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with
hallucinations. The memory of these dreams was always very
distinct. Thus he was able to relate that the devil had shouted
at him: “Now we have you, now we have you!” and then
there was a smell of pitch and brimstone, and the fire burned
his skin. From this dream he woke in terror; at first he could
not cry out; then his voice came back to him, and he was
distinctly heard to say: “No, no, not me; I haven’t done
anything,” or: “Please, don’t; I will never do it again!” At
other times he said: “Albert has never done that!” Later he
avoided undressing, “because the fire attacked him only when
he was undressed.” In the midst of these evil dreams, which
were endangering his health, he was sent into the country,
where he recovered in the course of eighteen months. At the
age of fifteen he confessed one day: “Je n’osais pas l’avouer, mais
j’éprouvais continuellement des picotements et des surexcitations aux
parties;² à la fin, cela m’énervait tant que plusieurs fois j’ai pensé me
jeter par la fenêtre du dortoir.”

It is, of course, not difficult to guess: 1. That the boy had

¹This material has since been provided in abundance by the literature of psycho-
analysis.

²The emphasis is my own, though the meaning is plain enough without it.

540

practised masturbation in former years, that he had probably
denied it, and was threatened with severe punishment for his
bad habit. (His confession: Je ne le ferai plus; his denial: Albert
n’a jamais fait ça.) 2. That under the advancing pressure of
puberty the temptation to masturbate was reawakened through
the titillation of the genitals. 3. That now, however, there
arose within him a struggle for repression, which suppressed
the libido and transformed it into anxiety, and that this
anxiety now gathered up the punishments with which he was
originally threatened.

Let us, on the other hand, see what conclusions were drawn
by the author (p. 69):

“1. It is clear from this observation that the influence of
puberty may produce in a boy of delicate health a con-
dition of extreme weakness, and that this may lead to a
very marked cerebral anaemia.¹

“2. This cerebral anaemia produces an alteration of charac-
ter, demonomaniacal hallucinations, and very violent
nocturnal, and perhaps also diurnal, states of anxiety.

“3. The demonomania and the self-reproaches of the boy
can be traced to the influences of a religious education
which had acted upon him as a child.

“4. All manifestations disappeared as a result of a lengthy
sojourn in the country, bodily exercise, and the return
of physical strength after the termination of puberty.

“5. Possibly an influence predisposing to the development
of the boy’s cerebral state may be attributed to heredity
and to the father’s former syphilis.”

Then finally come the concluding remarks: “Nous avons fait
entrer cette observation dans le cadre délires apyrétiques d’inanition, car
c’est à l’ischémie cérébrale que nous rattachons cet état particulier.”

E

THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES. REPRESSION

In attempting to penetrate more profoundly into the psychology
of the dream-processes, I have undertaken a difficult task, to

¹ The italics are mine.

541

which, indeed, my powers of exposition are hardly adequate.
To reproduce the simultaneity of so complicated a scheme in
terms of a successive description, and at the same time to make
each part appear free from all assumptions, goes fairly beyond
my powers. I have now to atone for the fact that in my
exposition of the psychology of dreams I have been unable to
follow the historic development of my own insight. The
lines of approach to the comprehension of the dream were
laid down for me by previous investigations into the psychology
of the neuroses, to which I should not refer here, although I
am constantly obliged to do so; whereas I should like to work
in the opposite direction, starting from the dream, and then
proceeding to establish its junction with the psychology of
the neuroses. I am conscious of all the difficulties which
this involves for the reader, but I know of no way to avoid
them.

Since I am dissatisfied with this state of affairs, I am glad to
dwell upon another point of view, which would seem to enhance
the value of my efforts. As was shown in the introductory
section, I found myself confronted with a theme which had
been marked by the sharpest contradictions on the part of those
who had written on it. In the course of our treatment of the
problems of the dream, room has been found for most of these
contradictory views. We have been compelled to take decided
exception to two only of the views expressed: namely, that
the dream is a meaningless process, and that it is a somatic
process. Apart from these, we have been able to find a place
for the truth of all the contradictory opinions at one point or
another of the complicated tissue of the facts, and we have
been able to show that each expressed something genuine and
correct. That our dreams continue the impulses and interests
of waking life has been generally confirmed by the discovery
of the hidden dream-thoughts. These concern themselves only
with things that seem to us important and of great interest.
Dreams never occupy themselves with trifles. But we have
accepted also the opposite view, namely, that the dream
gathers up the indifferent residues of the day, and cannot seize
upon any important interest of the day until it has in some
measure withdrawn itself from waking activity. We have found
that this holds true of the dream-content, which by means of

542

distortion gives the dream-thought an altered expression. We
have said that the dream-process, owing to the nature of the
mechanism of association, finds it easier to obtain possession
of recent or indifferent material, which has not yet been put
under an embargo by our waking mental activity; and that
on account of the censorship it transfers the psychic intensity
of the significant but also objectionable material to the
indifferent. The hypermnesia of the dream and its ability to
dispose of infantile material have become the main foundations
of our doctrine; in our theory of dreams we have assigned to
a wish of infantile origin the part of the indispensable motive-
power of dream-formation. It has not, of course, occurred to
us to doubt the experimentally demonstrated significance of
external sensory stimuli during sleep; but we have placed this
material in the same relation to the dream-wish as the thought-
residues left over from our waking activity. We need not dispute
the fact that the dream interprets objective sensory stimuli after
the manner of an illusion; but we have supplied the motive
for this interpretation, which has been left indeterminate by
other writers. The interpretation proceeds in such a way that
the perceived object is rendered harmless as a source of
disturbance of sleep, whilst it is made usable for the wish-
fulfilment. Though we do not admit as a special source of
dreams the subjective state of excitation of the sensory organs
during sleep (which seems to have been demonstrated by
Trumbull Ladd), we are nevertheless able to explain this state
of excitation by the regressive revival of the memories active
behind the dream. As to the internal organic sensations, which
are wont to be taken as the cardinal point of the explanation
of dreams, these, too, find a place in our conception, though
indeed a more modest one. These sensations—the sensations of
falling, of soaring, or of being inhibited—represent an ever-
ready material, which the dream-work can employ to express
the dream-
thought as often as need arises.

That the dream-process is a rapid and momentary one is,
we believe, true as regards the perception by consciousness of
the preformed dream-content; but we have found that the
preceding portions of the dream-process probably follow a slow,
fluctuating course. As for the riddle of the superabundant
dream-
content compressed into the briefest moment of time,

543

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM–PROCESSES

we have been able to contribute the explanation that the
dream seizes upon ready-made formations of the psychic life.
We have found that it is true that dreams are distorted and
mutilated by the memory, but that this fact presents no
difficulties, as it is only the last manifest portion of a process
of distortion which has been going on from the very beginning
of the dream-
work. In the embittered controversy, which has
seemed irreconcilable, whether the psychic life is asleep at
night, or can make the same use of all its faculties as during
the day, we have been able to conclude that both sides are
right, but that neither is entirely so. In the dream-thoughts we
found evidence of a highly complicated intellectual activity,
operating with almost all the resources of the psychic apparatus ;
yet it cannot be denied that these dream-thoughts have
originated during the day, and it is indispensable to assume
that there is a sleeping state of the psychic life. Thus, even the
doctrine of partial sleep received its due ; but we have found
the characteristic feature of the sleeping state not in the
disintegration of the psychic system of connections, but in the
special attitude adopted by the psychic system which is
dominant during the day–the attitude of the wish to sleep.
The deflection from the outer world retains its significance for
our view, too ; though not the only factor at work, it helps to
make possible the regressive course of the dream-representation.
The abandonment of voluntary guidance of the flow of ideas
is incontestable ; but psychic life does not thereby become
aimless, for we have seen that upon relinquishment of the
voluntary directing ideas, involuntary ones take charge. On
the other hand, we have not only recognized the loose
associative connection of the dream, but have brought a far
greater area within the scope of this kind of connection than
could have been suspected ; we have, however, found it merely
an enforced substitute for another, a correct and significant
type of association. To be sure, we too have called the dream
absurd ; but examples have shown us how wise the dream is
when it simulates absurdity. As regards the functions that have
been attributed to the dream, we are able to accept them all.
That the dream relieves the mind, like a safety-valve, and that,
as Robert has put it, all kinds of harmful material are rendered
harmless by representation in the dream, not only coincides

544

exactly with our own theory of the twofold wish-fulfilment in
the dream, but in its very wording becomes more intelligible
for us than it is for Robert himself. The free indulgence of the
psyche in the play of its faculties is reproduced in our theory
as the non-interference of the preconscious activity with the
dream. The “return to the embryonal standpoint of psychic
life in the dream,” and Havelock Ellis’s remark that the dream
is “an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts,” appear
to us as happy anticipations of our own exposition, which
asserts that primitive modes of operation that are suppressed
during the day play a part in the formation of dreams. We can
fully identify ourselves with Sully’s statement, that “our dreams
bring back again our earlier and successively developed per-
sonalities, our old ways of regarding things, with impulses and
modes of reaction which ruled us long ago”; and for us, as for
Delage, the suppressed material becomes the mainspring of the
dream.

We have fully accepted the rôle that Scherner ascribes to
the dream-phantasy, and his own interpretations; but we have
been obliged to transpose them, as it were, to another part of
the problem. It is not the dream that creates the phantasy,
but the activity of unconscious phantasy that plays the leading
part in the formation of the dream-thoughts. We remain
indebted to Scherner for directing us to the source of the
dream-thoughts; but almost everything that he ascribes to the
dream-work is attributable to the activity of the unconscious
during the day, which instigates dreams no less than neurotic
symptoms. The dream-work we had to separate from this
activity as something quite different and far more closely
controlled. Finally, we have by no means renounced the
relation of the dream to psychic disturbances, but have given
it, on new ground, a more solid foundation.

Held together by the new features in our theory as by a
superior unity, we find the most varied and most contradictory
conclusions of other writers fitting into our structure; many of
them are given a different turn, but only a few of them are
wholly rejected. But our own structure is still unfinished. For
many obscure questions in which we have
involved ourselves by our advance into the dark regions of
psychology, we are now, it would seem, embarrassed by a new

545

contradiction. On the one hand, we have made it appear that
the dream-thoughts proceed from perfectly normal psychic
activities, but on the other hand we have found among the
dream-thoughts a number of entirely abnormal mental pro-
cesses, which extend also to the dream-content, and which we
reproduce in the interpretation of the dream. All that we have
termed the “dream-work” seems to depart so completely from
the psychic processes which we recognize as correct and
appropriate that the severest judgments expressed by the
writers mentioned as to the low level of psychic achievement
of dreams must appear well founded.

Here, perhaps, only further investigations can provide an
explanation and set us on the right path. Let me pick out for
renewed attention one of the constellations which lead to
dream-formation.

We have learned that the dream serves as a substitute for a
number of thoughts derived from our daily life, and which fit
together with perfect logic. We cannot, therefore, doubt that
these thoughts have their origin in our normal mental life. All
the qualities which we value in our thought-processes, and
which mark them out as complicated performances of a high
order, we shall find repeated in the dream-thoughts. There is,
however, no need to assume that this mental work is performed
during sleep; such an assumption would badly confuse the
conception of the psychic state of sleep to which we have
hitherto adhered. On the contrary, these thoughts may very
well have their origin in the daytime, and, unremarked by our
consciousness, may have gone on from their first stimulus until,
at the onset of sleep, they have reached completion. If we are
to conclude anything from this state of affairs, it can only be
that it proves that the most complex mental operations are possible
without the co-operation of consciousness—a truth which we have
had to learn anyhow from every psychoanalysis of a patient
suffering from hysteria or obsessions. These dream-thoughts are
certainly not in themselves incapable of consciousness; if we
have not become conscious of them during the day, this may
have been due to various reasons. The act of becoming conscious
depends upon a definite psychic function—attention—being
brought to bear. This seems to be available only in a deter-
minate quantity, which may have been diverted from the train

546

of thought in question by other aims. Another way in which
such trains of thought may be withheld from consciousness is
the following: From our conscious reflection we know that,
when applying our attention, we follow a particular course.
But if that course leads us to an idea which cannot withstand
criticism, we break off, and allow the cathexis of attention to
drop. Now it would seem that the train of thought thus started
and abandoned may continue to develop without our attention
returning to it, unless at some point it attains a specially high
intensity which compels attention. An initial conscious rejection
by our judgment, on the ground of incorrectness or uselessness
for the immediate purpose of the act of thought, may therefore
be the cause of a thought-process going on unnoticed by
consciousness until the onset of sleep.

Let us now recapitulate: We call such a train of thought a
preconscious train, and we believe it to be perfectly correct,
and that it may equally well be a merely neglected train or
one that has been interrupted and suppressed. Let us also state
in plain terms how we visualize the movement of our thought.
We believe that a certain quantity of excitation, which we
call “cathectic energy,” is displaced from a purposive idea
along the association paths selected by this directing idea. A
“neglected” train of thought has received no such cathexis,
and the cathexis has been withdrawn from one that was
“suppressed” or “rejected”; both have thus been left to their
own excitations. The train of thought cathected by some aim
becomes able under certain conditions to attract the attention
of consciousness, and by the mediation of consciousness it then
receives “hyper-cathexis.” We shall be obliged presently to
elucidate our assumptions as to the nature and function of
consciousness.

A train of thought thus incited in the Pcs. may either
disappear spontaneously, or it may continue. The former
eventuality we conceive as follows: it diffuses its energy through
all the association paths emanating from it, and throws the
entire chain of thoughts into a state of excitation, which
continues for a while, and then subsides, through the excitation
which had called for discharge being transformed into dormant
cathexis. If this first eventuality occurs, the process has no
further significance for dream-formation. But other directing

547

ideas are lurking in our preconscious, which have their source
in our unconscious and ever-active wishes. These may gain
control of the excitation in the circle of thoughts thus left to
itself, establish a connection between it and the unconscious
wish, and transfer to it the energy inherent in the unconscious
wish. Henceforth the neglected or suppressed train of thought
is in a position to maintain itself, although this reinforcement
gives it no claim to access to consciousness. We may say, then,
that the hitherto preconscious train of thought has been drawn
into the unconscious.

Other constellations leading to dream-formation might be as
follows: The preconscious train of thought might have been
connected from the beginning with the unconscious wish, and
for that reason might have met with rejection by the dominating
aim-cathexis. Or an unconscious wish might become active for
other (possibly somatic) reasons, and of its own accord seek a
transference to the psychic residues not cathected by the Pcs.
All three cases have the same result: there is established in the
preconscious a train of thought which, having been abandoned
by the preconscious cathexis, has acquired cathexis from the
unconscious wish.

From this point onward the train of thought is subjected to
a series of transformations which we no longer recognize as
normal psychic processes, and which give a result that we find
strange, a psychopathological formation. Let us now emphasize
and bring together these transformations:–

1. The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of
discharge in their entirety, and pass from one idea to another,
so that individual ideas are formed which are endowed with
great intensity. Through the repeated occurrence of this process,
the intensity of an entire train of thought may ultimately be
concentrated in a single conceptual unit. This is the fact of
compression or condensation with which we became acquainted
when investigating the dream-work. It is condensation that is
mainly responsible for the strange impression produced by
dreams, for we know of nothing analogous to it in the normal
psychic life that is accessible to consciousness. We get here, too,
ideas which are of great psychic significance as nodal points or
as end-results of whole chains of thought, but this value is not
expressed by any character actually manifest for our internal

548

perception; what is represented in it is not in any way made
more intensive. In the process of condensation the whole set
of psychic connections becomes transformed into the intensity
of the idea-content. The situation is the same as when in the
case of a book I italicize or print in heavy type any word to
which I attach outstanding value for the understanding of the
text. In speech I should pronounce the same word loudly and
deliberately and with emphasis. The first simile points im-
mediately to one of the examples which were given of the
dream-work (trimethylamine in the dream of Irma’s injection).
Historians of art call our attention to the fact that the most
ancient sculptures known to history follow a similar principle,
in expressing the rank of the persons represented by the size
of the statues. The king is made two or three times as tall as
his retinue or his vanquished enemies. But a work of art of the
Roman period makes use of more subtle means to accomplish
the same end. The figure of the Emperor is placed in the centre,
erect and in his full height, and special care is bestowed on the
modelling of this figure; his enemies are seen cowering at his
feet; but he is no longer made to seem a giant among dwarfs.
At the same time, in the bowing of the subordinate to his
superior, even in our own day, we have an echo of this
ancient principle of representation.

The direction followed by the condensations of the dream is
prescribed on the one hand by the true preconscious relations
of the dream-thoughts, and on the other hand by the attraction
of the visual memories in the unconscious. The success of the
condensation-work produces those intensities which are required
for penetration to the perception-system.

2. By the free transference of intensities, and in the service
of the condensation, intermediary ideas—compromises, as it were
—are formed (cf. the numerous examples). This, also, is
something unheard of in the normal movement of our ideas,
where what is of most importance is the selection and the
retention of the right conceptual material. On the other hand,
composite and compromise formations occur with extraordinary
frequency when we are trying to find verbal expression for
preconscious thoughts; these are considered “slips of the
tongue.”

3. The ideas which transfer their intensities to one another

549

are very loosely connected, and are joined together by such forms
of association as are disdained by our serious thinking, and left
to be exploited solely by wit. In particular, assonances and
punning associations are treated as equal in value to any other
associations.

4. Contradictory thoughts do not try to eliminate one
another, but continue side by side, and often combine to form
condensation-products, as though no contradiction existed; or they
form compromises for which we should never forgive our
thought, but which we frequently sanction in our action.

These are some of the most conspicuous abnormal processes
to which the dream-
thoughts which have previously been
rationally formed are subjected in the course of the dream-
work. As the main feature of these processes, we may see that
the greatest importance is attached to rendering the cathecting
energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and the
intrinsic significance of the psychic elements to which these
cathexes adhere become matters of secondary importance. One
might perhaps assume that condensation and compromise-
formation are effected only in the service of regression, when
the occasion arises for changing thoughts into images. But the
analysis—and still more plainly the synthesis—of such dreams
as show no regression towards images, e.g. the dream
“Autodidasker: Conversation with Professor N.,” reveals the
same processes of displacement and condensation as do the rest.

We cannot, therefore, avoid the conclusion that two kinds of
essentially different psychic processes participate in dream-
formation; one forms perfectly correct and fitting dream-
thoughts, equivalent to the results of normal thinking, while
the other deals with these thoughts in a most astonishing and,
as it seems, incorrect way. The latter process we have already
set apart in Chapter VI as the dream-work proper. What can
we say now as to the derivation of this psychic process?

It would be impossible to answer this question here if we
had not penetrated a considerable way into the psychology of
the neuroses, and especially of hysteria. From this, however,
we learn that the same “incorrect” psychic processes—as well
as others not enumerated—control the production of hysterical
symptoms. In hysteria, too, we find at first a series of perfectly
correct and fitting thoughts, equivalent to our conscious ones,

550

of whose existence in this form we can, however, learn nothing,
i.e. which we can only subsequently reconstruct. If they have
forced their way anywhere to perception, we discover from the
analysis of the symptom formed that these normal thoughts
have been subjected to abnormal treatment, and that by means
of condensation and compromise-formation, through superficial associa-
tions which cover up contradictions, and eventually along the path of
regression, they have been conveyed into the symptom. In view of the
complete identity between the peculiarities of the dream-work
and those of the psychic activity which issues in psychoneurotic
symptoms, we shall feel justified in transferring to the dream
the conclusions urged upon us by hysteria.

From the theory of hysteria we borrow the proposition that
such an abnormal psychic elaboration of a normal train of thought takes
place only when the latter has been used for the transference of an
unconscious wish which dates from the infantile life and is in a state
of repression. Complying with this proposition, we have built up
the theory of the dream on the assumption that the actuating
dream-wish invariably originates in the unconscious; which, as
we have ourselves admitted, cannot be universally demon-
strated, even though it cannot be refuted. But in order to enable
us to say just what repression is, after employing this term so
freely, we shall be obliged to make a further addition to our
psychological scaffolding.

We had elaborated the fiction of a primitive psychic
apparatus, the work of which is regulated by the effort to avoid
accumulation of excitation, and as far as possible to maintain
itself free from excitation. For this reason it was constructed
after the plan of a reflex apparatus; motility, in the first place
as the path to changes within the body, was the channel of
discharge at its disposal. We then discussed the psychic results
of experiences of gratification, and were able at this point to
introduce a second assumption, namely, that the accumulation
of excitation–by processes that do not concern us here–is felt
as pain, and sets the apparatus in operation in order to bring
about again a state of gratification, in which the diminution
of excitation is perceived as pleasure. Such a current in the
apparatus, issuing from pain and striving for pleasure, we call
a wish. We have said that nothing but a wish is capable of
setting the apparatus in motion and that the course of any

551

excitation in the apparatus is regulated automatically by the
perception of pleasure and pain. The first occurrence of
wishing may well have taken the form of a hallucinatory
cathexis of the memory of gratification. But this hallucination,
unless it could be maintained to the point of exhaustion, proved
incapable of bringing about a cessation of the need, and con-
sequently of securing the pleasure connected with gratification.

Thus there was required a second activity—in our ter-
minology the activity of a second system—which would not
allow the memory-cathexis to force its way to perception and
thence to bind the psychic forces, but would lead the excitation
emanating from the need-stimulus by a detour, which by means
of voluntary motility would ultimately so change the outer
world as to permit the real perception of the gratifying object.
Thus far we have already elaborated the scheme of the psychic
apparatus; these two systems are the germ of what we set up
in the fully developed apparatus as the Ucs. and the Pcs.

To change the outer world appropriately by means of
motility requires the accumulation of a large total of experiences
in the memory-systems, as well as a manifold consolidation of
the relations which are evoked in this memory-material by
various directing ideas. We will now proceed further with our
assumptions. The activity of the second system, groping in
many directions, tentatively sending forth cathexes and re-
tracting them, needs on the one hand full command over all
memory-material, but on the other hand it would be a
superfluous expenditure of energy were it to send along the
individual thought-paths large quantities of cathexis, which
would then flow away to no purpose and thus diminish the
quantity needed for changing the outer world. Out of a regard
for purposiveness, therefore, I postulate that the second system
succeeds in maintaining the greater part of the energic cathexes
in a state of rest, and in using only a small portion for its
operations of displacement. The mechanics of these processes
is entirely unknown to me; anyone who seriously wishes to
follow up these ideas must address himself to the physical
analogies, and find some way of getting a picture of the sequence
of motions which ensues on the excitation of the neurones. Here
I do no more than hold fast to the idea that the activity of the
first ψ-system aims at the free outflow of the quantities of excitation,

552

and that the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating
from it, effects an inhibition of this outflow, a transformation
into dormant cathexis, probably with a rise of potential.
I therefore assume that the course taken by any excitation
under the control of the second system is bound to quite
different mechanical conditions from those which obtain under
the control of the first system. After the second system has
completed its work of experimental thought, it removes the
inhibition and damming up of the excitations and allows them
to flow off into motility.

An interesting train of thought now presents itself if we
consider the relations of this inhibition of discharge by the
second system to the process of regulation by the pain-principle.
Let us now seek out the counterpart of the primary experience
of gratification, namely, the objective experience of fear. Let a
perception-stimulus act on the primitive apparatus and be the
source of a pain-excitation. There will then ensue unco-
ordinated motor manifestations, which will go on until one of
these withdraws the apparatus from perception, and at the
same time from the pain. On the reappearance of the percept
this manifestation will immediately be repeated (perhaps as a
movement of flight), until the percept has again disappeared.
But in this case no tendency will remain to re-cathect the
perception of the source of pain by hallucination or otherwise.
On the contrary, there will be a tendency in the primary
apparatus to turn away again from this painful memory-image
immediately if it is in any way awakened, since the overflow
of its excitation into perception would, of course, evoke (or
more precisely, begin to evoke) pain. This turning away from
a recollection, which is merely a repetition of the former flight
from perception, is also facilitated by the fact that, unlike the
perception, the recollection has not enough quality to arouse
consciousness, and thereby to attract fresh cathexis. This
effortless and regular turning away of the psychic process from
the memory of anything that had once been painful gives us
the prototype and the first example of psychic repression. We all
know how much of this turning away from the painful, the
tactics of the ostrich, may still be shown as present even in
the normal psychic life of adults.

In obedience to the pain-principle, therefore, the first

553

ψ-system is quite incapable of introducing anything unpleasant
into the thought-nexus. The system cannot do anything but
wish. If this were to remain so, the activity of thought of the
second system, which needs to have at its disposal all the
memories stored up by experience, would be obstructed. But
two paths are now open: either the work of the second system
frees itself completely from the pain-principle, and continues
its course, paying no heed to the pain attached to given
memories, or it contrives to cathect the memory of the pain in
such a manner as to preclude the liberation of pain. We can
reject the first possibility, as the pain-principle also proves to
act as a regulator of the cycle of excitation in the second system;
we are therefore thrown back upon the second possibility,
namely, that this system cathects a memory in such a manner
as to inhibit any outflow of excitation from it, and hence, also,
the outflow, comparable to a motor-innervation, needed for
the development of pain. And thus, setting out from two
different starting-points, i.e. from regard for the pain-principle,
and from the principle of the least expenditure of innervation,
we are led to the hypothesis that cathexis through the second
system is at the same time an inhibition of the discharge of
excitation. Let us, however, keep a close hold on the fact—for
this is the key to the theory of repression—that the second system
can only cathect an idea when it is in a position to inhibit any pain
emanating from this idea. Anything that withdrew itself from this
inhibition would also remain inaccessible for the second system,
i.e. would immediately be given up by virtue of the pain-
principle. The inhibition of pain, however, need not be
complete; it must be permitted to begin, since this indicates
to the second system the nature of the memory, and possibly
its lack of fitness for the purpose sought by the process of
thought.

The psychic process which is alone tolerated by the first
system I shall now call the primary process; and that which
results under the inhibiting action of the second system I shall
call the secondary process. I can also show at another point for
what purpose the second system is obliged to correct the primary
process. The primary process strives for discharge of the
excitation in order to establish with the quantity of excitation
thus collected an identity of perception; the secondary process has

554

abandoned this intention, and has adopted instead the aim of
an identity of thought. All thinking is merely a detour from the
memory of gratification (taken as a purposive idea) to the
identical cathexis of the same memory, which is to be reached
once more by the path of motor experiences. Thought must
concern itself with the connecting-
paths between ideas without
allowing itself to be misled by their intensities. But it is obvious
that condensations of ideas and intermediate or compromise-
formations are obstacles to the attainment of the identity which
is aimed at; by substituting one idea for another they swerve
away from the path which would have led onward from the
first idea. Such procedures are therefore carefully avoided in
our secondary thinking. It will readily be seen, moreover, that
the pain-
principle, although at other times it provides the
thought-
process with its most important clues, may also put
difficulties in its way in the pursuit of identity of thought.
Hence the tendency of the thinking process must always be to
free itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the
pain-
principle, and to restrict the development of affect through
the work of thought to the very minimum which remains
effective as a signal. This refinement in functioning is to be
achieved by a fresh hyper-
cathexis, effected with the help of
consciousness. But we are aware that this refinement is seldom
completely successful, even in normal psychic life, and that
our thinking always remains liable to falsification by the
intervention of the pain-
principle.

This, however, is not the breach in the functional efficiency
of our psychic apparatus which makes it possible for thoughts
representing the result of the secondary thought-
work to fall
into the power of the primary psychic process; by which
formula we may now describe the operations resulting in
dreams and the symptoms of hysteria. This inadequacy results
from the converging of two factors in our development, one of
which pertains solely to the psychic apparatus, and has exer-
cised a determining influence on the relation of the two
systems, while the other operates fluctuatingly, and introduces
motive forces of organic origin into the psychic life. Both
originate in the infantile life, and are a precipitate of the
alteration which our psychic and somatic organism has
undergone since our infantile years.

555

When I termed one of the psychic processes in the psychic
apparatus the primary process, I did so not only in consideration
of its status and function, but was also able to take account of
the temporal relationship actually involved. So far as we know,
a psychic apparatus possessing only the primary process does
not exist, and is to that extent a theoretical fiction; but this
at least is a fact: that the primary processes are present in the
apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes
only take shape gradually during the course of life, inhibiting
and overlaying the primary, whilst gaining complete control
over them perhaps only in the prime of life. Owing to this
belated arrival of the secondary processes, the essence of our
being, consisting of unconscious wish-impulses, remains some
thing which cannot be grasped or inhibited by the preconscious;
and its part is once and for all restricted to indicating the most
appropriate paths for the wish-impulses originating in the
unconscious. These unconscious wishes represent for all sub
sequent psychic strivings a compulsion to which they must
submit themselves, although they may perhaps endeavour to
divert them and to guide them to superior aims. In consequence
of this retardation, an extensive region of the memory-
material remains in fact inaccessible to preconscious cathexis.

Now among these wish-impulses originating in the infantile
life, indestructible and incapable of inhibition, there are some
the fulfilments of which have come to be in contradiction with
the purposive ideas of our secondary thinking. The fulfilment
of these wishes would no longer produce an affect of pleasure,
but one of pain; and it is just this conversion of affect that constitutes
the essence of what we call “repression.” In what manner and by
what motive forces such a conversion can take place constitutes
the problem of repression, which we need here only touch upon
in passing. It will suffice to note the fact that such a conversion
of affect occurs in the course of development (one need only
think of the emergence of disgust, originally absent in infantile
life), and that it is connected with the activity of the secondary
system. The memories from which the unconscious wish evokes
a liberation of affect have never been accessible to the Pcs.,
and for that reason this liberation cannot be inhibited. It is
precisely on account of this generation of affect that these ideas
are not now accessible even by way of the preconscious thoughts

556

to which they have transferred the energy of the wishes con-
nected with them. On the contrary, the pain-principle comes
into play, and causes the Pcs. to turn away from these
transference-thoughts. These latter are left to themselves, are
“repressed,” and thus the existence of a store of infantile
memories, withdrawn from the beginning from the Pcs.,
becomes the preliminary condition of repression.

In the most favourable case, the generation of pain terminates
so soon as the cathexis is withdrawn from the transference-
thoughts in the Pcs., and this result shows that the intervention
of the pain-principle is appropriate. It is otherwise, however,
if the repressed unconscious wish receives an organic reinforce-
ment which it can put at the service of its transference-thoughts,
and by which it can enable them to attempt to break through
with their excitation, even if the cathexis of the Pcs. has been
taken away from them. A defensive struggle then ensues,
inasmuch as the Pcs. reinforces the opposite to the repressed
thoughts (counter-cathexis), and the eventual outcome is that
the transference-thoughts (the carriers of the unconscious wish)
break through in some form of compromise through symptom-
formation. But from the moment that the repressed thoughts
are powerfully cathected by the unconscious wish-impulse, but
forsaken by the preconscious cathexis, they succumb to the
primary psychic process, and aim only at motor discharge; or,
if the way is clear, at hallucinatory revival of the desired
identity of perception. We have already found, empirically,
that the “incorrect” processes described are enacted only with
thoughts which are in a state of repression. We are now in a
position to grasp yet another part of the total scheme of the
facts. These “incorrect” processes are the primary processes of
the psychic apparatus; they occur wherever ideas abandoned
by the preconscious cathexis are left to themselves and can
become filled with the uninhibited energy which flows from
the unconscious and strives for discharge. There are further
facts which go to show that the processes described as
“incorrect” are not really falsifications of our normal pro-
cedure, or defective thinking, but the modes of operation of
the psychic apparatus when freed from inhibition. Thus we see
that the process of conveyance of the preconscious excitation
to motility occurs in accordance with the same procedure, and

557

that in the linkage of preconscious ideas with words we may
easily find manifested the same displacements and confusions
(which we ascribe to inattention). Finally, a proof of the
increased work made necessary by the inhibition of these
primary modes of procedure might be found in the fact that
we achieve a comical effect, a surplus to be discharged through
laughter, if we allow these modes of thought to come to consciousness.

The theory of the psychoneuroses asserts with absolute
certainty that it can only be sexual wish-impulses from the
infantile life, which have undergone repression (affect-conver-
sion) during the developmental period of childhood, which are
capable of renewal at later periods of development (whether
as a result of our sexual constitution, which has, of course,
grown out of of an original bi-sexuality, or in consequence of
unfavourable influences in our sexual life); and which therefore
supply the motive-power for all psychoneurotic symptom-
formation. It is only by the introduction of these sexual forces
that the gaps still demonstrable in the theory of repression can
be filled. Here I will leave it undecided whether the postulate
of the sexual and infantile holds good for the theory of dreams
as well; I am not completing the latter, because in assuming
that the dream-wish invariably originates in the unconscious
I have already gone a step beyond the demonstrable.¹ Nor will

¹Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment of the subject, which I have
deliberately left, because to fill them up would, on the one hand, require excessive
labour, and, on the other hand, I should have to depend on material which is foreign
to the dream. Thus for example, I have avoided stating whether I give the word
“repressed” a different meaning from that of the word “repressed.” No doubt,
however, it will have become clear that the latter emphasizes more than the
former the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the problem which
obviously arises, why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the censorship
even when they abandon the progressive path to consciousness, and choose the
path of regression. And so with other similar omissions. I have, above all, sought
to give some idea of the problems to which the further dissection of the dream-
work leads, and to indicate the other themes with which these are connected.
I was, however, not always easy to decide just where the pursuit should be
discontinued.—That I have not treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-
sexual life plays in the dream, and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an
obviously sexual content, is due to a special reason—which may not perhaps be
that which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views and my
neuropathological doctrines to regard the sexual life as a pudendum with which
neither the physician nor the scientific investigator should concern himself. To
me, the moral indignation which prompted the translator of Artemidorus of
Daldís to keep from the reader’s knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams con-
tained in the Symbolism of Dreams is merely ludicrous. For my own part, what

558

I inquire further into the nature of the difference between the
play of psychic forces in dream-
formation and in the formation
of hysterical symptoms, since there is missing here the needed
fuller knowledge of one of the two things to be compared. But
there is another point which I regard as important, and I will
confess at once that it was only on account of this point that
I entered upon all the discussions concerning the two psychic
systems, their modes of operation, and the fact of repression.
It does not greatly matter whether I have conceived the
psychological relations at issue with approximate correctness,
or, as is easily possible in such a difficult matter, wrongly and
imperfectly. However our views may change about the inter-
pretation of the psychic censorship or the correct and the
abnormal elaboration of the dream-
content, it remains certain
that such processes are active in dream-
formation, and that in
their essentials they reveal the closest analogy with the processes
observed in the formation of hysterical symptoms. Now the
dream is not a pathological phenomenon; it does not presup-
pose
any disturbance of our psychic equilibrium; and it does not
leave behind it any weakening-
of our efficiency or capacities.
The objection that no conclusions can be drawn about the
dreams of healthy persons from my own dreams and from those
of neurotic patients may be rejected without comment.
If, then, from the nature of the given phenomena we infer the
nature of their motive forces, we find that the psychic
mechanism utilized by the neuroses is not newly-
created by a
morbid disturbance that lays hold of the psychic life, but lies
in readiness in the normal structure of our psychic apparatus.
The two psychic systems, the frontier-
censorship between them,
the inhibition and overlaying of the one activity by the other,
the relations of both to consciousness—or whatever may take
the place of these concepts on a juster interpretation of the
actual relations—all these belong to the normal structure of
our psychic instrument, and the dream shows us one of the
paths which lead to a knowledge of this structure. If we wish
to be content with a minimum of perfectly assured additions to

decided my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation of sexual
dreams I should be bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained problems
of perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason that I reserved this material
for treatment elsewhere.

559

our knowledge, we shall say that the dream affords proof that
the suppressed material continues to exist even in the normal person and
remains capable of psychic activity. Dreams are one of the
manifestations of this suppressed material; theoretically, this is
true in all cases; and in tangible experience, it has been found
true in at least a great number of cases, which happen to dis-
play most plainly the more striking features of the dream-life.
The suppressed psychic material, which in the waking state has
been prevented from expression and cut off from internal
perception by the mutual neutralization of contradictory attitudes, finds
ways and means, under the sway of compromise-formations,
of obtruding itself on consciousness during the night.

Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo.

At any rate, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge
of the unconscious element in our psychic life.

By the analysis of dreams we obtain some insight into the
composition of this most marvellous and most mysterious of
instruments; it is true that this only takes us a little way, but
it gives us a start which enables us, setting out from the angle
of other (properly pathological) formations, to penetrate
further in our disjoining of the instrument. For disease–at all
events that which is rightly called functional–does not neces-
sarily presuppose the destruction of this apparatus, or the
establishment of new cleavages in its interior; it can be
explained dynamically by the strengthening and weakening of
the components of the play of forces, so many of the activities
of which are covered up in normal functioning. It might be
shown elsewhere how the fact that the apparatus is a com-
bination of two instances also permits of a refinement of its
normal functioning which would have been impossible to a
single system.¹⁾

¹⁾The dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our psycho-
pathology on psychology. In a short unfinished series of articles in the Monatsschrift
für Psychiatrie und Neurologie (Über den psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit,
1898, and Über Deckerinnerungen, 1899) I attempt to interpret a number of psychic
manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception. (These
and other articles on “Forgetting,” “Lapses of Speech,” etc., have since been
published in collected form under the title of Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
translated by A. A. Brill. Ernest Benn Ltd., London, and the Macmillan Co.,
New York.)

560

F

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS. REALITY

If we look more closely, we may observe that the psychological
considerations examined in the foregoing chapter require us to
assume, not the existence of two systems near the motor end
of the psychic apparatus, but two kinds of processes or courses taken
by excitation. But this does not disturb us; for we must always
be ready to drop our auxiliary ideas, when we think we are
in a position to replace them by something which comes closer
to the unknown reality. Let us now try to correct certain views
which may have taken a misconceived form as long as we
regarded the two systems, in the crudest and most obvious
sense, as two localities within the psychic apparatus—views
which have left a precipitate in the terms “repression” and
“penetration.” Thus, when we say that an unconscious thought
strives for translation into the preconscious in order-
sequently to penetrate through to consciousness, we do not
mean that a second idea has to be formed, in a new locality,
like a paraphrase, as it were, whilst the original persists by its
side; and similarly, when we speak of penetration into
consciousness, we wish carefully to detach from this notion any
idea of a change of locality. When we say that a preconscious
idea is repressed and subsequently absorbed by the uncon-
scious, we might be tempted by these images, borrowed from
the idea of a struggle for a particular territory, to assume that
an arrangement is really broken up in the one psychic locality
and replaced by a new one in the other locality. For these com-
parisons we will substitute a description which would seem to
correspond more closely to the real state of affairs; we will say
that an energic cathexis is shifted to or withdrawn from a
certain arrangement, so that the psychic formation falls under
the domination of a given instance or is withdrawn from it.
Here again we replace a topographical mode of representation
by a dynamic one; it is not the psychic formation that appears
to us as the mobile element, but its innervation.¹

¹This conception underwent elaboration and modification when it was recog-
nized that the essential character of a preconscious idea was its connection with
the residues of verbal ideas (The Unconscious, Collected Papers, vol. iv, p. 98).

561

Nevertheless, I think it expedient and justifiable to continue
to use the illustrative idea of the two systems. We shall avoid
any abuse of this mode of representation if we remember that
ideas, thoughts, and psychic formations in general must not in
any case be localized in organic elements of the nervous
system but, so to speak, between them, where resistances and
association-
tracks form the correlate corresponding to them.
Everything that can become an object of internal perception
is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the
crossing of light-
rays. But we are justified in thinking of the
systems-
which have nothing psychic in themselves, and which
never become accessible to our psychic perception-
as some-
thing similar to the lenses of the telescope, which project the
image. If we continue this comparison, we might say that the
censorship between the two systems corresponds to the
refraction of rays on passing into a new medium.

Thus far we have developed our psychology on our own
responsibility; it is now time to turn and look at the doctrines
prevailing in modern psychology, and to examine the relation
of these to our theories. The problem of the unconscious in
psychology is, according to the forcible statement of Lipps,¹⁾
less a psychological problem than the problem of psychology.
As long as psychology disposed of this problem by the verbal
explanation that the “psychic” is the “conscious,” and that
“unconscious psychic occurrences” are an obvious contra-
diction, there was no possibility of a physician’s observations
of abnormal mental states being turned to any psychological
account. The physician and the philosopher can meet only
when both acknowledge that “unconscious psychic processes”
is “the appropriate and justified expression for an established
fact.” The physician cannot but reject, with a shrug of his
shoulders, the assertion that “consciousness is the indispensable
quality of the psychic”; if his respect for the utterances of the
philosophers is still great enough, he may perhaps assume that
he and they do not deal with the same thing and do not pursue
the same science. For a single intelligent observation of the
psychic life of a neurotic, a single analysis of a dream, must
force upon him the unshakable conviction that the most

¹⁾Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychologie. Lecture delivered at the Third
International Psychological Congress at Munich, 1897.

562

complicated and the most accurate operations of thought, to
which the name of psychic occurrences can surely not be
refused, may take place without arousing consciousness.¹⁾ The
physician, it is true, does not learn of these unconscious pro-
cesses until they have produced an effect on consciousness
which admits of communication or observation. But this effect
on consciousness may show a psychic character which differs
completely from the unconscious process, so that internal
perception cannot possibly recognize in the first a substitute
for the second. The physician must reserve himself the right to
penetrate, by a process of deduction, from the effect on conscious-
ness to the unconscious psychic process; he learns in this way
that the effect on consciousness is only a remote psychic
product of the unconscious process, and that the latter has
not become conscious as such, and has, moreover, existed
and operated without in any way betraying itself to con-
sciousness.

A return from the over-estimation of the property of
consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine
insight into the course of psychic events. As Lipps has said,
the unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the
psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes
the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has a
preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can
stop at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full psychic
function. The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner
nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external
world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of
consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-
organs.

We get rid of a series of dream-problems which have claimed

¹⁾I am happy to be able to point to an author who has drawn from the study of
dreams the same conclusion as regards the relation between consciousness and the
unconscious.

Du Prel says: “The problem: what is the psyche, manifestly requires a pre-
liminary examination as to whether consciousness and psyche are identical. But
it is just this preliminary question which is answered in the negative by the dream,
which shows that the concept of the psyche extends beyond that of consciousness,
much as the gravitational force of a star extends beyond its sphere of luminosity”
(Philos. d. Mystik, p. 47).
“It is a truth which cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the concepts of
consciousness and of the psyche are not co-extensive” (p. 306).

563

much attention from earlier writers on the subject when the
old antithesis between conscious life and dream-life is discarded,
and the unconscious psychic assigned to its proper place. Thus
many of the achievements which are a matter for wonder in
a dream are now no longer to be attributed to dreaming, but
to unconscious thinking, which is active also during the day.
If the dream seems to make play with a symbolical representa-
tion of the body, as Scherner has said, we know that this is
the work of certain unconscious phantasies, which are probably
under the sway of sexual impulses and find expression not only
in dreams, but also in hysterical phobias and other symptoms.
If the dream continues and completes mental work begun
during the day, and even brings valuable new ideas to light,
we have only to strip off the dream-disguise from this, as the
contribution of the dream-work, and a mark of the assistance
of dark powers in the depths of the psyche (cf. the devil in
Tartini’s sonata-dream). The intellectual achievement as such
belongs to the same psychic forces as are responsible for all
such achievements during the day. We are probably much
too inclined to overestimate the conscious character even of
intellectual and artistic production. From the reports of
certain writers who have been highly productive, such as
Goethe and Helmholtz, we learn, rather, that the most
essential and original part of their creations came to them in
the form of inspirations, and offered itself to their awareness
in an almost completed state. In other cases, where there is a
concerted effort of all the psychic forces, there is nothing strange
in the fact that conscious activity, too, lends its aid. But it is
the much-abused privilege of conscious activity to hide from
us all other activities wherever it participates.

It hardly seems worth while to take up the historical
significance of dreams as a separate theme. Where, for instance,
a leader has been impelled by a dream to engage in a bold
undertaking, the success of which has had the effect of changing
history, a new problem arises only so long as the dream is
regarded as a mysterious power and contrasted with other more
familiar psychic forces. The problem disappears as soon as we
regard the dream as a form of expression for impulses to which a
resistance was attached during the day, whilst at night they
were able to draw reinforcement from deep-lying sources of

564

excitation.¹ But the great respect with which the ancient
peoples regarded dreams is based on a just piece of psycho-
logical divination. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and
indestructible element in the human soul, to the daemonic power
which furnishes the dream-wish, and which we have found
again in our unconscious.

It is not without purpose that I use the expression in our
unconscious, for what we so call does not coincide with the
unconscious of the philosophers, nor with the unconscious of
Lipps. As they use the term, it merely means the opposite of
the conscious. That there exist not only conscious but also
unconscious psychic processes is the opinion at issue, which
is so hotly contested and so energetically defended. Lipps
enunciates the more comprehensive doctrine that everything
psychic exists as unconscious, but that some of it may exist
also as conscious. But it is not to prove this doctrine that we
have adduced the phenomena of dreams and hysterical
symptom-
formation; the observation of normal life alone suffices
to establish its correctness beyond a doubt. The novel fact that
we have learned from the analysis of psychopathological
formations, and indeed from the first member of the group,
from dreams, is that the unconscious—and hence all that is
psychic—occurs as a function of two separate systems, and that
as such it occurs even in normal psychic life. There are
consequently two kinds of unconscious, which have not as yet
been distinguished by psychologists. Both are unconscious in
the psychological sense; but in our sense the first, which we
call Ucs., is likewise incapable of consciousness; whereas the second
we call Pcs. because its excitations, after the observance of
certain rules, are capable of reaching consciousness; perhaps
not before they have again undergone censorship, but never-
theless regardless of the Ucs. system. The fact that in order to
attain consciousness the excitations must pass through an
unalterable series, a succession of instances, as is betrayed by
the changes produced in them by the censorship, has enabled
us to describe them by analogy in spatial terms. We described
the relations of the two systems to each other and to conscious-
ness by saying that the system Pcs. is like a screen between the

¹Cf. here (p. 108) the dream (Σὰ-
τύρος) of Alexander the Great at the siege of
Tyre.

565

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM–PROCESSES

system Ucs. and consciousness. The system Pcs. not only bars
access to consciousness, but also controls the access to voluntary
motility, and has control of the emission of a mobile cathectic
energy, a portion of which is familiar to us as attention.¹⁾

We must also steer clear of the distinction between the
super-conscious and the subconscious, which has found such favour
in the more recent literature on the psychoneuroses, for just
such a distinction seems to emphasize the equivalence of what
is psychic and what is conscious.

What rôle is now left, in our representation of things, to the
phenomenon of consciousness, once so all-powerful and over-
shadowing all else? None other than that of a sense-organ for the
perception of psychic qualities. According to the fundamental idea
of our schematic attempt we can regard conscious perception
only as the function proper to a special system for which the
abbreviated designation Cs. commends itself. This system we
conceive to be similar in its mechanical characteristics to the
perception-
system P, and hence excitable by qualities, and
incapable of retaining the trace of changes: i.e. devoid of
memory. The psychic apparatus which, with the sense-
organ
of the P-systems, is turned to the outer world, is itself the outer
world for the sense-
organ of Cs., whose teleological justi-
fication
depends on this relationship. We are here once more confronted
with the principle of the succession of instances which seems
to dominate the structure of the apparatus. The material of
excitation flows to the sense-
organ Cs. from two sides: first
from the P-system, whose excitation, qualitatively condi-
tioned,
probably undergoes a new elaboration until it attains conscious
perception; and, secondly, from the interior of the apparatus
itself, whose quantitative processes are perceived as a qualitative
series of pleasures and pains once they have reached conscious-
ness after undergoing certain changes.

The philosophers, who became aware that accurate and
highly complicated thought-
structures are possible even without
the co-
operation of consciousness, thus found it difficult to
ascribe any function to consciousness; it appeared to them a
superfluous mirroring of the completed psychic pro-
cess. The

¹⁾Cf. here my remarks in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.
xxvi, in which the descriptive, dynamic and systematic meanings of the
ambiguous word “Unconscious” are distinguished from one another.

566

analogy of our Cs. system with the perception-systems relieves
us of this embarrassment. We see that perception through our
sense-organs results in directing an attention-cathexis to the
paths along which the incoming sensory excitation diffuses
itself; the qualitative excitation of the P-system serves the
mobile quantity in the psychic apparatus as a regulator of its
discharge. We may claim the same function for the overlying
sense-organ of the Cs. system. By perceiving new qualities, it
furnishes a new contribution for the guidance and suitable
distribution of the mobile cathexis-quantities. By means of
perceptions of pleasure and pain, it influences the course of
the cathexes within the psychic apparatus, which otherwise
operates unconsciously and by the displacement of quantities.
It is probable that the pain-principle first of all regulates the
displacements of cathexis automatically; but it is quite possible
that consciousness contributes a second and more subtle
regulation of these qualities, which may even oppose the first,
and perfect the functional capacity of the apparatus, by placing
it in a position contrary to its original design, subjecting even
that which induces pain to cathexis and to elaboration. We
learn from neuro-psychology that an important part in the
functional activity of the apparatus is ascribed to these
regulations by the qualitative excitations of the sense-organs.
The automatic rule of the primary pain-principle, together
with the limitation of functional capacity bound up with it,
is broken by the sensory regulations, which are themselves
again automatisms. We find that repression, which, though
originally expedient, nevertheless finally brings about a harmful
lack of inhibition and of psychic control, overtakes memories
much more easily than it does perceptions, because in the
former there is no additional cathexis from the excitation of
the psychic sense-organs. Whilst an idea which is to be warded
off may fail to become conscious because it has succumbed to
repression, it may on other occasions come to be repressed
simply because it has been withdrawn from conscious percep-
tion on other grounds. These are clues which we make use of
in therapy in order to undo accomplished repressions.

The value of the hyper-cathexis which is produced by the
regulating influence of the Cs. sense-organs on the mobile
quantity is demonstrated in a teleological context by nothing

567

more clearly than by the creation of a new series of qualities,
and consequently a new regulation, which constitutes the
prerogative of man over the animals. For the mental processes
are in themselves unqualitative except for the excitations of
pleasure and pain which accompany them; which, as we know,
must be kept within limits as possible disturbers of thought.
In order to endow them with quality, they are associated in
man with verbal memories, the qualitative residues of which
suffice to draw upon them the attention of consciousness, which
in turn endows thought with a new mobile cathexis.

It is only on a dissection of hysterical mental processes that
the manifold nature of the problems of consciousness becomes
apparent. One then receives the impression that the transition
from the preconscious to the conscious cathexis is associated
with a censorship similar to that between Ucs. and Pcs. This
censorship, too, begins to act only when a certain quantitative
limit is reached, so that thought-
formations which are not very
intense escape it. All possible cases of detention from conscious-
ness and of penetration into consciousness under certain
restrictions are included within the range of psychoneurotic
phenomena; all point to the intimate and twofold connection
between the censorship and consciousness. I shall conclude
these psychological considerations with the record of two such
occurrences.

On the occasion of a consultation a few years ago, the patient
was an intelligent-
looking girl with a simple, unaffected manner.
She was strangely attired; for whereas a woman’s dress is
usually carefully thought out to the last pleat, one of her
stockings was hanging down and two of the buttons of her
blouse were undone. She complained of pains in one of her
legs, and exposed her calf without being asked to do so. Her
chief complaint, however, was as follows: She had a feeling in
her body as though something were sticking into it which moved to
and fro and shook her through and through. This sometimes seemed
to make her whole body stiff. On hearing this, my colleague in
consultation looked at me; the trouble was quite obvious to
him. To both of us it seemed peculiar that this suggested
nothing to the patient’s mother, though she herself must
repeatedly have been in the situation described by her child.
As for the girl, she had no idea of the import of her words, or

568

she would never have allowed them to pass her lips. Here the
censorship had been hoodwinked so successfully that under
the mask of an innocent complaint a phantasy was admitted
to consciousness which otherwise would have remained in the
preconscious.

Another example: I began the psychoanalytic treatment of
a boy of fourteen who was suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical
vomiting, headache, etc., by assuring him that after closing
his eyes he would see pictures or that ideas would occur to
him, which he was to communicate to me. He replied by
describing pictures. The last impression he had received before
coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He had
been playing a game of checkers with his uncle, and now he
saw the checker-
board before him. He commented on various
positions that were favourable or unfavourable, on moves that
were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the
checker-
board—an object belonging to his father, but which
his phantasy laid on the checker-
board. Then a sickle was
lying on the board; a scythe was added; and finally, he saw
the image of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of his
father’s house far away. A few days later I discovered the
meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family circum-
stances had made the boy excited and nervous. Here was a
case of a harsh, irascible father, who had lived unhappily with
the boy’s mother, and whose educational methods consisted of
threats; he had divorced his gentle and delicate wife, and
remarried; one day he brought home a young woman as the
boy’s new mother. The illness of the fourteen-
year-
old boy
developed a few days later. It was the suppressed rage against
his father that had combined these images into intelligible
allusions. The material was furnished by a mythological
reminiscence. The sickle was that with which Zeus castrated his
father; the scythe and the image of the peasant represented
Kronos, the violent old man who devours his children, and
upon whom Zeus wreaks his vengeance in so unfilial a manner.
The father’s marriage gave the boy an opportunity of returning
the reproaches and threats which the child had once heard his
father utter because he played with his genitals (the draught-
board; the prohibited moves; the dagger with which one could
kill). We have here long-
repressed memories and their un-

569

conscious derivatives which, under the guise of meaningless pictures,
have slipped into consciousness by the devious paths opened
to them.

If I were asked what is the theoretical value of the study of
dreams, I should reply that it lies in the additions to psycho-
logical knowledge and the beginnings of an understanding of
the neuroses which we thereby obtain. Who can foresee the
importance a thorough knowledge of the structure and functions
of the psychic apparatus may attain, when even our present
state of knowledge permits of successful therapeutic intervention
in the curable forms of the psychoneuroses? But, it may be
asked, what of the practical value of this study in regard to a
knowledge of the psyche and discovery of the hidden peculiari-
ties of individual character? Have not the unconscious impulses
revealed by dreams the value of real forces in the psychic life?
Is the ethical significance of the suppressed wishes to be lightly
disregarded, since, just as they now create dreams, they may
some day create other things?

I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I have
not followed up this aspect of the problem of dreams. In any
case, however, I believe that the Roman Emperor was in the
wrong in ordering one of his subjects to be executed because
the latter had dreamt that he had killed the Emperor. He
should first of all have endeavour-
ed to discover the significance
of the man’s dream; most probably it was not what it seemed
to be. And even if a dream of a different content had actually
had this treasonable meaning, it would still have been well to
recall the words of Plato—that the virtuous man contents
himself with dreaming of that which the wicked man does in
actual life. I am therefore of the opinion that dreams should
be acquitted of evil. Whether any reality is to be attributed to
the unconscious wishes, I cannot say. Reality must, of course,
be denied to all transitory and intermediate thoughts. If we
had before us the unconscious wishes, brought to their final
and truest expression, we should still do well to remember that
psychic reality is a special form of existence which must not be
confounded with material reality. It seems, therefore, unnecessary
that people should refuse to accept the responsibility for
the immorality of their dreams. With an appreciation of the
mode of functioning of the psychic apparatus, and an insight

570

into the relations between conscious and unconscious, all that
is ethically offensive in our dream-
life and the life of phantasy
for the most part disappears.

“What a dream has told us of our relations to the present
(reality) we will then seek also in our consciousness, and we
must not be surprised if we discover that the monster we saw
under the magnifying-
glass of the analysis is a tiny little
infusorian” (H. Sachs).

For all practical purposes in judging human character, a
man’s actions and conscious expressions of thought are in most
cases sufficient. Actions, above all, deserve to be placed in the
front rank; for many impulses which penetrate into conscious-
ness are neutralized by real forces in the psychic life before
they find issue in action; indeed, the reason why they frequently
do not encounter any psychic obstacle on their path is because
the unconscious is certain of their meeting with resistances later.
In any case, it is highly instructive to learn something of the
intensively tilled soil from which our virtues proudly emerge.
For the complexity of human character, dynamically moved
in all directions, very rarely accommodates itself to the
arbitrament of a simple alternative, as our antiquated moral
philosophy would have it.

And what of the value of dreams in regard to our knowledge
of the future? That, of course, is quite out of the question.
One would like to substitute the words: “in regard to our
knowledge of the past.” For in every sense a dream has its
origin in the past. The ancient belief that dreams reveal the
future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing
a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future;
but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his present, has
been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible
wish.