MT
THE DREAM-WORK

ALL previous attempts to solve the problems of the dream
have been based directly upon the manifest dream content
as it is retained in the memory, and have undertaken to obtain
an interpretation of the dream from this content, or, if inter-
pretation was dispensed with, to base a judgment of the dream
upon the evidence furnished by this content. We alone are in
possession of new data; for us a new psychic material inter-
venes between the dream content and the results of our
investigations : and this is the latent dream content or the
dream thoughts which are obtained by our method. We
develop a solution of the dream from this latter, and not
from the manifest dream content. We are also confronted
for the first time with a problem which has not before existed,
that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent
dream thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the
processes through which the former have grown into the
latter.

We regard the dream thoughts and the dream content as
two representations of the same meaning in two different
languages; or to express it better, the dream content appears
to us as a translation of the dream thoughts into another form
of expression, whose signs and laws of composition we are to
learn by comparing the original with the translation. The
dream thoughts are at once intelligible to us as soon as we
have ascertained them. The dream content is, as it were,
presented in a picture-writing, whose signs are to be trans-
lated one by one into the language of the dream thoughts.
It would of course be incorrect to try to read these signs
according to their values as pictures instead of according to
their significance as signs. For instance, I have before me a
picture-puzzle (rebus): a house, upon whose roof there
is a boat; then a running figure whose head has been

260

THE DREAM-WORK 261

apostrophised away, and the like. I might now be tempted
as a critic to consider this composition and its elements non-
sensical. A boat does not belong on the roof of a house and
a person without a head cannot run ; the person, too, is larger
than the house, and if the whole thing is to represent a land-
scape, the single letters of the alphabet do not fit into it, for
of course they do not occur in pure nature. A correct judg-
ment of the picture-puzzle results only if I make no such
objections to the whole and its parts, but if, on the contrary,
I take pains to replace each picture by the syllable or word
which it is capable of representing by means of any sort of
reference, the words which are thus brought together are no
longer meaningless, but may constitute a most beautiful and
sensible expression. Now the dream is a picture-puzzle of
this sort, and our predecessors in the field of dream inter-
pretation have made the mistake of judging the rebus as an
artistic composition. As such it appears nonsensical and
worthless.

(a) The Condensation Work

The first thing which becomes clear to the investigator in
the comparison of the dream content with the dream thoughts
is that a tremendous work of condensation has taken place.
The dream is reserved, paltry, and laconic when compared
with the range and copiousness of the dream thoughts. The
dream when written down fills half a page; the analysis, in
which the dream thoughts are contained, requires six, eight,
twelve times as much space. The ratio varies with different
dreams; it never changes its essential meaning, as far as I
have been able to observe. As a rule the extent of the com-
pression which has taken place is under-estimated, owing to
the fact that the dream thoughts which are brought to light
are considered the complete material, while continued work
of interpretation may reveal new thoughts which are con-
cealed behind the dream. We have already mentioned that
one is really never sure of having interpreted a dream com-
pletely ; even if the solution seems satisfying and flawless,
it still always remains possible that there is a further meaning
which is manifested by the same dream. Thus the amount of
condensation is—strictly speaking—indeterminable. An objec-

262 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

tion, which at first sight seems very plausible, might be raised
against the assertion that the disproportion between dream
content and dream thought justifies the conclusion that an
abundant condensation of psychic material has taken place
in the formation of dreams. For we so often have the im-
pression that we have dreamed a great deal throughout the
night and then have forgotten the greater part. The dream
which we recollect upon awakening would thus be only a
remnant of the total dream-work, which would probably
equal the dream thoughts in range if we were able to remember
the former completely. In part this is certainly true; there
can be no mistake about the observation that the dream is
most accurately reproduced if one tries to remember it im-
mediately after awakening, and that the recollection of it
becomes more and more defective towards evening. On the
other hand, it must be admitted that the impression that we
have dreamed a good deal more than we are able to reproduce
is often based upon an illusion, the cause of which will be
explained later. Moreover, the assumption of condensation
in the dream activity is not affected by the possibility of
forgetting in dreams, for it is proved by groups of ideas belong-
ing to those particular parts of the dream which have remained
in the memory. If a large part of the dream has actually
been lost to memory, we are probably deprived of access to a
new series of dream thoughts. It is altogether unjustifiable
to expect that those portions of the dream which have been
lost also relate to the thoughts with which we are already
acquainted from the analysis of the portions which have been
preserved.

In view of the great number of ideas which analysis fur-
nishes for each individual element of the dream content, the
chief doubt with many readers will be whether it is permissible
to count everything that subsequently comes to mind during
analysis as a part of the dream thoughts—to assume, in other
words, that all these thoughts have been active in the sleeping
state and have taken part in the formation of the dream.
Is it not more probable that thought connections are developed
in the course of analysis which did not participate in the
formation of the dream ? I can meet this doubt only con-
ditionally. It is true, of course, that particular thought

THE DREAM-WORK 263

connections first arise only during analysis; but one may
always be sure that such new connections have been estab-
lished only between thoughts which have already been con-
nected in the dream thoughts by other means; the new
connections are, so to speak, corollaries, short circuits, which
are made possible by the existence of other more fundamental
means of connection. It must be admitted that the huge
number of trains of thought revealed by analysis have already
been active in the formation of the dream, for if a chain of
thoughts has been worked out, which seems to be without
connection with the formation of the dream, a thought is
suddenly encountered which, being represented in the dream,
is indispensable to its interpretation—which nevertheless is
inaccessible except through that chain of thoughts. The reader
may here turn to the dream of the botanical monograph,
which is obviously the result of an astonishing condensation
activity, even though I have not given the analysis of it
completely.

But how, then, is the psychic condition during sleep which
precedes dreaming to be imagined ? Do all the dream thoughts
exist side by side, or do they occur one after another, or
are many simultaneous trains of thought constructed from
different centres, which meet later on? 1 am of the opinion
that it is not yet necessary to form a plastic conception of
the psychic condition of dream formation. Only let us not
forget that we are concerned with unconscious thought, and
that the process may easily be a different one from that which
we perceive in ourselves in intentional contemplation accom-
panied by consciousness.

The fact, however, that dream formation is based on a
process of condensation, stands indubitable. How, then, is
this condensation brought about ?

If it be considered that of those dream thoughts which are
found only the smallest number are represented in the dream
by means of one of its ideal elements, it might be concluded
that condensation is accomplished by means of ellipsis, in
that the dream is not an accurate translation or a projection
point by point of the dream thoughts, but a very incomplete
and defective reproduction of them. This view, as we shall
soon find, is a very inadequate one. But let us take it as a

264 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

starting point for the present, and ask ourselves: If only a
few of the elements of the dream thoughts get into the dream
content, what conditions determine their choice ?

In order to gain enlightenment on this subject let us turn
our attention to those elements of the dream content which
must have fulfilled the conditions we are seeking. A dream
to the formation of which an especially strong condensation
has contributed will be the most suitable material for this
investigation. I select the dream, cited on page 142, of the
botanical monograph.

Dream content: I have written a monograph upon a
(obscure) certain plant. The book lies before me, I am just
turning over a folded coloured plate. A dried specimen of the
plant is bound with every copy as though from a herbarium.

The most prominent element of this dream is the botanical
monograph. This comes from the impressions received on
the day of the dream; I had actually seen a monograph on
the genus “ cyclamen” in the show-window of a book-store.
The mention of this genus is lacking in the dream content,
in which only the monograph and its relation to botany have
remained. The “ botanical monograph " immediately shows
its relation to the work on cocaine which I had once written ;
thought connections proceed from cocaine on the one hand
to a “ Festschrift," and on the other to my friend, the eye
specialist, Dr. Koenigstein, who has had a share in the utili-
sation of cocaine. Moreover, with the person of this Dr.
Koenigstein is connected the recollection of the interrupted
conversation which I had had with him on the previous
evening and of the manifold thoughts about remuneration
for medical services among colleagues. This conversation,
then, is properly the actual stimulus of the dream ; the mono-
graph about cyclamen is likewise an actuality but of an indif-
ferent nature; as I soon see, the “ botanical monograph ” of
the dream turns out to be a common mean between the two
experiences of the day, and to have been taken over unchanged
from an indifferent impression and bound up with the psycho-
logically significant experience by means of the most abundant
associations.

Not only the combined idea, ‘botanical monograph,”
however, but also each of the separate elements, “ botanical “

THE DREAM-WORK 265

and “monograph,” penetrates deeper and deeper into the
confused tangle of the dream thoughts. To “botanical “
belong the recollections of the person of Professor Gartner
(German : Gårtner= gardener), of his blooming wife, of my
patient whose name is Flora, and of a lady about whom I told
the story of the forgotten flowers. Gartner, again, is connected
with the laboratory and the conversation with Koenigstein ;
the mention of the two female patients also belongs to the
same conversation. A chain of thoughts, one end of which
is formed by the title of the hastily seen monograph, leads
off in the other direction from the lady with the flowers to the
favourite flowers of my wife. Besides this, ‘botanical ”
recalls not only an episode at the Gymnasium, but an examina-
tion taken while I was at the university ; and a new subject
matter—my hobbies—which was broached in the conversa-
tion already mentioned, is connected by means of my
humorously so-called favourite flower, the artichoke, with the
chain of thoughts proceeding from the forgotten flowers ;
behind “ artichoke “ there is concealed on the one hand a
recollection of Italy, and on the other a reminiscence of a
childhood scene in which I first formed my connection with
books which has since grown so intimate. “ Botanical,”
then, is a veritable nucleus, the centre for the dream of many
trains of thought, which, I may assure the reader, were
correctly and justly brought into relation to one another in
the conversation referred to. Here we find ourselves in a
thought factory, in which, as in the “ Weaver's Masterpiece ” :
“ One tread moves thousands of threads,

The little shuttles fly back and forth,

The threads flow on unseen,

One stroke ties thousands of knots.”

“ Monograph” in the dream, again, has a bearing upon
two subjects, the one-sidedness of my studies and the costli-
ness of my hobbies.

The impression is gained from this first investigation that
the elements “ botanical” and “ monograph” have been
accepted in the dream content because they were able to show
the most extensive connections with the dream thoughts,
and thus represent nuclei in which a great number of dream
thoughts come together, and because they have manifold

266 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

significance for the dream interpretation. The fact upon
which this explanation is based may be expressed in another
form : Every element of the dream content turns out to be
over-determined—that is, it enjoys a manifold representation
in the dream thoughts.

We shall learn more by testing the remaining component
parts of the dream as to their occurrence in the dream thoughts.
The coloured plate refers (cf. the analysis on p. 145) to a new
subject, the criticism passed upon my work by colleagues,
and to a subject already represented in the dream—my
hobbies—and also to a childish recollection in which I pull to
pieces the book with the coloured plates ; the dried specimen
of the plant relates to an experience at the Gymnasium
centering about and particularly emphasizing the herbarium.
Thus I see what sort of relation exists between the dream
content and dream thoughts: Not only do the elements of
the dream have a manifold determination in the dream
thoughts, but the individual dream thoughts are represented
in the dream by many elements. Starting from an element of
the dream the path of associations leads to a number of dream
thoughts ; and from a dream thought to several elements of
the dream. The formation of the dream does not, therefore,
take place in such fashion that a single one of the dream
thoughts or a group of them furnishes the dream content
with an abridgment as its representative therein, and that
then another dream thought furnishes another abridgment
as its representative—somewhat as popular representatives
are elected from among the people—but the whole mass of the
dream thoughts is subjected to a certain elaboration, in the
course of which those elements that receive the greatest and
completest support stand out in relief, analogous, perhaps, to
election by scrutins des listes. Whatever dream I may subject
to such dismemberment, I always find the same fundamental
principle confirmed—that the dream elements are constructed
from the entire mass of the dream thoughts and that every one
of them appears in relation to the dream thoughts to have a
multiple determination.

It is certainly not out of place to demonstrate this relation
of the dream content to the dream thoughts by means of a
fresh example, which is distinguished by a particularly artful

THE DREAM-WORK 267

intertwining of reciprocal relations. The dream is that of a
patient whom I am treating for claustrophobia (fear in enclosed
spaces). It will soon become evident why I feel myself called
upon to entitle this exceptionally intellectual piece of dream
activity in the following manner :

IT. “ A Beautiful Dream”

The dreamer is riding with much company to X-street, where
there is a modest road-house (which is not the fact). A
theatrical performance is being given in its rooms. He is first
audience, then actor. Finally the company is told to change
their clothes, in order to get back into the city. Some of the
people are assigned to the rooms on the ground floor, others to
the first floor. Then a dispute arises. Those above are angry
because those below have not yet finished, so that they cannot
come down, His brother is upstairs, he is below, and he is angry
at his brother because there is such crowding. (This part
obscure.) Besides it has already been decided upon their arrival
who is to be wpstairs and who down. Then he goes alone over
the rising ground, across which X-street leads toward the city,
and he has such difficulty and hardship in walking that he cannot
move from the spot. An elderly gentleman joins him and scolds
about the King of Italy. Finally, towards the end of the rising
ground walking becomes much easier.

The difficulties experienced in walking were so distinct
that for some time after waking he was in doubt whether
they were dream or reality.

According to the manifest content, this dream can hardly
be praised. Contrary to the rules, I shall begin with that
portion which the dreamer referred to as the most distinct.

The difficulties which were dreamed of, and which were
probably experienced during the dream—difficult climbing
accompanied by dyspnæa—is one of the symptoms which
the patient had actually shown years before, and which, in
conjunction with other symptoms, was at that time attributed
to tuberculosis (probably hysterically simulated). We are
already from exhibition dreams acquainted with this sensation
of being hindered, peculiar to the dream, and here again we
find it used for the purpose of any kind of representation, as
an ever-ready material. That part of the dream content

268 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

which ascribes the climbing as difficult at first, and as becoming
easier at the end of the hill, made me think while it was being
told of the well-known masterful introduction to Sappho
by A. Daudet. Here a young man carries the girl whom
he loves upstairs—she is at first as light as a feather ; but the
higher he mounts the more heavily she weighs upon his arm,
and this scene symbolises a course of events by recounting
which Daudet tries to warn young men not to waste serious
affection upon girls of humble origin or of questionable past.*
Although I knew that my patient had recently had a love
affair with a lady of the theatre, and had broken it off, I did
not expect to find that the interpretation which had occurred
to me was correct. Moreover, the situation in Sappho was the
reverse of that in the dream ; in the latter the climbing was
difficult at the beginning and easy later on ; in the novel the
symbolism serves only if what was at first regarded as easy
finally turns out to be a heavy load. To my astonishment,
the patient remarked that the interpretation corresponded
elosely to the plot of a play which he had seen on the evening
before at the theatre. The play was called Round about
Vienna, and treated of the career of a girl who is respectable
at first but later goes over to the demi-monde, who has affairs
with persons in high places, thus * climbing,” but finally
* goes down ” faster and faster. This play had reminded him
of another entitled From Step to Step, in the advertisement
of which had appeared a stairway consisting of several
steps.

Now to continue the interpretation. The actress with
whom he had had his most recent affair, a complicated one,
had lived in X-street. There is no inn in this street. How-
ever, while he was spending a part of the summer in Vienna
for the sake of the lady, he had lodged (German abgestiegen =
stopped, literally stepped off) at a little hotel in the neighbour-
hood. As he was leaving the hotel he said to the cab-driver,
“Tam glad I didn't get any vermin anyway (which incidentally
is one of his phobias). Whereupon the cab-driver answered :
“How could anybody stop there! It isn’t a hotel at all,
it’s really nothing but a road-house ! ”

* In estimating this description of the author one may recall the signi-
ficance of stairway dreams, referred to on p. 246.

THE DREAM-WORK 269

The road-house immediately suggests to the dreamer’s
recollection a quotation :

“ Of that marvellous host
I was once a guest.”

But the host in the poem by Uhland is an apple tree. Now
a second quotation continues the train of thought :

Faust (dancing with the young witch).

“ A lovely dream once came to me;
I then beheld an apple tree,
And there two fairest apples shone:
They lured me so, I climbed thereon.”

THE Fair ONE.

+ Apples have been desired by you,
Since first in Paradise they grew;
And I am moved with joy to know
That such within my garden grow.”
Translated by BAYARD TAYLOR.

There remains not the slightest doubt what is meant by
the apple tree and the apples. A beautiful bosom stood high
among the charms with which the actress had bewitched our
dreamer.

According to the connections of the analysis we had every
reason to assume that the dream went back to an impression
from childhood. In this case it must have reference to the
nurse of the patient, who is now a man of nearly fifty years
of age. The bosom of the nurse is in reality a road-house for
the child. The nurse as well as Daudet’s Sappho appears as
an allusion to his abandoned sweetheart.

The (elder) brother of the patient also appears in the
dream content ; he is upstairs, the dreamer himself is below.
This again is an inversion, for the brother, as I happen to know,
has lost his social position, my patient has retained his. In
reporting the dream content the dreamer avoided saying
that his brother was upstairs and that he himself was down.
It would have been too frank an expression, for a person is
said to be “ down and out ” when he has lost his fortune and
position. Now the fact that at this point in the dream some-
thing is represented as inverted must have a meaning. The
inversion must apply rather to some other relation between

270 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the dream thoughts and dream content. There is an in-
dication which suggests how this inversion is to be taken.
It obviously applies to the end of the dream, where the circum-
stances of climbing are the reverse of those in Sappho. Now it
may easily be seen what inversion is referred to; in Sappho
the man carries the woman who stands in a sexual relation
to him; in the dream thoughts, inversely, a woman carries
a man, and as this state of affairs can only occur during
childhood, the reference is again to the nurse who carries
the heavy child. Thus the final portion of the dream
succeeds in representing Sappho and the nurse in the same
allusion.

Just as the name Sappho has not been selected by the
poet without reference to a Lesbian custom, so the elements
of the dream in which persons act above and below, point to
fancies of a sexual nature with which the dreamer is occupied
and which as suppressed cravings are not without connection
with his neurosis. Dream interpretation itself does not show
that these are fancies and not recollections of actual happen-
ings ; it only furnishes us with a set of thoughts and leaves
us to determine their value as realities. Real and fantastic
occurrences at first appear here as of equal value—and not
only here but also in the creation of more important psychic
structures than dreams. Much company, as we already
know, signifies a secret. The brother is none other than a
representative, drawn into the childhood scene by “ fancying
backwards,” of all of the later rivals for the woman. Through
the agency of an experience which is indifferent in itself, the
episode with the gentleman who scolds about the King of
Italy again refers to the intrusion of people of low rank into
aristocratic society. It is as though the warning which
Daudet gives to youth is to be supplemented by a similar
warning applicable to the suckling child.*

In order that we may have at our disposal a third example
for the study of condensation in dream formation, I shall cite

* The fantastic nature of the situation relating to the nurse of the
dreamer is shown by the objectively ascertained circumstance that the nurse
in this case was his mother. Furthermore, I may call attention to the
regret of the young man in the anecdote (p. 172), that he had not taken
better advantage of his opportunity with the nurse as probably the source
of the present SEE

THE DREAM-WORK 271

the partial analysis of another dream for which I am in-
debted to an elderly lady who is being psychoanalytically
treated. In harmony with the condition of severe anxiety
from which the patient suffered, her dreams contained a great
abundance of sexual thought material, the discovery of which
astonished as well as frightened her. Since I cannot carry
the interpretation of the dream to completion, the material
seems to fall apart into several groups without apparent
connection.

III. Content of the dream: She remembers that she has
two June bugs in a box, which she must set at liberty, for otherwise
they will suffocate. She opens the box, and the bugs are quite
exhausted ; one of them flies out of the window, but the other is
crushed on the casement while she is shutting the window, as some
one or other requests her to do (expressions of disgust).

Analysis: Her husband is away travelling, and her
fourteen-year-old daughter is sleeping in the bed next to her.
In the evening the little one calls her attention to the fact
that a moth has fallen into her glass of water; but she neglects
to take it out, and feels sorry for the poor little creature in
the morning. A story which she had read in the evening told
of boys throwing a cat into boiling water, and the twitchings
of the animal were described. These are the occasions for
the dream, both of which are indifferent in themselves. She
is further occupied with the subject of cruelty to animals.
Years before, while they were spending the summer at a
certain place, her daughter was very cruel to animals. She
started a butterfly collection, and asked her for arsenic with
which to kill the butterflies. Once it happened that a moth
flew about the room for a long time with a needle through its
body ; on another occasion she found that some moths which
had been kept for metamorphosis had died of starvation.
The same child while still at a tender age was in the habit
of pulling out the wings of beetles and butterflies ; now she
would shrink in horror from these cruel actions, for she has
grown very kind.

Her mind is occupied with this contrast. It recalls another
contrast, the one between appearance and disposition, as it is
described in Adam Bede by George Eliot. There a beautiful
but vain and quite stupid girl is placed side by side with an

272 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

ugly but high-minded one. The aristocrat who seduces the
little goose, is opposed to the working man who feels aristo-
cratic, and behaves accordingly. It is impossible to tell
character from people’s looks. Who could tell from her looks
that she is tormented by sensual desires ?

In the same year in which the little girl started her butterfly
collection, the region in which they were staying suffered
much from a pest of June bugs. The children made havoc
among the bugs, and crushed them cruelly. At that time she
saw a person who tore the wings off the June bugs and ate
them. She herself had been born in June and also married
in June. Three days after the wedding she wrote a letter
home, telling how happy she was. But she was by no means
happy.

During the evening before the dream she had rummaged
among her old letters and had read various ones, comical and
serious, to her family—an extremely ridiculous letter from a
piano-teacher who had paid her attention when she was a
girl, as well as one from an aristocratic admirer.*

She blames herself because a bad book by de Maupassant
had fallen into the hands of one of her daughters.f The arsenic
which her little girl asks for recalls the arsenic pills which
restored the power of youth to the Duc de Mora in Nabab.

“ Set at liberty “ recalls to her a passage from the Magic
Flute :

4 I cannot compel you to love,
But I will not give you your liberty.”
“ June bugs “ suggests the speech of Katie : +
“I love you like a little beetle.”

Meanwhile the speech from Tannhauser: “ For you are
wrought with evil passion.”

She is living in fear and anxiety about her absent husband.
The dread that something may happen to him on the journey
is expressed in numerous fancies of the day. A little while
before, during the analysis, she had come upon a complaint

* This is the real inciter of the dream.

+ By way of supplement. Such books are poison to a young girl. She
herself in youth had drawn much information from forbidden books.

‡ A further train of thought leads to Penthesileia by the same author:
eruelty towards her lover,

THE DREAM-WORK 273

about his “ senility “ in her unconscious thoughts. The wish
thought which this dream conceals may perhaps best be
conjectured if I say that several days before the dream she
was suddenly astounded by a command which she directed
to her husband in the midst of her work : " Go hang yourself.”
It was found that a few hours before she had read somewhere
that a vigorous erection is induced when a person is hanged.
It was for the erection which freed itself from repression in
this terror-inspiring veiled form. “ Go hang yourself “ is as
much as to say: "Get up an erection, at any cost.” Dr.
Jenkin’s arsenic pills in Nabab belong in this connection ; for
it was known to the patient that the strongest aphrodisiac,
cantharides, is prepared by crushing bugs (so-called Spanish
flies). The most important part of the dream content has a
significance to this effect.

Opening and shutting the window is the subject of a stand-
ing quarrel with her husband. She herself likes to sleep with
plenty of air, and her husband does not. Exhaustion is the
chief ailment of which she complains these days.

In all three of the dreams just cited I have emphasized by
italics those phrases where one of the elements of the dream
recurs in the dream thoughts in order to make the manifold
references of the former obvious. Since, however, the
analysis of none of these dreams has been carried to com-
pletion, it will be well worth while to consider a dream with a
fully detailed analysis, in order to demonstrate the manifold
determination of its content. I select the dream of Irma’s
injection for this purpose. We shall see without effort in
this example that the condensation work has used more than
one means for the formation of the dream.

The chief person in the content of the dream is my patient
Irma, who is seen with the features which belong to her in
waking life, and who therefore in the first instance represents
herself. But her attitude as I examine her at the window is
taken from the recollection of another person, of the lady for
whom I should like to exchange my patient, as the dream
thoughts show. In as far as Irma shows a diphtheritic mem-
brane which recalls my anxiety about my eldest daughter,
she comes to represent this child of mine, behind whom is
concealed the person of the patient who died from intoxication

8

274 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

and who is brought into connection by the identity of her
name. In the further course of the dream the significance of
Irma’s personality changes (without the alteration of her
image as it is seen in the dream); she becomes one of the
children whom we examine in the public dispensaries for
children’s diseases, where my friends show the difference of
their mental capabilities. The transference was obviously
brought about through the idea of my infant daughter. By
means of her unwillingness to open her mouth the same Irma
is changed into an allusion to another lady who was once
examined by me, and besides that to my wife, in the same
connection. Furthermore, in the morbid transformations
which I discover in her throat I have gathered allusions to a
great number of other persons.

All these people whom I encounter as I follow the associa-
tions suggested by * Irma,” do not appear personally in the
dream ; they are concealed behind the dream person “ Irma,”
who is thus developed into a collective image, as might be
expected, with contradictory features. Irma comes to re-
present these other persons, who are discarded in the work
of condensation, in that I cause to happen to her all the things
which recall these persons detail for detail.

I may also construct a collective person for the con-
densation of the dream in another manner, by uniting the
actual features of two or more persons in one dream image.
It is in this manner that Dr. M. in my dream was constructed,
he bears the name of Dr. M., and speaks and acts as Dr. M.
does, but his bodily characteristics and his suffering belong to
another person, my eldest brother ; a single feature, paleness,
is doubly determined, owing to the fact that it is common to
both persons. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle is a similar
composite person. But here the dream image is prepared in
still another manner. I have not united features peculiar
to the one with features of the other, and thereby abridged
the remembered image of each by certain features, but I have
adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family
portraits, by which he projects both pictures upon one another,
whereupon the common features stand out in stronger relief,
while those which do not coincide neutralize one another and
become obscure in the picture. In the dream of my uncle the

THE DREAM-WORK 275

blond beard stands out in relief, as an emphasized feature, from
the physiognomy, which belongs to two persons, and which is
therefore blurred ; furthermore the beard contains an allusion
to my father and to myself, which is made possible by its
reference to the fact of growing grey.

The construction of collective and composite persons is
one of the chief resources of the activity of dream condensa-
tion. There will soon be an occasion for treating of this in
another connection.

The notion “ dysentery “ in the dream about the injection
likewise has a manifold determination, on the one hand
because of its paraphasic assonance with diphtheria, and on
the other because of its reference to the patient, whom I have
sent to the Orient, and whose hysteria has been wrongly
recognised.

The mention of propyls “ in the dream also proves to be
an interesting case of condensation. Not “ propyls” but
“amyls ” were contained in the dream thoughts. One might
think that here a simple displacement had occurred in the
dream formation. And this is the case, but the displacement
serves the purposes of condensation, as is shown by the
following supplementary analysis. If I dwell for a moment
upon the word “ propyls,” its assonance to the word “ pro-
pylæum ” suggests itself to me. But the propylæum is to be
found not only in Athens but also in Munich. In the latter
city I visited a friend the year before who was seriously ill,
and the reference to him becomes unmistakable on account of
trimethylamin, which follows closely upon propyls.

I pass over the striking circumstance that here, as else-
where in the analysis of dreams, associations of the most widely
different values are employed for the establishment of thought
connections as though they were equivalent, and I yield to the
temptation to regard the process by which amyls in the dream
thoughts are replaced by propyls, as though it were plastic
in the dream content.

On the one hand is the chain of ideas about my friend
Otto, who does not understand me, who thinks I am in the
wrong, and who gives me the cordial that smells like amyls ;
on the other the chain of ideas—connected with the first by
contrast—about my friend William, who understands me and

276 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

who would always think I was in the right, and to whom I
am indebted for so much valuable information about the
chemistry of the sexual processes.

Those characteristics of the associations centering about
Otto which ought particularly to attract my attention are
determined by the recent occasions which are responsible for
the dream; amyls belong to these elements so determined
which are destined to get into the dream content. The group
of associations “ William “ is distinctly vivified by the con-
trast to Otto, and the elements in it which correspond to those
already excited in the “ Otto " associations are thrown into
relief. In this whole dream I am continually referring to a
person who excites my displeasure and to another person whom
I can oppose to him or her at will, and I conjure up the friend
as against the enemy, feature for feature. Thus amyls in the
Otto-group suggests recollections in the other group belonging
to chemistry ; trimethylamin, which receives support from
several quarters, finds its way into the dream content.
** Amyls,” too, might have got into the dream content without
undergoing change, but it yields to the influence of the
“ William ” group of associations, owing to the fact that an
element which is capable of furnishing a double determina-
tion for amyls is sought out from the whole range of recollec-
tions which the name “ William ” covers. The association
“ propyls “ lies in the neighbourhood of amyls ; Munich with
the propylæum comes to meet amyls from the series of associa-
tions belonging to “ William.” Both groups are united in
propyls—propylœum. As though by a compromise, this inter-
mediary element gets into the dream content. Here a
common mean which permits of a manifold determination has
been created. It thus becomes perfectly obvious that manifold
determination must facilitate penetration into the dream
content. A displacement of attention from what is really
intended to something lying near in the associations has
thoughtlessly taken place, for the sake of this mean-formation.

The study of the injection dream has now enabled us to
get some insight into the process of condensation which takes
place in the formation of dreams. The selection of those
elements which occur in the dream content more than once,
the formation of new unities (collective persons, composite

THE DREAM-WORK 277

images), and the construction of the common mean, these we
have been able to recognise as details of the condensing
process. The purpose which is served by condensation and
the means by which it is brought about will be investigated
when we come to study the psychic processes in the formation
of dreams as a whole. Let us be content for the present
with establishing dream condensation as an important relation
between the dream thoughts and the dream content.

The condensing activity of the dream becomes most tangible
when it has selected words and names as its object. In general
words are often treated as things by the dream, and thus
undergo the same combinations, displacements, and sub-
stitutions, and therefore also condensations, as ideas of things.
The results of such dreams are comical and bizarre word
formations. Upon one occasion when a colleague had sent
me one of his essays, in which he had, in my judgment, over-
estimated the value of a recent physiological discovery and
had expressed himself in extravagant terms, I dreamed the
following night a sentence which obviously referred to this
treatise : "That is in true norekdal style.” The solution of
this word formation at first gave me difficulties, although it
was unquestionably formed as a parody after the pattern of
the superlatives “ colossal,” “ pyramidal “ : but to tell where
it came from was not easy. At last the monster fell apart
into the two names Nora and Ekdal from two well-known
plays by Ibsen. I had previously read a newspaper essay on
Ibsen by the same author, whose latest work I was thus
criticising in the dream.

II.* One of my female patients dreams that a man with a
light beard and a peculiar glittering eye is pointing to a sign board
attached to a tree which reads : uclamparia—wet.

Analysis. The man was rather authoritative looking, and
his peculiar glittering eye at once recalled St. Paul's Cathedral,
near Rome, where she saw in mosaics the Popes that have so
far ruled. One of the early Popes had a golden eye (this was
really an optical illusion which the guides usually call attention
to). Furtherassociations showed that the general physiognomy
corresponded to her own clergyman (Pope), and the shape of
the light beard recalled her doctor (myself), while the stature of

* Given by translator as author's example could not be translated.

278 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the man in the dream recalled her father. All these persons
stand in the same relation to her; they are all guiding and
directing her course of life. On further questioning, the
golden eye recalled gold—money—the rather expensive
psychoanalytic treatment which gives her a great deal of
concern. Gold, moreover, recalls the gold cure for alcoholism
— Мг. D., whom she would have married if it had not been for
his clinging to the disgusting alcohol habit—she does not
object to a person taking an occasional drink; she herself
sometimes drinks beer and cordials—this again brings her back
to her visit to St. Paul’s without the walls and its surroundings.
She remembers that in the neighbouring monastery of the
Three Fountains she drank a liquor made of eucalyptus by
the Trappist monks who inhabit this monastery. She then
relates how the monks transformed this malarial and swampy
region into a dry and healthful neighbourhood by planting
there many eucalyptus trees. The word * uclamparia “
then resolves itself into eucalyptus and malaria, and the word
“ wet ” refers to the former swampy nature of the place. Wet
also suggests dry. Dry is actually the name of the man
whom she would have married except for his over-indulgence
in alcohol. The peculiar name of Dry is of Germanic origin
(drei=three) and hence alludes to the Abbey of the Three
(drei) Fountains above mentioned. In talking about Mr. Dry’s
habit she used the strong words, “ He could drink a fountain.”
Mr. Dry jocosely refers to his habit by saying, “ You know I
must drink because I am always dry ” (referring to his name).
The eucalyptus also refers to her neurosis, which was at first
diagnosed as malaria. She went to Italy because her attacks
of anxiety, which were accompanied by marked trembling
and shivering, were thought to be of malarial origin. She
bought some eucalyptus oil from the monks, and she maintains
that it has done her much good.

The condensation ucłamparia—wet is therefore the point of
junction for the dream as well as for the neurosis. *

* The same analysis and synthesis of syllables—a veritable chemistry of
syllables—serves us for many a jest in waking life. * What is the cheapest
method of obtaining silver? You go to a field where silver-berries are
growing and pick them; then the berries are eliminated and the silver

remains in a free state,” The first person who read and criticised this book
made the objection to me—which other readers will probably repeat—* that

THE DREAM-WORK 279

111. In a somewhat long and wild dream of my own, the
chief point of which is apparently a sea voyage, it happens
that the next landing is called Hearsing and the one farther on
Fliess. The latter is the name of my friend living in B.,who
has often been the objective point of my travels. But Hearsing
is put together from the names of places in the local environ-
ment of Vienna, which so often end in ing : Hietzing, Liesing,
Moedling (Medelitz, “ mese deliciæ,” my own name, “ ту
joy”) (joy=German Freude), and the English hearsay,
which points to libel and establishes the relation to the in-
different dream excitement of the day—a poem in the
Fliegende Blatter about a slanderous dwarf, “ 6
Hashesaid.” By connecting the final syllable “ ing ” with the
name Fliess, * Vlissingen “ is obtained, which is a real port on
the sea-voyage which my brother passes when he comes to
visit us from England. But the English for Vlissingen is
Flushing, which signifies blushing and recalls erythrophobia
(fear of blushing), which I treat, and also reminds me of a
recent publication by Bechterew about this neurosis, which
has given occasion for angry feelings in me.

IV. Upon another occasion I had a dream which consisted
of two parts. The first was the vividly remembered word
f Autodidasker,” the second was truthfully covered by a
short and harmless fancy which had been developed a few
days before, and which was to the effect that I must tell
Professor N., when I saw him next: ‘The patient about
whose condition I last consulted you is really suffering from
a neurosis, just as you suspected.” The coinage " Auto-
didasker ” must, then, not only satisfy the requirement that it
should contain or represent a compressed meaning, but also
the dreamer often appears too witty." That is true, as long as it applies
to the dreamer; it involves a condemnation only when its application is
extended to the interpreter of the dream. In waking reality I can make
very little claim to the predicate “ witty ^; if my dreams appear witty, this
is not the fault of my individuality, but of the peculiar psychological con-
ditions under which the dream is fabricated, and is intimately connected
with the theory of wit and the comical. The dream becomes witty because
the shortest and most direct way to the expression of its thoughts is barred
for 16 : the dream is under constraint. My readers may convince themselves
that the dreams of my patients give the impression of being witty (attempt-
ing to be witty), in the same degree and in a greater than my own.
Nevertheless this reproach impelled me to compare the technique of wit

with the dream activity, which I have done in a book published in 1905,
on Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. (Author.)

280 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

that this meaning should have a valid connection with my
purpose, which is repeated from waking life, of giving Pro-
fessor N. his due credit.

Now Autodidasker is easily separated into author (German
Autor), autodidact, and Lasker, with whom is associated the
name Lasalle. The first of these words leads to the occasion
of the dream— which this time is significant. I had brought
home to my wife several volumes by a well-known author,
who is a friend of my brother’s, and who, as I have learned,
comes from the same town as I (J. J. David). One evening
she spoke to me about the profound impression which the
touching sadness of a story in one of David’s novels, about a
talented but degenerate person, had made upon her, and our
conversation turned upon the indications of talent which we
perceive in our own children. Under the influence of what she
had just read, my wife expressed a concern relative to our
children, and I comforted her with the remark that it is just
such dangers that can be averted by education. During the
night my train of thoughts proceeded further, took up the
concern of my wife, and connected with it all sorts of other
things. An opinion which the poet had expressed to my
brother upon the subject of marriage showed my thoughts a
by-path which might lead to a representation in the dream.
This path led to Breslau, into which city a lady who was a
very good friend of ours had married. I found in Breslau
Lasker and Lasalle as examples realising our concern about
being ruined at the hands of a woman, examples which
enabled me to represent both manifestations of this influence
for the bad at once.* The "" Cherchez la femme,” in which
these thoughts may be summed up, when taken in another
sense, brings me to my brother, who is still unmarried and
whose name is Alexander. Now I see that Alex, as we ab-
breviate the name, sounds almost like inversion of Lasker
and that this factor must have taken part in giving my
thoughts their detour by way of Breslau.

But this playing with names and syllables in which I am
here engaged contains still another meaning. The wish that

* Lasker died of progressive paralysis, that is of the consequences of an
infection caught from a woman (lues) ; Lasalle, as is well known, was killed
in a duel on account of a lady.

THE DREAM-WORK 281

my brother may have a happy family life is represented by it
in the following manner. In the artistic romance L’Œuvre,
the writer, as is well known, has incidentally given an episodic
account of himself and of his own family happiness, and he
appears under the name of Sandoz. Probably he has taken
the following course in the name transformation. Zola when
inverted (as children like so much to do) gives Aloz. But that
was still too undisguised for him; therefore he replaced the
syllable Al, which stands at the beginning of the name
Alexander, by the third syllable of the same name, sand, and
thus Sandoz came about. In a similar manner my autodi-
dasker originated.

My fancy, that I am telling Professor N. that the patient
whom we had both seen is suffering from a neurosis, got into
the dream in the following manner. Shortly before the close
of my working year I received a patient in whose case my
diagnosis failed me. A serious organic affliction—perhaps
some changes in the spine—was to be assumed, but could not
be proved. It would have been tempting to diagnose the
trouble as a neurosis, and this would have put an end to all
difficulties, had it not been for the fact that the sexual
anamnesis, without which I am unwilling to admit a neurosis,
was so energetically denied by the patient. In my embarrass-
ment I called to my assistance the physician whom I respect
most of all men (as others do also), and to whose authority I
surrender most completely. He listened to my doubts, told
me he thought them justified, and then said: * Keep on
observing the man, it is probably a neurosis.” Since I know
that he does not share my opinions about the etiology of
neuroses, I suppressed my disagreement, but I did not conceal
my scepticism. A few days after T informed the patient that
I did not know what to do with him, and advised him to go
to some one else. Thereupon, to my great astonishment, he
began to beg my pardon for having lied to me, saying that he
had felt very much ashamed ; and now he revealed to me just
that piece of sexual etiology which I had expected, and which
I found necessary for assuming the existence of a neurosis.
This was a relief to me, but at the same time a humiliation ;
for I had to admit that my consultant, who was not dis-
concerted by the absence of anamnesis, had made a correct

282 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

observation. I made up my mind to tell him about it when I
saw him again, and to say to him that he had been in the
right and I in the wrong.

This is just what I do in the dream. But what sort of a
wish is supposed to be fulfilled if I acknowledge that I am in
the wrong ? This is exactly my wish; I wish to be in the
wrong with my apprehensions—that is to say, I wish that my
wife whose fears I have appropriated in the dream thoughts
may remain in the wrong. The subject to which the matter
of being in the right or in the wrong is related in the dream is
not far distant from what is really interesting to the dream
thoughts. It is the same pair of alternatives of either organic
or functional impairment through a woman, more properly
through the sexual life—either tabetic paralysis or a neurosis
—with which the manner of Lasalle’s ruin is more or less
loosely connected.

In this well-joined dream (which, however, is quite trans-
parent with the help of careful analysis) Professor N. plays a
part not merely on account of this analogy and of my wish to
remain in the wrong, or on account of the associated references
to Breslau and to the family of our friend who is married
there—but also on account of the following little occurrence
which was connected with our consultation. After he had
attended to our medical task by giving the above mentioned
suggestion, his interest was directed to personal matters.

“ How many children have you now ? ”—“ Six.”—A gesture
of respect and reflection.—“ Girls, boys ? リー ド Three of each.
They are my pride and my treasure.”—" Well, there is no

difficulty about the girls, but the boys give trouble later on
in their education.” 1 replied that until now they had been
very tractable; this second diagnosis concerning the future
of my boys of course pleased me as little as the one he had
made earlier, namely, that my patient had only a neurosis.
These two impressions, then, are bound together by contiguity,
by being successively received, and if I incorporate the story
of the neurosis into the dream, I substitute it for the conversa-
tion upon education which shows itself to be even more closely
connected with the dream thoughts owing to the fact that it
has such an intimate bearing upon the subsequently expressed
concerns of my wife. Thus even my fear that N. may turn out

THE DREAM-WORK 283

to be right in his remarks on the educational difficulties in the
case of boys is admitted into the dream content, in that it is
concealed behind the representation of my wish that I may be
wrong in such apprehensions. The same fancy serves without
change to represent both conflicting alternatives.

The verbal compositions of the dream are very similar
to those which are known to occur in paranoia, but which are
also found in hysteria and in compulsive ideas. The linguistic
habits of children, who at certain periods actually treat words
as objects and invent new languages and artificial syntaxes,
are in this case the common source for the dream as well as for
psychoneuroses.

When speeches occur in the dream, which are expressly
distinguished from thoughts as such, it is an invariable rule
that the dream speech has originated from a remembered
speech in the dream material. Either the wording has been
preserved in its integrity, or it has been slightly changed in
the course of expression; frequently the dream speech is
pieced together from various recollections of speeches, while
the wording has remained the same and the meaning has
possibly been changed so as to have two or more significations.
Not infrequently the dream speech serves merely as an allusion
to an incident, at which the recollected speech oceurred.%

(b) The Work of Displacement

Another sort of relation, which is no less significant, must
have come to our notice while we were collecting examples
of dream condensation. We have seen that those elements
which obtrude themselves in the dream content as its essential
components play a part in the dream thoughts which is by
no means the same. As a correlative to this the converse of
this thesis is also true. That which is clearly the essential
thing in the dream thoughts need not be represented in the
dream at all. The dream, as it were, is eccentric ; its contents
are grouped about other elements than the dream thoughts

* In the case of a young man who was suffering from obsessions, but
whose intellectual functions were intact and highly developed, I recently
found the only exception to this rule. The speeches which occurred in his
dreams did not originate in speeches which he had heard or had made him-

self, but corresponded to the undisfigured wording of his obsessive thoughts,
which only came to his consciousness in a changed state while he was awake.

284 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

as a central point. Thus, for example, in the dream about
the botanical monograph the central point of the dream
content is apparently the element botanical”; in the
dream thoughts we are concerned with the complications and
conflicts which result from services rendered among colleagues
which put them under obligations to one another, subse-
quently with the reproach that I am in the habit of sacrificing
too much to my hobbies, and the element “ botanical ” would
in no case find a place in this nucleus of the dream thoughts
if it were not loosely connected with it by an antithesis, for
botany was never among my favourite studies. In the Sappho
dream of my patient the ascending and descending, being
upstairs and down, is made the central point; the dream,
however, is concerned with the danger of sexual relations
with persons of low degree, so that only one of the elements of
the dream thoughts seems to have been taken over into the
dream content, albeit with unseemly elaboration. Similarly
in the dream about June bugs, whose subject is the relation
of sexuality to cruelty, the factor of cruelty has indeed re-
appeared but in a different connection and without the mention
of the sexual, that is to say, it has been torn from its context
and transformed into something strange. Again, in the
dream about my uncle, the blond beard, which seems to be
its central point, appears to have no rational connection with
the wishes for greatness which we have recognised as the
nucleus of the dream thoughts. It is only to be expected if
such dreams give a displaced impression. In complete con-
trast to these examples, the dream of Irma's injection shows
that individual elements can claim the same place in the
formation of dreams which they occupy in the dream thoughts.
The recognition of these new and entirely variable relations
between the dream thoughts and the dream content is at
first likely to excite our astonishment. If we find in a psychic
process of normal life that an idea has been culled from among
a number of others, and has acquired particular vividness in
our consciousness, we are in the habit of regarding this result
as a proof that the victorious idea is endowed with a peculiarly
high degree of psychic value—a certain degree of interest.
We now discover that this value of the individual elements in
the dream thoughts is not preserved in the formation of the

THE DREAM-WORK 285

dream, or does not come into consideration. For there is no
doubt as to the elements of the dream thoughts which are of
the highest value; our judgment tells us immediately. In
the formation of dreams those elements which are emphasized
with intense interest may be treated as though they were in-
ferior, and other elements are putin their place which certainly
were inferior in the dream thoughts. We are at first given
the impression that the psychic intensity * of the individual
ideas does not come into consideration at all for the selection
made by the dream, but only their greater or smaller multi-
plicity of determination. Not what is important in the
dream thoughts gets into the dream, but what is contained
in them several times over, one might be inclined to think ;
but our understanding of the formation of dreams is not much
furthered by this assumption, for at the outset it will be im-
possible to believe that the two factors of manifold deter-
mination and of integral value do not tend in the same direc-
tion in the influence they exert on the selection made by the
dream. Those ideas in the dream thoughts which are most
important are probably also those which recur most frequently,
for the individual dream thoughts radiate from them as from
central points. And still the dream may reject those elements
which are especially emphasized and which receive manifold
support, and may take up into its content elements which
are endowed only with the latter property.

This difficulty may be solved by considering another im-
pression received in the investigation of the manifold deter-
mination of the dream content. Perhaps many a reader has
already passed his own judgment upon this investigation by
saying that the manifold determination of the elements of the
dream is not a significant discovery, because it is a self-evident
one. In the analysis one starts from the dream elements, and
registers all the notions which are connected with them ; it is
no wonder, then, that these elements should occur with particu-
lar frequency in the thought material which is obtained in this
manner. I cannot acknowledge the validity of this objection,
but shall say something myself which sounds like it. Among

* Psychic intensity, value, and emphasis due to the interest of an idea
are, of course, to be kept distinct from sensational intensity, and from intensity
of that which is conceived.

286 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the thoughts which analysis brings to light, many can be
found which are far removed from the central idea of the
dream, and which appear distinguished from the rest as artificial
interpolations for a definite purpose. Their purpose may
easily be discovered ; they are just the ones which establish
a connection, often a forced and far-fetched one, between the
dream content and the dream thoughts, and if these elements
were to be weeded out, not only over-determination but also
a sufficient determination by means of the dream thoughts
would often be lacking for the dream content. We are thus
led to the conclusion that manifold determination, which
decides the selection made by the dream, is perhaps not always
a primary factor in dream formation, but is often the secondary
manifestation of a psychic power which is still unknown to us.
But in spite of all this, manifold determination must never-
theless control the entrance of individual elements into the
dream, for it is possible to observe that it is established with
considerable effort in cases where it does not result from the
dream material without assistance.

The assumption is not now far distant that a psychic force
is expressed in dream activity which on the one hand strips
elements of high psychic value of their intensity, and which
on the other hand creates new values, by way of over-determina-
tion, from elements of small value, these new values subse-
quently getting into the dream content. If this is the method
of procedure, there has taken place in the formation of the
dream a transference and displacement of the psychic in-
tensities of the individual elements, of which the textual
difference between the dream and the thought content appears
as a result. The process which we assume here is nothing
less than the essential part of the dream activity; it merits
the designation of dream displacement. Dream displacement
and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we
may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream.

I think we also have an easy task in recognising the psychic
force which makes itself felt in the circumstances of dream
displacement. The result of this displacement is that the
dream content no longer resembles the core of the dream
thoughts at all, and that the dream reproduces only a disfigured
form of the dream-wish in the unconscious. But we are

THE DREAM-WORK 287

already acquainted with dream disfigurement; we have
traced it back to the censorship which one psychic instance in
the psychic life exercises upon the other. Dream displace-
ment is one of the chief means for achieving this disfigurement.
Is fecit, cui profuit. We may assume that dream displacement
is brought about by the influence of this censor, of the endo-
psychic repulsion. *

The manner in which the factors of displacement, condensa-
tion, and over-determination play into one another in the
formation of the dream, which is the ruling factor and which
the subordinate one, all this will be reserved as the subject of
later investigations. For the present we may state, as a
second condition which the elements must satisfy in order to
getinto the dream, that they must be withdrawn from the censor
of resistance. From now on we shall take account of dream

% Since I consider this reference of dream disfigurement to the censor
as the essence of my dream theory, I here insert the latter portion of a story
“ Traumen wie Wachen ” from Phantasien eines Realisten, by Lynkeus, Vienna,
(second edition, 1900), in which I find this chief feature of my theory
reproduced :

* Concerning a man who possesses the remarkable quality of never dream-
ing nonsense. . . .”

“ Your marvellous characteristic of dreaming as you wake is based upon
your virtues, upon your goodness, your justice, and your love for truth; it
is the moral clearness of your nature which makes everything about you
intelligible.”

“But if you think the matter over carefully,” replied the other, “I
almost believe that all people are created as I am, and that no human being
ever dreams nonsense! A dream which is so distinctly remembered that it
can be reproduced, which is therefore no dream of delirium, always has a
meaning ; why, it cannot be otherwise! For that which is in contradiction
with itself can never be grouped together as a whole. The fact that time
and space are often SUE shaken up detracts nothing from the real
meaning of the dream, because neither of them has had any significance
whatever for its essential contents. We often do the same thing in waking
life ; think of the fairy-tale, of many daring and profound phantastic crea-
tions, about which only an ignorant person would say: ‘That is nonsense !
For it is impossible; ”

“If it were only always possible to interpret dreams correctly, as you
have just done with mine!” said the friend.

“That is certainly not an easy task, but the dreamer himself ought
always to succeed in doing it with a little concentration of attention. . . .
You ask why it is generally impossible? Your dreams seem to conceal
something secret, something unchaste of a peculiar and higher nature, a
certain mystery in your nature which cannot easily be revealed by thought ;
and it is for that reason that your dreaming seems so often to be without
meaning, or even to be a contradiction. But in the profoundest sense this
is by no means the case ; indeed it cannot be true at all, for it is always the
same person, whether he is asleep or awake.”

288 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

displacement as an unquestionable fact in the interpretation
of dreams.

(c) Means of Representation in the Dream

Besides the two factors of dream condensation and dream
displacement which we have found to be active in the trans-
formation of the latent dream material into the manifest
content, we shall come in the course of this investigation
upon two other conditions which exercise an unquestionable
influence upon the selection of the material which gets into
the dream. Even at the risk of seeming to stop our progress,
I should like to glance at the processes by which the inter-
pretation of dreams is accomplished. I do not deny that I
should succeed best in making them clear, and in showing
that they are sufficiently reliable to insure them against
attack, by taking a single dream as a paradigm and develop-
ing its interpretation, as I have done in Chapter II. in the
dream of “ Irma’s Injection," and then putting together the
dream thoughts which I have discovered, and reconstructing
the formation of the dream from them—that is to say, by
supplementing the analysis of dreams by a synthesis of them.
I have accomplished this with several specimens for my own
instruction ; but I cannot undertake to do it here because I
am prevented by considerations, which every right-minded
person must approve of, relative to the psychic material
necessary for such a demonstration. In the analysis of dreams
these considerations present less difficulty, for an analysis
may be incomplete and still retain its value even if it leads
only a short way into the thought labyrinth of the dream.
I do not see how a synthesis could be anything short of com-
plete in order to be convincing. I could give a complete
synthesis only of the dreams of such persons as are unknown
to the reading public. Since, however, only neurotic patients
furnish me with the means for doing this, this part of the
description of the dream must be postponed until I can carry
the psychological explanation of neuroses far enough—else-
where—to be able to show their connection with the subject
matter under consideration. *

* I have since given the complete analysis and synthesis of two dreams in
the Bruchstueck einer Hysterieanalyse, 1905,

THE DREAM-WORK 289

From my attempts synthetically to construct dreams from
the dream thoughts, I know that the material which is ob-
tained from interpretation varies in value. For a part of it
consists of the essential dream thoughts which would, therefore,
completely replace the dream, and which would in themselves
be sufficient for this replacement if there were no censor for
the dream. The other part may be summed up under the
term “ collaterals “ ; taken as a whole they represent the
means by which the real wish that arises from the dream
thoughts is transformed into the dream-wish. A first part
of these collaterals” consists of allusions to the actual
dream thoughts, which, considered schematically, correspond
to displacements from the essential to the non-essential. A
second part comprises the thoughts which connect these non-
essential elements, that have become significant through
displacement with one another, and which reach from them
into the dream content. Finally a third part contains the
ideas and thought connections which (in the work of inter-
pretation) conduct us from the dream content to the inter-
mediary collaterals, all of which need not necessarily have
participated in the formation of the dream.

At this point we are interested exclusively in the essential
dream thoughts. These are usually found to be a complex
of thoughts and memories of the most intricate possible con-
struction, and to possess all the properties of the thought
processes which are known to us from waking life. Not
infrequently they are trains of thought which proceed from
more than one centre, but which do not lack points of con-
nection ; almost regularly a chain of thought stands next to its
contradictory correlative, being connected with it by contrast
associations.

The individual parts of this complicated structure naturally
stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another.
They constitute a foreground or background, digressions,
illustrations, conditions, chains of argument, and objections.
When the whole mass of these dream thoughts is subjected
to the pressure of the dream activity, during which the parts
are turned about, broken up, and pushed together, something
like drifting ice, there arises the question, what becomes of

the logical ties which until now had given form to the struc-
"T

290 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

33 ce

ture? What representation do “if,” “ because,” “as though,”
“although,” “ either—or,” and all the other conjunctions,
without which we cannot understand a phrase or a sentence,
receive in the dream ?

At first we must answer that the dream has at its disposal
no means for representing these logical relations among the
dream thoughts. In most cases it disregards all these con-
junctions, and undertakes the élaboration only of the ob-
jective content of the dream thoughts. It is left to the
interpretation of the dream to restore the coherence which
the activity of the dream has destroyed.

If the dream lacks ability to express these relations, the
psychic material of which the dream is wrought must be
responsible. The descriptive arts are limited in the same
manner—painting and the plastic arts in comparison with
poetry, which can employ speech ; and here too the reason for
this impotence is to be found in the material in the treatment
of which the two arts strive to give expression to something.
Before the art of painting had arrived at an understanding of
the laws of expression by which it is bound, it attempted to
escape this disadvantage. In old paintings little tags were
hung from the mouths of the persons represented giving the
speech, the expression of which in the picture the artist
despaired of.

Perhaps an objection will here be raised challenging the
assertion that the dream dispenses with the representation
of logical relations. There are dreams in which the most
complicated intellectual operations take place, in which proof
and refutation are offered, puns and comparisons made, just as
in waking thoughts. But here, too, appearances are deceitful ;
if the interpretation of such dreams is pursued, it is found that
all of this is dream material, not the representation of intellectual
activity in the dream. The content of the dream thoughts is
reproduced by the apparent thinking of the dream, not the
relations of the dream thoughts to one another, in the determina-
tion of which relations thinking consists. I shall give examples
of this. But the thesis which is most easily established is
that all speeches which occur in the dream, and which are
expressly designated as such, are unchanged or only slightly
modified copies of speeches which are likewise to be found in

THE DREAM-WORK 291

the recollections of the dream material. Often the speech is
only an allusion to an event contained in the dream thoughts ;
the meaning of the dream is a quite different one.

I shall not deny, indeed, that there is also critical thought
activity which does not merely repeat material from the
dream thoughts and which takes part in the formation of the
dream. I shall have to explain the influence of this factor
at the close of this discussion. It will then become clear that
this thought activity is evoked not by the dream thoughts,
but by the dream itself after it is already finished in a certain
sense.

We shall, therefore, consider it settled for the present that
the logical relations among the dream thoughts do not enjoy
any particular representation in the dream. For instance,
where there is a contradiction in the dream, this is either a
contradiction directed against the dream itself or a contra-
diction derived from the content of one of the dream thoughts ;
a contradiction in the dream corresponds to a contradiction
among the dream thoughts only in a highly indirect manner.

But just as the art of painting finally succeeded in de-
picting in the represented persons, at least their intention in
speaking—their tenderness, threatening attitude, warning mien,
and the like—by other means than the dangling tag, so also
the dream has found it possible to render account of a few of
the logical relations among its dream thoughts by means of
an appropriate modification of the peculiar method of dream
representation. It will be found by experience that different
dreams go to different lengths in taking this into consideration ;
while one dream entirely disregards the logical coherence of
its material, another attempts to indicate it as completely as
possible. In so doing the dream departs more or less widely
from the subject-matter which it is to elaborate. The dream
also takes a similarly varying attitude towards the temporal
coherence of the dream thoughts, if such coherence has been
established in the unconscious (as for example in the dream of
Irma's injection).

But what are the means by which the dream activity is
enabled to indicate these relations in the dream material
which are so difficult to represent ? I shall attempt to
enumerate these separately.

292 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

In the first place, the dream renders account of the con-
nection which is undeniably present between all the parts
of the dream thoughts by uniting this material in a single
composition as a situation or process. It reproduces logical
connection in the form of simultaneousness ; in this case it acts
something like the painter who groups together all the philo-
sophers or poets into a picture of the school of Athens or of
Parnassus, although these were never at once present in any
hall or on any mountain top—though they do, however, form
a unity from the point of view of reflective contemplation.

The dream carries out this method of representation in
detail. Whenever it shows two elements close together, it
vouches for a particularly intimate connection between those
elements which correspond to them in the dream thoughts.
It is as in our method of writing : to signifies that the two
letters are to be pronounced as one syllable, while ¢ with o
after a free space shows that 7 is the last letter of one word
and o the first letter of another. According to this, dream
combinations are not made of arbitrary, completely incon-
gruent elements of the dream material, but of elements that
also have a somewhat intimate relation to one another in the
dream thoughts.

For representing causal relation the dream has two methods,
which are essentially reducible to one. The more frequent
method, in cases, for example, where the dream thoughts are
to the effect : “ Because this was so and so, this and that
must happen,” consists in making the premise an introductory
dream and jeining the conclusion to it in the form of the main
dream. If my interpretation is correct, the sequence may also
be reversed. That part of the dream which is more completely
worked out always corresponds to the conclusion.

A female patient, whose dream I shall later give in full,
once furnished me with a neat example of such a representa-
tion of causal relationship. The dream consisted of a short
prologue and of a very elaborate but well organised dream
composition, which might be entitled : “ A flower of speech.”
The prologue of the dream is as follows : She goes to the two
maids in the kitchen and scolds them for taking so long to prepare
“ a little bite of food.” She also sees a great many coarse dishes
standing in the kitchen, inverted so that the water may drop off

THE DREAM-WORK · 298

them, and heaped up in a pile. The two maids go to fetch water,
and must, as it were, step into a river, which reaches up to the
house or into the yard.

Then follows the main dream, which begins as follows :
She is descending from a high place, over balustrades that are
curiously fashioned, and she is glad that her dress doesn't get
caught anywhere, &c. Now the introductory dream refers
to the house of the lady’s parents. Probably she has often
heard from her mother the words which are spoken in the
kitchen. The piles of unwashed dishes are taken from an
unpretentious earthenware shop which was located in the
same house. The second part of this dream contains an
allusion to the dreamer’s father, who always had a great deal
to do with servant girls, and who later contracted a fatal
disease during a flood—the house stood near the bank of a
river. The thought which is concealed behind the intro-
ductory dream, then, is to this effect : “ Because I was born
in this house, under such limited and unlovely circumstances.”
The main dream takes up the same thought, and presents it in
a form that has been altered by the tendency to wish-fulfil-
ment : “Tam of exalted origin." Properly then : “ Because
I was born in such low circumstances, my career has been so
and so.”

As far as I can see, the partition of a dream into two unequal
portions does not always signify a causal relation between
the thoughts of the two portions. It often appears as though
the same material were being presented in the two dreams
from different points of view; or as though the two dreams
have proceeded from two separated centres in the dream
material and their contents overlap, so that the object which
is the centre of one dream has served in the other as an
allusion, and vice versa. But in a certain number of cases a
division into shorter fore-dreams and longer subsequent
dreams actually signifies a causal relation between the two
portions. The other method of representing causal relation
is used with less abundant material and consists in the change
of one image in the dream, whether a person or a thing, into
another. It is only in cases where we witness this change
taking place in the dream that any causal relation is asserted
to exist, not where we merely notice that one thing has taken

294 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the place of another. I said that both methods of repre-
senting causal relation are reducible to the same thing; in
both cases causation is represented by a succession, now by
the sequence of the dreams, now by the immediate transforma-
tion of one image into another. In the great majority of
cases, of course, causal relation is not expressed at all, but is
obliterated by the sequence of elements which is unavoidable
in the dream process.

The dream is altogether unable to express the alternative,
ffeither—or ” ; it is in the habit of taking both members of
this alternative into one context, as though they were equally
privileged. A classic example of this is contained in the
dream of Irma's injection. Its latent thoughts obviously
mean: I am innocent of the continued presence of Irma’s
pains ; the fault rests either with her resistance to accepting
the solution, or with the fact that she is living under un-
favourable sexual conditions, which I am unable to change, or
her pains are not of a hysteric nature at all, but organic. The
dream, however, fulfils all these possibilities, which are almost
exclusive, and is quite ready to extract from the dream-wish
an additional fourth solution of this kind. After interpreting
the dream I have therefore inserted the either—or in the
sequence of the dream thoughts.

In the case where the dreamer finds occasion in telling the
dream to use either—or : “ It was either a garden or a living-
room,” &c., it is not really an alternative which occurs in the
dream thoughts, but an “ and,” a simple addition. When we
use either—or we are usually describing a characteristic of
indistinctness belonging to an element of the dream which 8
still capable of being cleared up. The rule of interpretation
for this case is as follows: The separate members of the
alternative are to be treated as equals and connected by
“and.” For instance, after waiting for a long time in vain
for the address of my friend who is living in Italy, I dream
that I receive a telegram which tells me this address. Upon

the strip of telegraph paper I see printed in blue the following ;
the first word is blurred :

perhaps via,
or villa, the second is distinctly : Sezerno or perhaps (Casa)

THE DREAM-WORK 295

The second word, which sounds like an Italian name and
which reminds me of our etymological discussions, also ex-
presses my displeasure on account of the fact that my friend
has kept his place of residence secret from me for so long a
time ; every member of the triple suggestion for the first word
may be recognised in the course of analysis as a self-sufficient
and equally well-justified starting point in the concatenation
of ideas.

During the night before the funeral of my father I dreamed
of a printed placard, a card or poster—perhaps something
like signs in railway waiting-rooms which announce the pro-
hibition of smoking—which reads either :

It is requested to shut the eyes
or
It is requested to shut an eye

which I am in the habit of representing in the following form :
the
It is requested to shut eye (s).
an

Each of the two variations has its own particular meaning,
and leads us along particular paths in the interpretation of the
dream. I had made the simplest kind of funeral arrangements,
for I knew how the deceased thought about such matters.
Other members of the family, however, did not approve of
such puritanic simplicity ; they thought we would have to
be ashamed before the mourners. Hence one of the wordings
of the dream requests the “ shutting of one eye,” that is to
say, that people should show consideration. The significance
of the blurring, which we describe with an either—or, may here
be seen with particular ease. The dream activity has not
succeeded in constructing a unified but at the same time
ambiguous wording for the dream thoughts. Thus the two
main trains of thought are already distinguished even in the
dream content.

In a few cases the division of the dream into two equal
parts expresses the alternative which the dream finds it so
difficult to represent.

The attitude of the dream towards the category of anti-
thesis and contradiction is most striking. This category is

296 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

unceremoniously neglected ; the word “No” does not seem
to exist for the dream. Antitheses are with peculiar preference
reduced to unity or represented as one. The dream also
takes the liberty of representing any element whatever by its
desired opposite, so that it is at first impossible to tell about
any element capable of having an opposite, whether it is to be
taken negatively or positively, in the dream thoughts." In
one of the last-mentioned dreams, whose introductory portion
we have already interpreted (“ because my parentage is such ”),
the dreamer descends over a balustrade and holds a blossom-
ing twig in her hands. Since this picture suggests to her
the angel in paintings of the Annunciation (her own name is
Mary) carrying a lily stem in his hand, and the white-robed
girls marching in the procession on Corpus Christi Day when
the streets are decorated with green bows, the blossoming
twig in the dream is very certainly an allusion to sexual
innocence. But the twig is thickly studded with red blossoms,
each one of which resembles a camelia. At the end of her
walk, so the dream continues, the blossoms have already
fallen considerably apart; then unmistakable allusions to
menstruation follow. But this very twig which is carried
like a lily and as though by an innocent girl, is also an allusion
to Camille, who, as is known, always wore a white camelia,
but a red one at the time of her menstruation. The same
blossoming twig (“ the flower of maidenhood ” in the songs
about the miller's daughter by Goethe) represents at once
sexual innocence and its opposite. The same dream, also,
which expresses the dreamer’s joy at having succeeded in
passing through life unsullied, hints in several places (as at
the falling-off of the blossom), at the opposite train of thought
—namely, that she had been guilty of various sins against
sexual purity (that is in her childhood). In the analysis of

* From a work of K. Abel, Der Gegensinn der Urworte, 1884 (see my
review of it in the Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch, IL, 1910), I learned with surprise
a fact which is confirmed by other philologists, that the oldest languages
behaved in this regard quite like the dream. They originally had only one
word for both extremes in a series of qualities or activities (strong—weak,
O youn, far—near, to tie—to separate), and formed separate designa-
tions for the two extremes only secondarily through slight modifications of
the common primitive word. Abel demonstrated these relationships with
rare exceptions in the old Egyptian, and he was able to show distinet
remnants of the same development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic

languages.

THE DREAM-WORK 297

the dream we may clearly distinguish the two trains of thought,
of which the comforting one seems to be superficial, the re-
proachful one more profound. The two are diametrically
opposed to each other, and their like but contrasting elements
have been represented by the identical dream elements.

The mechanism’ of dream formation is favourable in the
highest degree to only one of the logical relations. This
relation is that of similarity, correspondence, contiguity, “ as
though,” which is capable of being represented in the dream
as no other can be, by the most varied expedients. The corre-
spondences occurring in the dream, or cases of “ as though,”
are the chief points of support for the formation of dreams,
and no inconsiderable part of the dream activity consists in
creating new correspondences of this sort in cases where those
which are already at hand are prevented by the censor of
resistance from getting into the dream. The effort towards
condensation shown by the dream activity assists in the
representation of the relation of similarity.

Similarity, agreement, community, are quite generally ex-
pressed in the dream by concentration into a unity, which is
either already found in the dream material or is newly created.
The first case may be referred to as identification, the second
as composition. Identification is used where the dream is
concerned with persons, composition where things are the
objects of unification ; but compositions are also made from
persons. Localities are often treated as persons.

Identification consists in giving representation in the
dream content to only one of a number of persons who are
connected by some common feature, while the second or the
other persons seem to be suppressed as far as the dream is
concerned. This one representative person in the dream
enters into all the relations and situations which belong to
itself or to the persons who are covered by it. In cases of
composition, however, when this has to do with persons,
there are already present in the dream image features which
are characteristic of, but not common to, the persons in
question, so that a new unity, a composite person, appears as
the result of the union of these features. The composition
itself may be brought about in various ways. Either the
dream person bears the name of one of the persons to whom

298 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

it refers—and then we know, in a manner which is quite
analogous to knowledge in waking life, that this or that person
is the one who is meant—while the visual features belong to
another person; or the dream image itself is composed of
visual features which in reality are shared by both. Instead
of visual features, also, the part played by the second person
may be represented by the mannerisms which are usually
ascribed to him, the words which he usually speaks, or the
situations in which he is usually imagined. In the latter
method of characterisation the sharp distinction between
identification and composition of persons begins to disappear.
But it may also happen that the formation of such a mixed
personality is unsuccessful. The situation of the dream is
then attributed to one person, and the other—as a rule the
more important one—is introduced as an inactive and uncon-
cerned spectator. The dreamer relates something like “ My
mother was also there ” (Stekel).

The common feature which justifies the union of the two
persons—that is to say, which is the occasion for it—may
either be represented in the dream or be absent. As a rule,
identification or composition of persons simply serves the
purpose of dispensing with the representation of this common
feature. Instead of repeating: “ A is ill disposed towards
me, and B is also,” I make a composite person of A and B in
the dream, or I conceive A as doing an unaccustomed action
which usually characterises B. The dream person obtained
in this way appears in the dream in some new connection, and
the fact that it signifies both A and B justifies me in inserting
that which is common to both—their hostility towards me—
at the proper place in the interpretation of the dream. In
this manner I often achieve a very extraordinary degree of
condensation of the dream content; I can save myself the
direct representation of very complicated relations belonging
to a person, if I can find a second person who has an equal
claim to a part of these relations. It is also obvious to what
extent this representation by means of identification can
circumvent the resisting censor, which makes the dream
activity conform to such harsh conditions, That which
offends the censor may lie in those very ideas which are con-
nected in the dream material with the one person ; I now find

THE DREAM-WORK 299

a second person, who likewise has relation to the objectionable
material, but only to a part of it. The contact in that one
point which offends the censor now justified me in forming
a composite person, which is characterised on either hand by
indifferent features. This person resulting from composition
or identification, who is unobjectionable to the censor, is now
suited for incorporation in the dream content, and by the
application of dream condensation I have satisfied the demands
of the dream censor.

In dreams where a common feature of two persons is repre-
sented, this is usually a hint to look for another concealed
common feature, the representation of which is made im-
possible by the censor. A displacement of the common
feature has here taken place partly in order to facilitate repre-
sentation. From the circumstance that the composite person
appears to me with an indifferent common feature, I must
infer that another common feature which is by no means
indifferent exists in the dream thoughts.

According to what has been said, identification or com-
position of persons serves various purposes in the dream ; in
the first place, to represent a feature common to the two
persons ; secondly, to represent a displaced common feature ;
and thirdly, even to give expression to a community of features
that is merely wished for. As the wish for a community
between two persons frequently coincides with the exchanging
of these persons, this relation in the dream is also expressed
through identification. In the dream of Irma’s injection I
wish to exchange this patient for another—that is to say, I
wish the latter to be my patient as the former has been ; the
dream takes account of this wish by showing me a person who
is called Irma, but who is examined in a position such as I
have had the opportunity of seeing only when occupied with
the other person in question. In the dream about my uncle
this substitution is made the centre of the dream ; I identify
myself with the minister by judging and treating my colleague
as shabbily as he does.

It has been my experience—and to this I have found no
exception—that every dream treats of one’s own person.
Dreams are absolutely egotistic. In cases where not my ego,
but only a strange person occurs in the dream content, I may

300 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

safely assume that my ego is concealed behind that person by
means of identification. I am permitted to supplement my
ego. On other occasions when my ego appears in the dream,
I am given to understand by the situation in which it is placed
that another person is concealing himself behind the ego.
In this case the dream is intended to give me notice that in the
interpretation I must transfer something which is connected
with this person—the hidden common feature—to myself.
There are also dreams in which my ego occurs along with other
persons which the resolution of the identification again shows
to be my ego. By means of this identification I am instructed
to unite in my ego certain ideas to whose acceptance the censor
has objected. I may also give my ego manifold representation
in the dream, now directly, now by means of identification
with strangers. An extraordinary amount of thought material
may be condensed by means of a few such identifications.*

The resolution of the identification of localities designated
under their own names is even less difficult than that of
persons, because here the disturbing influence of the ego,
which is all-powerful in the dream, is lacking. In one of my
dreams about Rome (p. 164) the name of the place in which
I find myself is Rome ; I am surprised, however, at the great
number of German placards at a street corner. The latter
is a wish-fulfilment, which immediately suggests Prague ; the
wish itself probably originated at a period in my youth when I
was imbued with a German nationalistic spirit which is sup-
pressed to-day. At the time of my dream I was looking
forward to meeting a friend in Prague; the identification of
Rome and Prague is thus to be explained by means of a desired
common feature; I would rather meet my friend in Rome
than in Prague, I should like to exchange Prague for Rome for
the purpose of this meeting.

The possibility of creating compositions is one of the chief
causes of the phantastic character so common in dreams, in
that it introduces into the dream elements which could never
have been the objects of perception. The psychic process
which occurs in the formation of compositions is obviously

% If I do not know behind which of the persons which occur in the
dream I am to look for my ego, I observe the following rule: That person in
the dream who is subject to an emotion which I experience while asleep,
is the one that conceals my ego.

THE DREAM-WORK 301

the same which we employ in conceiving or fashioning a centaur
or a dragon in waking life. The only difference is that in the
phantastic creations occurring in waking life the intended
impression to be made by the new creation is itself the
deciding factor, while the composition of the dream is deter-
mined by an influence—the common feature in the dream
thoughts—which is independent of the form of the image.
The composition of the dream may be accomplished in a great
many different ways. In the most artless method of execu-
tion the properties of the one thing are represented, and this
representation is accompanied by the knowledge that they
also belong to another object. A more careful technique
unites the features of one object with those of the other in
a new image, while it makes skilful use of resemblance
between the two objects which exist in reality. The new
creation may turn out altogether absurd or only phantasti-
cally ingenious, according to the subject-matter and the wit
operative in the work of composition. If the objects to be
condensed into a unity are too incongruous, the dream activity
is content with creating a composition with a comparatively
distinct nucleus, to which are attached less distinct modifica-
tions. The unification into one image has here been unsuccess-
ful, as it were ; the two representations overlap and give rise to
something like a contest between visual images. If attempt
were made to construct an idea out of individual images of
perception, similar representations might be obtained in a
drawing.

Dreams naturally abound in such compositions; several
examples of these I have given in the dreams already analysed ;
I shall add more. In the dream on p. 296, which describes
the career of my patient “in flowery language,” the dream
ego carries a blossoming twig in her hand, which, as we have
seen, signifies at once innocence and sexual transgression.
Moreover, the twig recalls cherry-blossoms on account of
the manner in which the blossoms are clustered ; the blossoms
themselves, separately considered, are camelias, and finally the
whole thing also gives the impression of an exotic plant. The
common feature in the elements of this composition is shown
by the dream thoughts. The blossoming twig is made up of
allusions to presents by which she was induced or should have

302 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

been induced to show herself agreeable. So it was with the
cherries in her childhood and with the stem of camelias in
her later years ; the exotic feature is an illusion to a much-
travelled naturalist, who sought to win her favour by means
of a drawing of a flower. Another female patient creates a
middle element out of bath-houses at a bathing resort, rural
outside water-closets, and the garrets of our city dwellings.
The reference to human nakedness and exposure is common
to the two first elements; and we may infer from their con-
nection with the third element that (in her childhood) the
garret was likewise the scene of exposure. A dreamer of the
male sex makes a composite locality out of two places in
which “ treatment “ is given—my office and the public hall
in which he first became acquainted with his wife. Another
female patient, after her elder brother has promised to regale
her with caviare, dreams that his legs are covered thick with
black caviare pearls. The two elements, “contagion” in
a moral sense and the recollection of a cutaneous eruption
in childhood which made her legs look as though studded
over with red dots instead of black ones, have here been united
with the caviare pearls to form a new idea—the idea of “ what
she has inherited from her brother.” In this dream parts of
the human body are treated as objects, as is usually the case
in dreams. In one of the dreams reported by Ferenczi”
there occurred a composition made up of the person of a
physician and a horse, over which was spread a nightshirt.
The common feature in these three components was shown
in the analysis after the nightshirt had been recognised as an
allusion to the father of the dreamer in an infantile scene.
In each of the three cases there was some object of her sexual
inquisitiveness. As a child she had often been taken by her
nurse to the military breeding station, where she had the
amplest opportunity to satisfy her curiosity, which was at that
time uninhibited.

I have already asserted that the dream has no means for
expressing the relation of contradiction, of contrast, of nega-
tion. I am about to contradict this assertion for the first
time. A part of the cases, which may be summed up under the
word " contrast,” finds representation, as we have seen, simply
by means of identification—that is, when an interchange or

THE DREAM-WORK 303

replacement can be connected with the contrast. We have
given repeated examples of this. Another part of the con-
trasts in the dream thoughts, which perhaps falls into the
category “ turned into the opposite,” is represented in the dream
in the following remarkable manner, which may almost be
designated as witty. The “inversion” does not itself get
into the dream content, but manifests its presence there by
means of the fact that a part of the already formed dream
content which lies at hand for other reasons, is—as it were
subsequently—inverted. It is easier to illustrate this process
than to describe it. In the beautiful “Up and Down”
dream (p. 267) the representation of ascending is an inversion
of a prototype in the dream thoughts, that is to say, of the
introductory scene of Daudet’s Sappho ; in the dream climb-
ing is difficult at first, and easy later on, while in the actual
scene it is easy at first, and later becomes more and more
difficult. Likewise “above” and “below” in relation to
the dreamer's brother are inverted in the dream. This points
to a relation of contraries or contrasts as obtaining between
two parts of the subject-matter of the dream thoughts and
the relation we have found in the fact that in the childish
fancy of the dreamer he is carried by his nurse, while in the
novel, on the contrary, the hero carries his beloved. My
dream about Goethe’s attack upon Mr. M. (p. 345) also contains
an “inversion “ of this sort, which must first be set right
before the interpretation of the dream can be accomplished.
In the dream Goethe attacks a young man, Mr. M. ; in reality,
according to the dream thoughts, an eminent man, my friend,
has been attacked by an unknown young author. In the
dream I reckon time from the date of Goethe's death; in
reality the reckoning was made from the year in which the
paralytic was born. The thought determining the dream
material is shown to be an objection to the treatment of Goethe
as a lunatic. “The other way around,” says the dream ; “if
you cannot understand the book, it is you who are dull-witted,
not the author.” Furthermore, all these dreams of inversion
seem to contain a reference to the contemptuous phrase,
“to turn one's back upon a person “ (German * einen die
Kehrseite zeigen “ ; cf. the inversion in respect to the dreamer's
brother in the Sappho dream). It is also remarkable how

304 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

frequently inversion becomes necessary in dreams which are
inspired by repressed homosexual feelings.

Moreover, inversion or transformation into an opposite
is one of the favourite methods of representation, and one of
the methods most capable of varied application which the
dream activity possesses. Its first function is to create the
fulfilment of a wish with reference to a definite element of
the dream-thoughts. “ If it were only just the other way!”
is often the best expression of the relation of the ego to a dis-
agreeable recollection. But inversion becomes extraordinarily
useful for the purposes of the censor, for it brings about
in the material represented a degree of disfiguration which all
but paralyses our understanding of the dream. For this
reason it is always permissible, in cases where the dream
stubbornly refuses to yield its meaning, to try the inversion
of definite portions of its manifest content, whereupon not
infrequently everything becomes clear.

Besides this inversion, the subject-matter inversion in
temporal relation is not to be overlooked. A frequent device
of dream disfigurement consists in presenting the final issue
of an occurrence or the conclusion of an argument at the
beginning of the dream, or in supplying the premises of a
conclusion or the causes of an effect at the end of it. Any
one who has not considered this technical method of dream
disfigurement stands helpless before the problem of dream
interpretation."

Indeed in some cases we can obtain the sense of the dream
only by subjecting the dream content to manifold inversion
in different directions. For example, in the dream of a young
patient suffering from a compulsion neurosis, the memory of an
infantile death-wish against a dreaded father was hidden behind

* The hysterical attack sometimes uses the same device—the inversion of
time-relations—for the purpose of concealing its meaning from the spectator.
The attack of a hysterical girl, for example, consists in enacting a little
romance, which she has unconsciously fancied in connection with an en-
counter in the street car. A man, attracted by the beauty of her foot, addresses
her while she is reading, whereupon she goes with him and experiences a
stormy love scene. Her attack begins with the representation of this scene
in writhing movements of the body (accompanied by motions of the lips to
signify kissing, entwining of the arms for embraces), whereupon she hurries
into another room, sits down in a chair, lifts her skirt in order to show her

foot, acts as though she were about to read a book, and speaks to me
(answers me).

THE DREAM-WORK 305

the following words : His father upbraids him because he arrives
80 late. But the context in the psychoanalytic treatment
and the thoughts of the dreamer alike go to show that the
sentence must read as follows: He is angry at his father,
and, further, that his father is always coming home too early
(i.e. too soon). He would have preferred that his father should
not come home at all, which is identical with the wish (see page
219) that his father should die. As a little boy the dreamer
was guilty of sexual aggression against another person while
his father was away, and he was threatened with punishment
in the words : “Just wait until father comes home.”

If we attempt to trace the relations between dream content
and dream thoughts further, we shall do this best by making
the dream itself our starting-point and by asking ourselves
the question: What do certain formal characteristics of dream
representation signify with reference to the dream thoughts ?
The formal characteristics which must attract our attention
in the dream primarily include variations in the distinctness
of individual parts of the dream or of whole dreams in relation
to one another. The variations in the intensity of individual
dream images include a whole scale of degrees ranging from
a distinctness of depiction which one is inclined to rate as
higher 一 without warrant, to be sure—than that of reality, to
a provoking indistinctness which is declared to be character-
istic of the dream, because it cannot altogether be compared
to any degree of indistinctness which we ever see in real objects.
Moreover, we usually designate the impression which we
get from an indistinet object in the dream as “ fleeting,”
while we think of the more distinct dream images as remain-
ing intact for a longer period of perception. We must now
ask ourselves by what conditions in the dream material these
differences in the vividness of the different parts of the dream
content are brought about.

There are certain expectations which will inevitably arise
at this point and which must be met. Owing to the fact that
real sensations during sleep may form part of the material
of the dream, it will probably be assumed that these sensations
or the dream elements resulting from them are emphasized
by peculiar intensity, or conversely, that what turns out to be

せ

306 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

particularly vivid in the dream is probably traceable to such
real sensations during sleep. My experience has never con-
firmed this. It is incorrect to say that those elements of the
dream which are the derivatives of impressions occurring in
sleep (nervous excitements) are distinguished by their vivid-
ness from others which are based on recollections. The factor
of reality is of no account in determining the intensity of
dream images.

Furthermore, the expectation will be cherished that the
sensory intensity (vividness) of individual dream images has
a relation to the psychic intensity of the elements correspond-
ing to them in the dream-thoughts. In the latter intensity
is identical with psychic value; the most intense elements
are in fact the most significant, and these are the central
point of the dream. We know, however, that it is just these
elements which are usually not accepted in the dream content
owing to the censor. But still it might be possible that the
elements immediately following these and representing them
might show a higher degree of intensity, without, however,
for that reason constituting the centre of the dream represen-
tation. This expectation is also destroyed by a comparison
of the dream and the dream material. The intensity of the
elements in the one has nothing to do with the intensity of
the elements in the other; a complete “ transvaluation of
all psychic values “ takes place between the dream-material
and the dream. The very element which is transient and hazy
and which is pushed into the background by more vigorous
images is often the single and only element in which may be
traced any direct derivative from the subject which entirely
dominated the dream-thoughts.

The intensity of the elements of the dream shows itself
to be determined in a different manner—that is, by two factors
which are independent of each other. It is easy to see at
the outset that those elements by means of which the wish-
fulfilment is expressed are most distinctly represented. But
then analysis also teaches us that from the most vivid elements
of the dream, the greatest number of trains of thought start,
and that the most vivid are at the same time those which are
best determined. No change of sense is involved if we express
the latter empirical thesis in the following form : the greatest

THE DREAM-WORK 307

intensity is shown by those elements of the dream for which
the most abundant condensation activity was required. We
may therefore expect that this condition and the others im-
posed by the wish-fulfilment can be expressed in a single
formula.

The problem which I have just been considering—the
causes of greater or less intensity or distinctness of individual
elements of the dream—is one which I should like to guard
against being confused with another problem, which has to
do with the varying distinctness of whole dreams or sections
of dreams. In the first case, the opposite of distinctness is
blurredness ; in the second, confusion. It is of course unmis-
takable that the intensities rise and fall in the two scales in
unison. A portion of the dream which seems clear to us
usually contains vivid elements; an obscure dream is com-
posed of less intense elements. But the problem with which
we are confronted by the scale, ranging from the apparently
clear to the indistinet or confused, is far more complicated
than that formed by variations in the vividness of the dream
elements ; indeed the former will be dropped from the dis-
cussion for reasons which will be given later. In isolated
cases we are astonished to find that the impression of clear-
ness or indistinctness produced by the dream is altogether
without significance for its structure, and that it originates
in the dream material as one of its constituents. Thus I
remember a dream which seemed particularly well constructed,
flawless, and clear, so that I made up my mind, while I was
still in the somnolent state, to recognise a new class of dreams
—those which had not been subject to the mechanism of con-
densation and displacement, and which might thus be desig-
nated “ Fancies while asleep." A closer examination proved
that this rare dream had the same breaches and flaws in its
construction as every other; for this reason I abandoned the
category of dream fancies. The content of the dream, re-
duced to its lowest terms, was that I was reciting to a friend a
difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality, and the wish-
fulfilling power of the dream was responsible for the fact
that this theory (which, by the way, was not stated in the
dream) appeared so clear and flawless. What I considered
a judgment upon the finished dream was thus a part of the

308 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

dream content, and the essential one at that. The dream
activity had extended its operations, as it were, into waking
thought, and had presented to me in the form of a judgment
that part of the dream material which it had not succeeded
in reproducing with exactness. The exact opposite of this
once came to my attention in the case of a female patient
who was at first altogether unwilling to tell a dream which was
necessary for the analysis, * because it was so obscure and
confused,” and who declared, after repeatedly denying the
accuracy of her description, that several persons, herself,
her husband, and her father, had occurred in the dream, and
that it seemed as though she did not know whether her
husband was her father, or who her father was anyway, or
something of that sort. Upon considering this dream in
connection with the ideas that occurred to the dreamer in the
course of the sitting, it was found unquestionably to be concerned
with the story of a servant girl who had to confess that she was
expecting a child, and who was now confronted with doubts
as to “who was really the father.” * The obscurity mani-
fested by the dream, therefore, is again in this case a portion
of the material which excited it. A part of this material
was represented in the form of the dream. The form of the
dream or of dreaming is used with astonishing frequency to
represent the concealed content.

Comments on the dream and seemingly harmless observa-
tions about it often serve in the most subtle manner to conceal
—although they usually betray—a part of what is dreamed.
Thus, for example, when the dreamer says: Here the dream
is vague, and the analysis gives an infantile reminiscence of
listening to a person cleaning himself after defecation. An-
other example deserves to be recorded in detail. A young
man has a very distinct dream which recalls to him phan-
tasies from his infancy which have remained conscious to
him : he was in a summer hotel one evening, he mistook the
number of his room, and entered a room in which an elderly
lady and her two daughters were undressing to go to bed.
He continues : “Then there are some gaps in the dream ; then
something is missing ; and at the end there was a man in the

* Accompanying hysterical symptoms: Failure to menstruate and pro-
found depression, which was the chief ailment of the patient.

THE DREAM-WORK 309

room who wished to throw me out with whom I had to wrestle.”
He endeavoured in vain to recall the content and purpose
of the boyish fancy to which the dream apparently alludes.
But we, finally become aware that the required content had
already been given in his utterances concerning the indistinct
part of the dream. The "gaps" were the openings in the
genitals of the women who were retiring : “ Here something
is missing ” described the chief character of the female genitals.
In those early years he burned with curiosity to see a female
genital, and was still inclined to adhere to the infantile sexual
theory which attributes a male genital to the woman.

All the dreams which have been dreamed in the same
night belong to the same whole when considered with respect
to their content ; their separation into several portions, their
grouping and number, all these details are full of meaning
and may be considered as information coming from the latent
dream content. In the interpretation of dreams consisting
of many principal sections, or of dreams belonging to the
same night, one must not fail to think of the possibility that
these different and succeeding dreams bring to expression the
same feelings in different material. The one that comes
first in time of these homologous dreams is usually the most
disfigured and most bashful, while the succeeding is bolder
and more distinct.

Even Pharaoh’s dream in the Bible of the ears and the
kine, which Joseph interpreted, was of this kind. It is reported
by Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, bk. ii. chap. iii.) in greater
detail than in the Bible. After relating the first dream, the
King said : “ When I had seen this vision T awaked out of my
sleep, and being in disorder, and considering with myself
what this appearance should be, I fell asleep again, and saw
another dream much more wonderful than the first, which
did still more affright and disturb me.” After listening to
the report of the dream, Joseph said, “ This dream, O King,
although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same
issue of things.”

Jung,” who, in his Beitrag zur Psychologie des Geriichtes
relates how the veiled erotic dream of a school-girl was under-
stood by her friends without interpretation and continued
by them with variations, remarks in connection with reports

310 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of this dream, * that the last of a long series of dream pictures
contained precisely the same thought whose representation
had been attempted in the first picture of the series. The
censor pushed the complex out of the way as long as possible,
through constantly renewed symbolic concealments, dis-
placements, deviations into the harmless, &c.” (Le. p. 87).
Scherner 58 was well acquainted with the peculiarities of dream
disfigurement and describes them at the end of his theory
of organic stimulation as a special law, p. 166: “ But, finally,
the phantasy observes the general law in all nerve stimuli
emanating from symbolic dream formations, by representing
at the beginning of the dream only the remotest and freest
allusions to the stimulating object; but towards the end,
when the power of representation becomes exhausted, it pre-
sents the stimulus or its concerned organ or its function in
unconcealed form, and in the way this dream designates its
organic motive and reaches its end.”

A new confirmation of Scherner’s law has been furnished
by Otto Rank 1% in his work, 21 Self Interpretation Dream.
This dream of a girl reported by him consisted of two dreams,
separated in time of the same night, the second of which ended
with pollution. This pollution dream could be interpreted
in all its details by disregarding a great many of the ideas
contributed by the dreamer, and the profuse relations be-
tween the two dream contents indicated that the first dream
expressed in bashful language the same thing as the second,
so that the latter—the pollution dream—helped to a full
explanation of the former. From this example, Rank, with
perfect justice, draws conclusions concerning the significance
of pollution dreams in general.

But in my experience it is only in rare cases that one is
in a position to interpret clearness or confusion in the dream
as certainty or doubt in the dream material. Later I shall
try to discover the factor in the formation of dreams upon
whose influence this scale of qualities essentially depends.

In some dreams, which adhere for a time to a certain
situation and scenery, there occur interruptions dsecribed
in the following words : “ But then it seemed as though it
were at the same time another place, and there such and such
a thing happened.” What thus interrupts the main trend

THE DREAM-WORK 311

of the dream, which after a while may be continued again,
turns out to be a subordinate idea, an interpolated thought
in the dream material. A conditional relation in the dream-
thoughts is represented by simultaneousness in the dream
(wenn—wann : if— when).

What is signified by the sensation of impeded movement,
which so often occurs in the dream, and which is so closely
allied to anxiety ? One wants to move, and is unable to stir
from the spot ; or one wants to accomplish something, and meets
one obstacle after another. The train is about to start, and
one cannot reach it ; one's hand is raised to avenge an insult,
and its strength fails, &c. We have already encountered
this sensation in exhibition dreams, but have as yet made no
serious attempt to interpret it. It is convenient, but inade-
quate, to answer that there is motor paralysis in sleep, which
manifests itself by means of the sensation alluded to. We
may ask : “ Why is it, then, that we do not dream continually
of these impeded motions ? ” And we are justified in suppos-
ing that this sensation, constantly appearing in sleep, serves
some purpose or other in representation, and is brought about
by a need occurring in the dream material for this sort of
representation.

Failure to accomplish does not always appear in the dream
as a sensation, but also simply as a part of the dream content.
I believe that a case of this sort is particularly well suited to
enlighten us about the significance of this characteristic of
the dream. I shall give an abridged report of a dream in
which I seem to be accused of dishonesty. The scene is a
mixture, consisting of a private sanatorium and several other
buildings. A lackey appears to call me to an examination. 1
know in the dream that something has been missed, and that the
examination is taking place because I am suspected of having
appropriated the lost article. Analysis shows that examination
18 to be taken in two senses, and also means medical examination.
Being conscious of my innocence, and of the fact that I have been
called in for consultation, I calmly follow the lackey. We are
received, at the door by another lackey, who says, pointing to me,
“ Is that the person whom you have brought? Why, he is a
respectable man.” Thereupon, without any lackey, I enter a
great hall in which machines are standing, and which reminds me

812 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of an Inferno with its hellish modes of punishment. I see a
colleague strapped on to one apparatus who has every reason to
be concerned about me ; but he takes no notice of me. Then I
am given to understand that I may now go. Then I cannot find
my hat, and cannot go after all.

The wish which the dream fulfils is obviously that I may
be acknowledged to be an honest man, and may go ; all kinds
of subject-matter containing a contradiction of this idea must
therefore be present in the dream-thoughts. The fact that I
may go is the sign of my absolution; if, then, the dream
furnishes at its close an event which prevents me from going,
we may readily conclude that the suppressed subject-matter
of the contradiction asserts itself in this feature. The cir-
cumstance that I cannot find my hat therefore means : “ You
are not an honest man after all.” Failure to accomplish in
the dream is the expression of a contradiction, a “No”;
and therefore the earlier assertion, to the effect that the
dream is not capable of expressing a negation, must be revised
accordingly.*

In other dreams which involve failure to accomplish a
thing not only as a situation but also as a sensation, the same
contradiction is more emphatically expressed in the form of
a volition, to which a counter volition opposes itself. Thus
the sensation of impeded motion represents a conflict of will.
We shall hear later that this very motor paralysis belongs
to the fundamental conditions of the psychic process in dream-
ing. Now the impulse which is transferred to motor channels
is nothing else than the will, and the fact that we are sure to
find this impulse impeded in the dream makes the whole process
extraordinarily well suited to represent volition and the “ No ”
which opposes itself thereto. From my explanation of anxiety,

* A reference to a childhood experience is after complete analysis shown
to exist by the following intermediaries: “ The Moor has done his duty,
the Moor may go.” And then follows the waggish question: “ How old is
the Moor when he has done his duty ? One year. Then he may go.” (It
is said that I came into the world with so much black curly hair that my
young mother declared me to be a Moor.) The circumstance that I do not
find my hat is an experience of the day which has been turned to account
with various significations. Our servant, who is a genius at stowing away
things, had hidden the hat. A suppression of sad thoughts about death is
also concealed behind the conclusion of the dream : “I have not nearly done

my duty yet; I may not go yet.” Birth and death, as in the dream that
oceurred shortly before about Goethe and the paralytic (p. 345).

THE DREAM-WORK 318

it is easy to understand why the sensation of thwarted will
is so closely allied to anxiety, and why it is so often connected
with it in the dream. Anxiety is a libidinous impulse which
emanates from the unconscious, and is inhibited by the fore-
conscious. Therefore, when a sensation of inhibition in the
dream is accompanied by anxiety, there must also be present
a volition which has at one time been capable of arousing
a libido ; there must be a sexual impulse.

What significance and what psychic force is to be ascribed
to such manifestations of judgment as “ For that is only a‘
dream,” which frequently comes to the surface in dreams, I
shall discuss in another place (vide infra, p. 390). For the
present I shall merely say that they serve to depreciate the
value of the thing dreamed. An interesting problem allied to
this, namely, the meaning of the fact that sometimes a cer-
tain content is designated in the dream itself as “ dreamed “
—the riddle of the “dream within the dream ”—has been
solved in a similar sense by W. Stekel 714 through the analysis
of some convincing examples. The part of the dream
“ dreamed “ is again to be depreciated in value and robbed
of its reality ; that which’ the dreamer continues to dream
after awakening from the dream within the dream, is what
the dream-wish desires to put in place of the extinguished
reality. It may therefore be assumed that the part
“dreamed “ contains the representation of the reality and
the real reminiscence, while, on the other hand, the continued
dream contains the representation of what the dreamer
wished. The inclusion of a certain content in a * dream
within the dream ” is therefore equivalent to the wish that
what has just been designated as a dream should not have
occurred. The dream-work utilises the dream itself as a form
of deflection.

(d) Regard for Presentability

So far we have been attempting to ascertain how the dream
represents the relations among the dream-thoughts, but we
have several times extended our consideration to the further
question of what alterations the dream material undergoes
for the purposes of dream formation. We now know that
the dream material, after being stripped of the greater parts

314 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of its relations, is subjected to compression, while at the same
time displacements of intensity among its elements force a
psychic revaluation of this material. The displacements
which we have considered were shown to be substitutions of
one idea for another, the substitute being in some way con-
nected with the original by associations, and the displacements
were put to the service of condensation by virtue of the fact
that in this manner a common mean between two elements
took the place of these two elements in the formation of the
dream. We have not yet mentioned any other kind of dis-
placement. But we learn from the analyses that another
exists, and that it manifests itself in a change of the verbal
expression employed for the thought in question. In both
cases we have displacement following a chain of associations,
but the same process takes place in different psychic spheres,
and the result of this displacement in the one case is that one
element is substituted for another, while in the other case
an element exchanges its verbal expression for another.

This second kind of displacement occurring in dream
formation not only possesses great theoretical interest, but is
also peculiarly well fitted to explain the semblance of phan-
tastic absurdity in which the dream disguises itself. Dis-
placement usually occurs in such a way that a colourless
and abstract expression in the dream-thought is exchanged
for one that is visual and concrete. The advantage, and
consequently the purpose, of this substitution is obvious.
Whatever is visual is capable of representation in the dream,
and can be wrought into situations where the abstract ex-
pression would confront dream representation with diffi-
culties similar to those which would arise if a political editorial
were to be represented in an illustrated journal. But not
only the possibility of representation, but also the interests
of condensation and of the censor, can be furthered by this
change. If the abstractly expressed and unwieldy dream-
thought is recast into figurative language, this new expression
and the rest of the dream material are more easily furnished
with those identities and cross references, which are essential
to the dream activity and which it creates whenever they are
not at hand, for the reason that in every language concrete
terms, owing to their evolution, are more abundant in associa-

THE DREAM-WORK 315

tions than conceptual ones. It may be imagined that in dream
formation a good part of the intermediary activity, which tries
to reduce the separate dream-thoughts to the tersest and
simplest possible expression in the dream, takes place in the
manner above described—that is to say, in providing suitable
paraphrase for the individual thoughts. One thought whose
expression has already been determined on other grounds
will thus exert a separating and selective influence upon the
means available for expressing the other, and perhaps it will
do this constantly throughout, somewhat after the manner of
the poet. If a poem in rhyme is to be composed, the second
rhyming line is bound by two conditions; it must express
the proper meaning, and it must express it in such a way as
to secure the rhyme. The best poems are probably those
in which the poet’s effort to find a rhyme is unconscious, and
in which both thoughts have from the beginning exercised a
mutual influence in the selection of their verbal expressions,
which can then be made to rhyme by a means of slight
remodification.

In some cases change of expression serves the purposes
of dream condensation more directly, in making possible the
invention of a verbal construction which is ambiguous and
therefore suited to the expression of more than one dream-
thought. The whole range of word-play is thus put at the
service of the dream activity. The part played by words
in the formation of dreams ought not to surprise us. A
word being a point of junction for a number of conceptions,
it possesses, so to speak, a predestined ambiguity, and neuroses
(obsessions, phobias) take advantage of the conveniences
which words offer for the purposes of condensation and dis-
guise quite as readily as the dream.* That dream conception
also profits by this displacement of expression is easily de-
monstrated. It is naturally confusing if an ambiguous word
is put in the place of two ambiguous ones; and the employ-
ment of a figurative expression instead of the sober everyday
one thwarts our understanding, especially since the dream never
tells us whether the elements which it shows are to be inter-
preted literally or figuratively, or whether they refer to the

+ Of. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, 2nd edit. 1912, and
“ word-bridges in the solutions of neurotic symptoms.

316 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

dream material directly or only through the agency of inter-
polated forms of speech.* Several examples of representations
in the dream which are held together only by ambiguity have
already been cited (“her mouth opens without difficulty,”
in the dream of Irma’s injection; “ I cannot go yet,” in the
last dream reported, p. 312), &c. I shall now cite a dream
in the analysis of which the figurative expression of abstract
thought plays a greater part. The difference between such
dream interpretation and interpretation by symbolism may
again be sharply distinguished ; in the symbolic interpreta-
tion of dreams the key to the symbolism is arbitrarily chosen
by the interpreter, while in our own cases of verbal disguise all
these keys are universally known and are taken from estab-
lished customs of speech. If the correct notion occurs at the
right opportunity, it is possible to solve dreams of this sort
completely or in part, independently of any statements made
by the dreamer.

A lady, a friend of mine, dreams: She is in the opera-
house. It is a Wagnerian performance which has lasted till
7.45 in the morning. In the parquette and parterre there are
tables, around which people dine and drink. Her cousin and his
young wife, who have just returned from their honeymoon, sit
next to her at one of these tables, and next to them sits one of the
aristocracy. Concerning the latter the idea is that the young wife
has brought him back with her from the wedding journey. It
ts quite above board, just as if she were bringing back a hat from
her trip. In the midst of the parquette there is a high tower, on
the top of which is a platform surrounded by am iron grating.
There, high up, stands the conductor with the jeatures of Hans
Richter ; he is continually running around behind the grating,
perspiring awfully, and from this position conducting the orchestra,

% In general it is doubtful in the interpretation of every element of the
dream whether it—

(a) is to be regarded as having a negative or a positive sense (relation of

opposition) ;

0 is to be interpreted historically (as a reminiscence) ;

e) is symbolic ; or whether

(d) its valuation is to be based upon the sound of its verbal expression.
In spite of this manifold signification, it may be said that the representation
of the dream activity does not impose upon the translator any greater
Sti than the ancient writers of hieroglyphics imposed upon their
readers.

THE DREAM-WORK 317

which is arranged around the base of the tower. She herself sits
in a box with a lady friend (known to me). Her youngest sister
tries to hand her from the parquette a big piece of coal with the
idea that she did not know that it would last so long and that she
must by this time be terribly cold. (It was a little as if the boxes
had to be heated during the long performance.)

The dream is senseless enough, though the situation is well
developed too—the tower in the midst of the parquette from
which the conductor leads the orchestra; but, above all,
the coal which her sister hands her! I purposely asked for
no analysis of this dream. With the knowledge I have of the
personal relations of the dreamer, I was able to interpret parts
of it independently. I knew that she had entertained warm
feelings for a musician whose career had been prematurely
blasted by insanity. I therefore decided to take the tower
in the parquette verbally. It was apparent, then, that the
man whom she wished to see in the place of Hans Richter
towered above all the other members of the orchestra. This
tower must, therefore, be designated as a composite picture
formed by an apposition ; with its pedestal it represents the
greatness of the man, but with its gratings on top, behind which
he runs around like a prisoner or an animal in a cage (an
allusion to the name of the unfortunate man), it represents
his later fate. “ Lunatic-tower” is perhaps the word in
which both thoughts might have met.

Now that we have discovered the dream’s method of re-
presentation, we may try with the same key to open the second
apparent absurdity,—that of the coal which her sister hands
her, “ Coal” must mean “ secret love.”

“ No coal, no fire so hotly glows
As the secret love which no one knows.”

She and her friend remain seated while her younger sister,
who still has opportunities to marry, hands her up the coal
“because she did not know it would last so long.” What
would last so long is not told in the dream. In relating it we
would supply “the performance”; but in the dream we
must take the sentence as it is, declare it ambiguous, and add
“until she marries.” The interpretation secret love” is
then confirmed by the mention of the cousin who sits with

318 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

his wife in the parquette, and by the open love-affair attri-
buted to the latter. The contrasts between secret and open
love, between her fire and the coldness of the young wife,
dominate the dream. Moreover, here again there is a person
“in high position ” as a middle term between the aristocrat
and the musician entitled to high hopes.

By means of the above discussion we have at last brought
to light a third factor, whose part in the transformation of
the dream thoughts into the dream content is not to be con-
sidered trivial; it is the regard for presentability (German :
Darstellbarkeit) in the peculiar psychic material which the dream
makes use of,—that is fitness for representation, for the most
part by means of visual images. Among the various subor-
dinate ideas associated with the essential dream thoughts,
that one will be preferred which permits of a visual repre-
sentation, and the dream-activity does not hesitate promptly
to recast the inflexible thought into another verbal form,
even if it is the more unusual one, as long as this form makes
dramatisation possible, and thus puts an end to the psycho-
logical distress caused by cramped thinking. This pouring
of the thought content into another mould may at the same
time be put at the service of the condensation work, and may
establish relations with another thought which would other-
wise not be present. This other thought itself may perhaps
have previously changed its original expression for the purpose
of meeting these relations half-way.

In view of the part played by puns, quotations, songs,
and proverbs in the intellectual life of educated persons, it
would be entirely in accordance with our expectation to find
disguises of this sort used with extraordinary frequency.
For a few kinds of material a universally applicable dream
symbolism has been established on a basis of generally known
allusions and equivalents. A good part of this symbolism,
moreover, is possessed by the dream in common with the
psychoneuroses, and with legends and popular customs.

Indeed, if we look more closely, we must recognise that
in employing this method of substitution the dream is gene-
rally doing nothing original. For the attainment of its purpose,
which in this case is the possibility of dramatisation without
interference from the censor, it simply follows the paths

THE DREAM-WORK 319

which it finds already marked out in unconscious thought,
and gives preference to those transformations of the suppressed
material which may become conscious also in the form of wit
and allusion, and with which all the fancies of neurotics are
filled. Here all at once we come to understand Scherner’s
method of dream interpretation, the essential truth of which
I have defended elsewhere. The occupation of one’s fancy
with one’s own body is by no means peculiar to, or character-
istic of the dream alone. My analyses have shown me that this
is a regular occurrence in the unconscious thought of neurotics,
and goes back to sexual curiosity, the object of which for
the adolescent youth or maiden is found in the genitals of the
opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But, as Scherner and
Volkelt very appropriately declare, the house is not the only
group of ideas which is used for the symbolisation of the
body—either in the dream or in the unconscious fancies of
the neurosis. I know some patients, to be sure, who have
steadily adhered to an architectural symbolism for the body
and the genitals (sexual interest certainly extends far beyond
the region of the external genital organs), to whom posts and
pillars signify legs (as in the “Song of Songs”), to whom
every gate suggests a bodily opening (“hole”), and every
water-main a urinary apparatus, and the like. But the group
of associations belonging to plant life and to the kitchen is just
as eagerly chosen to conceal sexual images; in the first case
the usage of speech, the result of phantastic comparisons
dating from the most ancient times, has made abundant pre-
paration (the “vineyard” of the Lord, the “seeds,” the
“garden” of the girl in the “ Song of Songs ”). The ugliest
as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be
dreamed about in apparently harmless allusions to culinary
operations, and the symptoms of hysteria become practically
unintelligible if we forget that sexual symbolism can conceal
itself behind the most commonplace and most inconspicuous
matters, as its best hiding-place. The fact that some neurotic
children cannot look at blood and raw meat, that they vomit
at the sight of eggs and noodles, and that the dread of snakes,
which is natural to mankind, is monstrously exaggerated
in neurotics, all of this has a definite sexual meaning. Wher-
ever the neurosis employs a disguise of this sort, it treads the

320 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

paths once trodden by the whole of humanity in the early
ages of civilisation — paths of whose existence customs of
speech, superstitions, and morals still give testimony to
this day.

I here insert the promised flower dream of a lady patient,
in which I have italicised everything which is to be sexually
interpreted. This beautiful dream seemed to lose its entire
charm for the dreamer after it had been interpreted.

(a) Preliminary dream: She goes to the two maids in the
kitchen and scolds them for taking so long to prepare “ a little
bite of food.” She also sees a great many coarse dishes stand-
ing in the kitchen inverted so that the water may drip off them,
and heaped up in a pile. Later addition: The two maids go
to fetch water, and must, as it were, step into a river which reaches
up into the house or into the yard.*

(b) Main dream f: She is descending from a high place +
over balustrades that are curiously fashioned or fences which are
united into big squares and consist of a conglomeration of little
squares. § It is really not intended for climbing upon ; she is
worried about finding a place for her foot, and she is glad her
dress doesn’t get caught anywhere, and that she remains so re-
spectable while she is going.|| She is also carrying a large bough
in her hand, really a bough of a tree, which is thickly studded
with red blossoms; it has many branches, and spreads out. **
With this is connected the idea of cherry blossoms, but they look
like full-bloom camelias, which of course do not grow on trees.
While she is descending, she first has one, then suddenly two,
and later again only one. tt When she arrives at the bottom of

* For the interpretation of this preliminary dream, which is to be re-
garded as “ casual,” see p. 292.

+ Her career.

{ High birth, the wish contrast to the preliminary dream.

5 A polis image, which unites two localities, the so-called garret
(German Boden—floor, garret) of her father’s house, in which she played
with her brother, the object of her later fancies, and the garden of a malicious
uncle, who used to tease her.

l Wish contrast to an actual memory of her uncle's garden, to the effect
that she used to expose herself while she was asleep.

«| Just as the angel bears a lily stem in the Annunciation.

** For the explanation of this composite image, see p. 296 ; innocence,
menstruation, Camille.

。 Tt Referring to the plurality of the persons who serve the purpose of her
fancy.

THE DREAM-WORK 321

the lower blossoms they have already fallen off to a considerable
extent. Now that she is at the bottom, she sees a porter who is
combing—as she would like to express it—just such a tree—that is,
who is plucking thick bunches of hair from it, which hang from
it like moss. Other workmen have chopped off such boughs in
a garden, and have thrown them upon the street, where they lie
about, so that many people take some of them. But she asks
whether that is right, whether anybody may take one.* In the
garden there stands a young man (having a personality with
which she is acquainted, not a member of her family) up to
whom she goes in order to ask him how it is possible to transplant
such boughs into her own garden.t He embraces her, whereat
she resists and asks him what he means, whether it is permissible
to embrace her in such a manner. He says that there is no
wrong in it, that it is permitted. + He then declares himself
willing to go with her into the other garden, in order to show her
the transplanting, and he says something to her which she does
mot correctly understand : “ Besides this three metres— (later on
she says : square metres) or three fathoms of ground are lacking.”
It seems as though the man were trying to ask her something in
return for his affability, as though he had the intention of indemni-
fying himself in her garden, as though he wanted to evade some
law or other, to derive some advantage from it without causing
her an injury. She does not know whether or not he really
shows her anything. $

I must mention still another series of associations which
often serves the purpose of concealing sexual meaning both in
dreams and in the neurosis, —l refer to the change of residence
series. To change one’s residence is readily replaced by “ to
remove,” an ambiguous expression which may have reference to
clothing. If the dream also contains a “lift ” (elevator), one
may think of the verb “ to lift,” hence of lifting up the clothing.

* Whether it is permitted to “pull one off,” i.e. to masturbate.

+ The bough has long since been used to represent the male genital,
and besides that it contains a very distinct allusion to the family name of
the dreamer.

‡ Refers to matrimonial precautions, as does that which follows.

§ An analogous “biographical” dream was reported on p. 252, as the
third of the examples of dream symbolism ; a second example is the one
fully reported by Rank under the title “Traum der sich selbst deutet? ;
for another one which must be read in the * opposite direction,” see Stekel 114,
p. 486.

X

322 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I have naturally an abundance of such material, but a
report of it would carry us too far into the discussion of
neurotic conditions. Everything leads to the same conclu-
sion, that no special symbolising activity of the mind in the
formation of dreams need be assumed ; that, on the contrary,
the dream makes use of such symbolisations as are to be
found ready-made in unconscious thought, because these better
satisfy the requirements of dream formation, on account of
their dramatic fitness, and particularly on account of their
exemption from the censor.

(e) Examples—Arithmetic Speeches in the Dream

Before I proceed to assign to its proper place the fourth
of the factors which control the formation of the dream, I
shall cite several examples from my collection of dreams for
the purpose partly of illustrating the co-operation of the three
factors with which we are acquainted, and partly of supply-
ing proof for assertions which have been made without de-
monstration or of drawing irrefutable inferences from them.
For it has been very difficult for me in the foregoing account
of the dream activity to demonstrate my conclusions by means
of examples. Examples for the individual thesis are con-
vincing only when considered in connection with a dream
interpretation ; when they are torn from their context they
lose their significance, and, furthermore, a dream interpreta-
tion, though not at all profound, soon becomes so extensive
that it obscures the thread of the discussion which it is intended
to illustrate. This technical motive may excuse me for now
mixing together all sorts of things which have nothing in
common but their relation to the text of the foregoing chapter.

We shall first consider a few examples of very peculiar
or unusual methods of representation in the dream. The dream
of a lady is as follows : A servant girl is standing on a ladder
as though to clean the windows, and has with her a chimpanzee
and a gorilla cat (later corrected—angora cat). She throws
the animals at the dreamer; the chimpanzee cuddles up to her,
and this is disgusting to her. This dream has accomplished
its purpose by the simplest possible means, namely by taking

THE DREAM-WORK 323

a mere mode of speech literally and representing it according
to the meaning of its words. " Ape,” like the names of ani-
mals in general, is an epithet of opprobrium, and the situation
of the dream means nothing but “to hurl invectives." This
same collection will soon furnish us with further examples
of the use of this simple artifice.

Another dream proceeds in a very similar manner: A
woman with a child that has a conspicuously deformed cranium ;
the dreamer has heard that the child got into this condition owing
to its position in its mother’s womb. The doctor says that the
cranium might be given a better shape by means of compression,
but that would harm the brain. She thinks that because it is a
boy it won't suffer so much from deformity. This dream contains
a plastic representation of the concept: “ Childish impres-
sions,” which the dreamer has heard of in the course of
explanations concerning the treatment.

In the following example, the dream activity enters upon
a different path. The dream contains a recollection of an
excursion to the Hilmteich, near Graz: There is a terrible
storm outside ; a miserable hotel—the water is dripping from the
walls, and the beds are damp. (The latter part of the content
is less directly expressed than I give it.) The dream signifies
“ superfluous.” The abstract idea occurring in the dream
thoughts is first made equivocal by a certain straining of
language ; it has, perhaps, been replaced by “overflowing ”
or by “fluid ” and “ super-fluid (-fluous) “ and has then been
given representation by an accumulation of like impressions.
Water within, water without, water in the beds in the form
of dampness—everything fluid and super” fluid. That,
for the purposes of the dream representation, the spelling is
much less regarded than the sound of words ought not sur-
prise us when we remember that rhyme exercises similar
privileges.

The fact that language has at its disposal a great number
of words which were originally intended in a picturesque and
concrete sense but are at present used in a faded abstract
sense has in other cases made it very easy for the dream to
represent its thoughts. The dream need only restore to these
words their full significance, or follow the evolution of their
meaning a little way back. For example, a man dreams that

324 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

his friend, who is struggling to get out of a very tight place,
calls upon him to help him. The analysis shows that the tight
place is a hole, and that the dream uses symbolically his very
words to his friend, “ Be careful, or you'll get yourself into a
hole.” * Another dreamer climbs upon a mountain from which
he sees a very extraordinary broad view. He identifies himself
with his brother who is editing a “ review ” which deals with
relations to the Farthest East.

It would be a separate undertaking to collect such methods
of representation and to arrange them according to the prin-
ciples upon which they are based. Some of the representa-
tions are quite witty. They give the impression that they
would have never been divined if the dreamer himself had
not reported them.

1. A man dreams that he is asked for a name, which,
however, he cannot recall. He himself explains that this
means : It does not occur to me in the dream.

2. A female patient relates a dream in which all the persons
concerned were especially big. “ That means,” she adds,
“that it must deal with an episode of my early childhood,
for at that time all grown up people naturally seemed to me
immensely big.”

The transference into childhood is also expressed differ-
ently in other dreams by translating time into space. One
sees the persons and scenes in question as if at a great distance,
at the end of a long road, or as if looked at through the wrong
az of the opera-glass.

3. A man, who in waking life shows an inclination to ab-
stract and indefinite expressions. but who is otherwise endowed
with wit enough, dreams in a certain connection that he is
at a railroad station while a train is coming in. But then the
Station platform approaches the train, which stands still;
hence an absurd inversion of the real state of affairs. This
detail is again nothing but an index to remind one that some-
thing else in the dream should be turned about. The analysis
of the same dream brings back the recollection of a picture-
book in which men are represented standing on their heads
and walking on their hands.

4. The same dreamer on another occasion relates a short

* Given by translator as author's example could not be translated.

THE DREAM-WORK 825

dream which almost recalls the technique of a rebus. His
uncle gives him a kiss in an automobile. He immediately
adds the interpretation, which I should never have found :
it means Autoerotism. This might have been made as a joke
in the waking state.

The dream work often succeeds in representing very
awkward material, such as proper names, by means of the
forced utilisation of very far-fetched references. In one of
my dreams the elder Bruecke has given me a task. I com-
pound a preparation, and skim something from it which looks
like crumpled tinfoil. (More of this later on.) The notion cor-
responding to this, which was not easy to find, is * stanniol,”
and now I know that I have in mind the name of the author
Stannius, which was borne by a treatise on the nervous system
of fishes, which I regarded with awe in my youthful years.
The first scientific task which my teacher gave me was actually
concerned with the nervous system of a fish—the Ammocætes.
Obviously the latter name could never have been used in a
picture puzzle.

I shall not omit here to insert a dream having a curious
content, which is also remarkable as a child's dream, and which
is very easily explained by the analysis. A lady relates: “I
can remember that when I was a child I repeatedly dreamed,
that the dear Lord had a pointed paper hat on his head. They
used to make me wear such a hat at table very often, so that
I might not be able to look at the plates of the other children
and see how much they had received of a particular dish.
Since I have learned that God is omniscient, the dream signifies
that I know everything in spite of the hat which I am made
to wear.”

Wherein the dream work consists, and how it manages its
material, the dream thoughts, can be shown in a very instruc-
tive manner from the numbers and calculations which occur
in dreams. Moreover, numbers in dreams are regarded as of
especial significance by superstition. I shall therefore give
a few more examples of this kind from my own collection.

1. The following is taken from the dream of a lady shortly
before the close of her treatment :

She wants to pay for something or other; her daughter
takes ⑧ florins and 65 kreuzer from her pocket-book ; but

326 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the mother says: “ What are you doing? It only costs
21 kreuzer.” This bit of dream was immediately intelligible
to me without further explanation from my knowledge of the
dreamer’s circumstances. The lady was a foreigner who
had provided for her daughter in an educational institution
in Vienna, and who could continue my treatment as long as
her daughter stayed in the city. In three weeks the daughter's
school year was to end, and with that the treatment also
stopped. On the day before the dream the principal of the
institute had urged her to make up her mind to allow her child
to remain with her for another year. She had then obviously
worked out this suggestion to the conclusion that in this case
she would be able to continue the treatment for one year
more. Now, this is what the dream refers to, for a year is
equal to 365 days ; the three weeks that remain before the close
of the school year and of the treatment are equivalent to 21
days (though the hours of treatment are not as many as that).
The numerals, which in the dream thoughts referred to time,
are given money values in the dream, not without also giving
expression to a deeper meaning for “time is money.” 365
kreuzer, to be sure, are 3 florins and 65 kreuzer. The small-
ness of the sums which appear in the dream is a self-evident
wish-fulfilment ; the wish has reduced the cost of both the
treatment and the year's instruction at the institution.

II. The numerals in another dream involve more compli-
cated relations. A young lady, who, however, has already
been married a number of years, learns that an acquaintance
of hers of about her own age, Elsie L., has just become en-
gaged. Thereupon she dreams: She is sitting in the theatre
with her husband, and one side of the orchestra is quite unoccupied.
Her husband tells her that Elsie L. and her husband had also
wanted to go, but that they had been able to get nothing but poor
seats, three for 1 florin and 50 kreuzer, and of course they could
not take those. She thinks that they didn't lose much either.

Where do the 1 florin and 50 kreuzer come from ? From
an occurrence of the previous day which is really indifferent.
The dreamer's sister-in-law had received 150 florins as a
present from her husband, and had quickly got rid of them
by buying some jewelry. Let us note that 150 florins is 100
times more than 1 florin and 50 kreuzer. Whence the 3 which

THE DREAM-WORK 327

stands before the theatre seats ? There is only one associa-
tion for this, namely, that the bride is that many months—
three—younger than herself. Information concerning the
significance of the feature that one side of the orchestra re-
mains empty leads to the solution of the dream. This feature
is an undisguised allusion to a little occurrence which has
given her husband good cause for teasing her. She had de-
cided to go to the theatre during the week, and had been careful
to get tickets a few days before, for which she had to pay the
pre-emption charge. When they got to the theatre they found
that one side of the house was almost empty ; she certainly
did not need to be in such a hurry.

I shall now substitute the dream thoughts for the dream :
“Tt surely was nonsense to marry so early ; there was no need
for my being in such a hurry. From the case of Elsie L., I see
that I should have got a husband just the same—and one who
is a hundred times better (husband, sweetheart, treasure)—
if I had only waited (antithesis to the haste of her sister-in-
law). I could have bought three such men for the money
(the dowry !). Our attention is drawn to the fact that the
numerals in this dream have changed their meanings and
relations to a much greater extent than in the one previously
considered. The transforming and disfiguring activity of
the dream has in this case been greater, a fact which we in-
terpret as meaning that these dream thoughts had to over-
come a particularly great amount of inner psychic resistance
up to the point of their representation. We must also not
overlook the circumstance that the dream contains an absurd
element, namely, that two persons take three seats. We digress
to the interpretation of the absurdity of dreams when we
remark that this absurd detail of the dream content is intended
to represent the most strongly emphasized detail of the dream
thoughts : ' It was nonsense to marry so early." The figure
3 belonging to a quite subordinate relation of the two
compared persons (three months’ difference in age) has thus
been skilfully used to produce the nonsense demanded by the
dream. The reduction of the actual 150 florins to 1 florin and
50 kreuzer corresponds to her disdain of her husband in the
suppressed thoughts of the dreamer.

III. Another example displays the arithmetical powers of

328 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the dream, which have brought it into such disrepute. A
man dreams : He is sitting at B—s (a family of his earlier
acquaintance) and says, “ It was nonsense for you not to give
me Amy in marriage.” Thereupon he asks the girl, “ How
old are you?” Answer: “I was born in 1882.” * Ah, then
you are 28 years old.”

Since the dream occurs in the year 1898, this is obviously
poor arithmetic, and the inability of the dreamer to calculate
may be compared to that of the paralytic, if there is no other
way of explaining it. My patient was one of those persons
who are always thinking about every woman they see. The
person who followed him in my office, regularly for several
months, was a young lady, whom he used to meet, about whom
he used to ask frequently, and to whom he was very anxious
to be polite. This was the lady whose age he estimated at
28 years. So much for explaining the result of the apparent
calculation. But 1882 was the year in which he had married.
He had been unable to refrain from engaging in conversation
with the two females whom he met at my house—two girls,
by no means youthful, who alternately opened the door for
him, and as he did not find them very responsive, he had given
himself the explanation that they probably considered him
an elderly “settled ” gentleman.

IV. For another number dream with its interpretation,—
a dream distinguished by its obvious determination, or rather
over-determination, I am indebted to B. Dattner :

My host, a policeman in the municipal service, dreamed
that he was standing at his post in the street, which was a
wish-realisation. The inspector then came over to him,
having on his gorget the numbers 22 and 62 or 26—at all events
there were many two's on it. Division of the number 2262
in the reproduction of the dream at once points to the fact
that the components have separate meanings. It occurs to
him that the day before, while on duty, they were discussing
the duration of their time of service. The occasion for this
was furnished by an inspector who had been pensioned at
62 years. The dreamer had only completed 22 years of
service, and still needed 2 years and 2 months to make him
eligible for a 90 per cent. pension. The dream first shows
him the fulfilment of a long wished for wish, the rank of

THE DREAM-WORK 329

inspector. The superior with 2262 on his collar is himself ;
he takes care to do his duty on the street, which is another
preferred wish ; he has served his 2 years and 2 months, and
can now be retired from the service with full pension, like the
62-year-old inspector.

If we keep in mind these examples and similar ones (to
follow), we may say: Dream activity does not calculate at
all, whether correctly or incorrectly ; it joins together in the
form of a calculation numerals which occur in the dream
thoughts, and which may serve as allusions to material which
is incapable of being represented. It thus utilises numerals
as material for the expression of its purposes in the same manner
as it does names and speeches known as word presenta-
tions.

For the dream activity cannot compose a new speech.
No matter how many speeches and answers may occur in
dreams, which may be sensible or absurd in themselves,
analysis always shows in such cases that the dream has only
taken from the dream thoughts fragments of speeches which
have been delivered or heard, and dealt with them in a most
arbitrary manner. It has not only torn them from their
context and mutilated them, taken up one piece and rejected
another, but it has also joined them together in a new way,
so that the speech which seems coherent in the dream falls
into three or four sections in the course of analysis. In this
new utilisation of the words, the dream has often put aside
the meaning which they had in the dream thoughts, and has
derived an entirely new meaning from them.* Upon closer
inspection the more distinct and compact constituents of
the dream speech may be distinguished from others which
serve as connectives and have probably been supplied, just
as we supply omitted letters and syllables in reading. The
dream speech thus has the structure of breccia stones, in which

* The neurosis also proceeds in the same manner. I know a patient who
involuntarily—contrary to her own wishes—hears (hallucinatory) songs or
fragments of songs without being able to understand their meaning to her
psychic life. She is surely not a paranoiac. Analysis showed that she
wrongly utilised the text of these songs by means of a certain license. “Oh
thou blissful one, Oh thou happy one,” is the beginning of a Christmas song.
By not continuing it to the word “ Christmas time” she makes a bridal song

out of it, &c. The same mechanism of disfigurement may take place also
without hallucinations as a mere mental occurrence.

330 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

larger pieces of different material are held together by a
solidified cohesive mass.

In a very strict sense this description is correct, to be sure,
only for those speeches in the dream which have something
of the sensational character of a speech, and which are de-
scribed as “ speeches.” The others which have not, as it were,
been felt as though heard or spoken (which have no accom-
panying acoustic or motor emphasis in the dream) are simply
thoughts such as occur in our waking thought activity, and
are transferred without change into many dreams. Our
reading, also, seems to furnish an abundant and not easily
traceable source of material for speeches, this material being
of an indifferent nature. Everything, however, which appears
conspicuously in the dream as a speech can be referred to real
speeches which have been made or heard by the dreamer himself.

We have already found examples for the explanation of
such dream speeches in the analysis of dreams cited for other
purposes. Here is one example in place of many, all of which
lead to the same conclusion.

A large courtyard in which corpses are cremated. The dreamer
says: "I'm going away from here, I can't look at this.” (Not
a distinct speech.) Then he meets two buicher boys and asks :
* Well, did it taste good?” One of them answers: “ No, it
wasn't good.” As though it had been human flesh.

The harmless occasion for this dream is as follows : After
taking supper with his wife, the dreamer pays a visit to his
worthy but by no means appetising neighbour. The hospit-
able old lady is just at her evening meal, and urges him (instead
of this word a composite sexually-significant word is jocosely
used among men) to taste of it. He declines, saying that he
has no appetite. “Go on, you can stand some more,” or
something of the kind. The dreamer is thus forced to taste
and praise what is offered. “ But that’s good!” After he
is alone again with his wife, he scolds about the neighbour’s
importunity and about the quality of the food he has tasted.
“I can’t stand the sight of it,” a phrase not appearing even
in the dream as an actual speech, is a thought which has refer-
ence to the physical charms of the lady who invites him, and
which would be translated as meaning that he does not want
to look at her.

THE DREAM-WORK 331

The analysis of another dream which I cite at this point
for the sake of the very distinct speech that forms its nucleus,
but which I shall explain only when we come to consider
emotions in the dream—will be more instructive. I dream
very distinctly : I have gone to Bruecke's laboratory at night,
and upon hearing a soft knocking at the door, I open it to
(the deceased) Professor Fleischl, who enters in the company of
several strangers, and after saying a few words sits down at his
table. Then follows a second dream : My friend Fl. has come
to Vienna in July without attracting much attention; I meet
him on the street while he is in conversation with my (deceased)
friend P., and I go somewhere or other with these two, and they sit
down opposite each other as though at a little table, while I sit at
the narrow end of the table facing them. FI. tells about his sister
and says : “ In three-quarters of an hour she was dead,” and then
something like : “ That is the threshold.” As P. does not under-
stand him, Fl. turns to me, and asks me how much I have told
of his affairs. Whereupon, seized by strange emotions, I want
to tell Fl. that P. (can’t possibly know anything because he)
is mot alive. But, noticing the mistake myself, I say: “ Non
vizit." Then I look at P. searchingly, and under my gaze he
becomes pale and blurred, his eyes a morbid blue—and at last he
dissolves. I rejoice greatly at this ; I now understand that Ernest
Fleischel, too, was only an apparition, a revenant, and I find
that it is quite possible for such a person to exist only as long as
one wants him to, and that he can be made to disappear by the
wish of another person.

This beautiful dream unites so many of the character-
istics of the dream content which are problematic—the
criticism made in the dream itself in that I myself notice my
mistake in having said “ Non vixit “ instead of “ Non vivit ” ;
the unconstrained intercourse with dead persons, whom the
dream itself declares to be dead ; the absurdity of the infer-
ence and the intense satisfaction which the inference gives
me—that "by my life ” I should like to give a complete
solution of these problems. But in reality I am incapable
of doing this—namely, the thing I do in the dream—of
sacrificing such dear persons to my ambition. With every
revelation of the true meaning of the dream, with which I
am well acquainted, I should have been put to shame. Hence

332 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I am content with selecting a few of the elements of the dream,
for interpretation, some here, and others later on another
page.
The scene in which I annihilate P. by a glance forms the
centre of the dream. His eyes become strange and weirdly
blue, and then he dissolves. This scene is an unmistakable
copy of one really experienced. I was a demonstrator at
the physiological institute, and began my service in the early
hours, and Bruecke learned that I had been late several times
in getting to the school laboratory. So one morning he came
promptly for the opening of the class and waited for me. What
he said to me was brief and to the point ; but the words did
not matter at all. What overwhelmed me was the terrible
blue eyes through which he looked at me and before which I
melted away—as P. does in the dream, for P. has changed
rôles with him much to my relief. Anyone who remembers the
eyes of the great master, which were wonderfully beautiful until
old age, and who has ever seen him in anger, can easily imagine
the emotions of the young transgressor on that occasion.

But for a long time I was unable to account for the “ Non
Vixit,” with which I execute sentence in the dream, until I
remembered that these two words possessed such great dis-
tinctness in the dream, not because they were heard or spoken,
but because they were seen. Then I knew at once where
they came from. On the pedestal of the statue of Emperor
Joseph in the Hofburg at Vienna, may be read the following
beautiful words :

Saluti patriae vizit

non diu sed totus.
I had culled from this inscription something which suited
the one inimical train of thought in the dream thoughts
and which now intended to mean: * That fellow has nothing
to say, he is not living at all.” And I now recalled that the
dream was dreamed a few days after the unveiling of the
memorial to Fleisch! in the arcades of the university, upon
which occasion I had again seen Bruecke’s statue and must
have thought with regret (in the unconscious) how my highly
gifted friend P. with his great devotion to science had forfeited
his just claim to a statue in these halls by his premature

THE DREAM-WORK 333

death. So I set up this memorial to him in the dream ; the
first name of my friend P. is Joseph.*

According to the rules of dream interpretation, I should
still not be justified in replacing non vivit, which I need, by
non vixit, which is placed at my disposal by the recollection
of the Joseph monument. Something now calls my attention
to the fact that in the dream scene, two trains of thought
concerning my friend P. meet, one hostile, the other friendly—
of which the former is superficial, the latter veiled, and both
are given representation in the same words: non vizit. Be-
cause my friend P. has deserved well of science, I erect a statue
to him ; but because he has been guilty of an evil wish (which
is expressed at the end of the dream) I destroy him. I have
here constructed a sentence of peculiar resonance, and I must
have been influenced by some model. But where can I find
similar antithesis, such a parallel between two opposite atti-
tudes towards the same person, both claiming to be entirely
valid, and yet both trying not to encroach upon each other ?
Such a parallel is to be found in a single place, where, however,
a deep impression is made upon the reader—in Brutus’ speech
of justification in Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar: “As Cæsar
loved me, I weep for him ; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at
it; as he was valiant, I honour him ; but, as he was ambitious
I slew him.” Is not this which I have discovered, the same
sentence structure and thought contrast as in the dream
thought ? I thus play Brutus in the dream. If I could only
find in the dream thoughts, one further trace of confirma-
tion for this astonishing collateral connection ! I think the
following might be such: My friend comes to Vienna in
July. This detail finds no support whatever in reality. To
my knowledge my friend has never been in Vienna during the
month of July. But the month of July is named after Julius
Cæsar, and might therefore very well furnish the required
allusion to the intermediary thought that I am playing the
part of Brutus.

Strangely enough I once actually played the part of Brutus.

* As a contribution to the over-determination : My excuse for coming
late was that after working late at night I had in the morning to make the
long journey from Kaiser 5 osef Street to Waehringer Street.

T In addition Cæsar— Kaiser.

334 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I presented the scene between Brutus and Cæsar from Schiller’s
poems to an audience of children when I was a boy of fourteen
years. I did this with my nephew, who was a year older than
I, and who had come to us from England—also a revenant—
for in him I recognised the playmate of my first childish years.
Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable, had
loved each other and scuffled with each other, and, as I have
already intimated, this childish relation has constantly de-
termined my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of
my own age. My nephew John has since found many incar-
nations, which have revivified first one aspect, then another, of
this character which is so ineradicably fixed in my unconscious
memory. Occasionally he must have treated me very badly.
and I must have shown courage before my tyrant, for in later
years I have often been told of the short speech with which
I vindicated myself when my father—his grandfather—
called me to account: “I hit him because he hit me.” This
childish scene must be the one which causes non wivit to
branch off into non wizit, for in the language of later childhood
striking is called wichsen (German, wichsen—to smear with
shoe-polish, to tan, ?.6., to flog) ; the dream activity does not
hesitate to take advantage of such connections. My hostility
towards my friend P., which has so little foundation in reality
—he was far superior to me, and might therefore have been
a new edition of the playmate of my childhood—can certainly
be traced to my complicated relations with John during our
infancy. I shall, however, return to this dream later.

(f) Absurd Dreams— Intellectual Performances in the Dream

In our interpretation of dreams thus far we have come
upon the element of absurdity in the dream-content so often
that we must no longer postpone an investigation of its cause
and significance. We remember, of course, that the absurdity
of dreams has furnished the opponents of dream investigation
with their chief argument for considering the dream nothing
but the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary
activity of the mind.

I begin with specimens in which the absurdity of the
dream-content is only apparent and immediately disappears

THE DREAM-WORK 335

when the dream is more thoroughly examined. There are a
few dreams which—accidentally one is at first inclined
to think—are concerned with the dead father of the
dreamer.

I. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his father
six years before : y

A terrible accident has occurred to his father. He was riding
in the night train when a derailment took place, the seats came
together, and his head was crushed from side to side. The
dreamer sees him lying on the bed with a wound over his left
eyebrow, which runs off vertically. The dreamer is surprised
that his father has had a misfortune (since he is dead already,
as the dreamer adds in telling his dream). His father's eyes are
so clear.

According to the standards prevailing in dream criticism,
this dream-content would have to be explained in the follow-
ing manner : At first, when the dreamer is picturing his father’s
misfortune, he has forgotten that his father has already been
in his grave for years; in the further course of the dream
this memory comes to life, and causes him to be surprised
at his own dream even while he is still dreaming. Analysis,
however, teaches us that it is entirely useless to attempt
such explanations. The dreamer had given an artist an order
for a bust of his father, which he had inspected two days
before the dream. This is the thing which seems to him to
have met with an accident. The sculptor has never seen the
father, and js working from photographs which have been
given him. On the very day before the dream the pious son
had sent an old servant of the family to the studio in order
to see whether he would pass the same judgment upon the
marble head, namely, that it had turned out too narrow from
side to side, from temple to temple. Now follows the mass
of recollections which has contributed to the formation of
this dream. The dreamer’s father had a habit, whenever
he was harassed by business cares or family difficulties, of
pressing his temples with both hands, as though he were
trying to compress his head, which seemed to grow too large
for him. When our dreamer was four years old he was
present when the accidental discharge of a pistol blackened
his father’s eyes (his eyes are so clear). While alive his father

886 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

had had a deep wrinkle at the place where the dream shows
the injury, whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that
in the dream this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to
the second occasion of the dream. The dreamer had taken a
photograph of his little daughter; the plate had fallen from
his hand, and when picked up showed a crack that ran like a
vertical furrow across the forehead and reached as far as the
orbital curve. He could not then get the better of his super-
stitious forebodings, for, on the day before his mother's death,
a photographic plate with her likeness had cracked as he was
handling it.

Thus the absurdity of the dream is only the result of an
inaccuracy of verbal expression, which does not take the
trouble to distinguish the bust and the photograph from the
original. We are all accustomed to say of a picture, “ Don't
you think father is good?” Of course the appearance of
absurdity in this dream might easily have been avoided. If
it were permissible to pass judgment after a single experience,
one might be tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity
is admitted or desired.

II. Here is another very similar example from my own
dreams (I lost my father in the year 1896) :

After his death my father has been politically active among
the Magyars, and has united them into a political body; to
accompany which I see a little indistinct picture : a erowd of
people as in the Reichstag ; a person who is standing on one or
two benches, others round about him. I remember that he looked
very like Garibaldi on his death-bed, and I am glad that this
promise has really come true.

This is certainly absurd enough. It was dreamed at the
time that the Hungarians got into a lawless condition, through
Parliamentary obstruction, and passed through the crisis
from which Koloman Szell delivered them. The trivial cir-
cumstance that the scene beheld in the dream consists of such
little pictures is not without significance for the explanation
of this element. The usual visual representation of our
thoughts results in pictures which impress us as being life-
size; my dream picture, however, is the reproduction of a
wood-cut inserted in the text of an illustrated history of
Austria, representing Maria Theresa in the Reichstag of

THE DREAM-WORK 887

Pressburg —the famous scene of “ Moriamur pro rege nostro.” +
Like Maria Theresa, my father, in the dream, stands sur-
rounded by the multitude ; but he is standing on one or two
benches, and thus like a judge on the bench. (He has united
them—here the intermediary is the phrase, “ We shall need
no judge.”) Those of us who stood around the death-bed
of my father actually noticed that he looked much like Gari-
baldi. He had a post-mortem rise of temperature, his cheeks
shone redder and redder . . . involuntarily we continue :
“ And behind him lay in phantom radiance that which subdues
us all—the common thing.”

This elevation of our thoughts prepares us for having to
deal with this very “common thing.” The post-mortem
feature of the rise in temperature corresponds to the words,
“after his death ” in the dream content. The most agonis-
ing of his sufferings had been a complete paralysis of the
intestines (obstruction), which set in during the last weeks.
All sorts of disrespectful thoughts are connected with this.
A man of my own age who had lost his father while he was
still at the Gymnasium, upon which occasion I was profoundly
moved and tendered him my friendship, once told me, with
derision, about the distress of a lady relative whose father had
died on the street and had been brought home, where it turned
out upon undressing the corpse, that at the moment of death,
or post-mortem, an evacuation of the bowels had taken place.
The daughter of the dead man was profoundly unhappy at
having this ugly detail stain her memory of her father. We
have now penetrated to the wish that is embodied in this dream.
To stand before one’s children pure and great after one’s death,
who would not wish that ? What has become of the absur-
dity of the dream ? The appearance of it has been caused
only by the fact that a perfectly permissible mode of speech
—in the case of which we are accustomed to ignore the ab-
surdity that happens to exist between its parts—has been
faithfully represented in the dream. Here, too, we are unable

* I have forgotten in what author I found a dream mentioned that was
overrun with unusually small figures, the source of which turned out to be
one of the engravings of Jacques Callot, which the dreamer had looked at
during the dy These engravings contained an enormous number of

very small figures; a series of them treats of the horrors of the Thirty
Years’ War.

X

338 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

to deny that the semblance of absurdity is one which is desired

and has been purposely brought about.*

III. In the example which I now cite I can detect the
dream activity in the act of purposely manufacturing an
absurdity for which there is no occasion at all in the subject-
matter. It is taken from the dream that I had as a result of
meeting Count Thun before my vacation trip. "I am riding
in a one-horse carriage, and give orders to drive to a railway
station. "Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line
itself, I say, after the driver made an objection as though I had
tired him out ; at the same time it seems as though I had already
driven with him for a distance which one usually rides on the
train.” For this confused and senseless story the analysis
gives the following explanation : During the day I had hired

* The frequency with which in the dream dead persons appear as living,
act, and deal with us, has called forth undue astonishment and given rise to
strange explanations, from which our ignorance of the dream becomes strik-
ingly evident. And yet the explanation for these dreams lies very close at
hand. How often we have occasion to think: “ If father were still alive,
what would he say to it?” The dream can express this if in no other way
than by present time in a definite situation. Thus, for instance, a young
man, whose grandfather has left him a great inheritance, dreams that his
grandfatheris alive and demands an accounting of him, upon an occasion
when the young man had been reproached for making too great an expendi-
ture of money. What we consider a resistance to the dream—the objection
made by our better knowledge, that after all the man is already dead—is in
reality a consolation, because the dead person did not have this or that ex-
perience, or satisfaction at the knowledge that he has nothing more to say.

Another form of absurdity found in dreams of deceased relatives does
not express folly and absurdity, but serves to represent the most extreme
rejection ; as the representation of a repressed thought which one would
gladly have appear as something least thought of. Dreams of this kind are
only solvable if one recalls that the dream makes no distinction between
things desired and realities. Thus, for example, a man who nursed his father
during his sickness, and who felt his death very keenly, sometime afterward
dreamed the following senseless dream : The father was again living, and
conversed with him as usual, but (the remarkable thing about it) he had never-
theless died, though he did not know it. This dream can be understood if after
“he had nevertheless died,” one inserts in consequence of the dreamer's wish,
and if after “but he did not know it” one adds that the dreumer has enter-
tained this wish. While nursing his father, the son often wishes his fathers
death ; i.e. he entertained the really compassionate desire that death finally
put an end to his suffering. While mourning after his death, this very wish
of compassion became an unconscious reproach, as if it had really contri-
buted to shorten the life of the sick man. Through the awakening of early
infantile feelings against the father, it became possible to express this re-
POE as a dream; and it was just because of the world-wide contrast

etween the dream inciter and day thought that this dream had to come out
so absurdly (cf. with this, “ Formulierungen über die zwei Prizipien des
seelischen Geschehens, Jahrbuch, Bleuler-Freud, III, 1, 1911).

THE DREAM-WORK 339

а one-horse carriage which was to take me to a remote street
in Durnbach. The driver, however, did not know the way,
and kept on driving in the manner of those good people until
I noticed the fact and showed him the way, not sparing him
a few mocking remarks withal. From this driver a train of
thought led to the aristocratic personage whom I was des-
tined to meet later. For the present I shall only remark
that what strikes us middle-class plebeians about the aristo-
cracy is that they like to put themselves in the driver’s seat.
Does not Count Thun guide the Austrian car of state? The
next sentence in the dream, however, refers to my brother,
whom I identify with the driver of the one-horse carriage.
I had this year refused to take the trip through Italy with
him (“of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line
itself ”), and this refusal was a sort of punishment for his
wonted complaint that I usually tired him out on this trip
(which gets into the dream unchanged) by making him take
hurried trips and see too many nice things in one day. That
evening my brother had accompanied me to the railroad
station, but shortly before getting there had jumped out,
at the state railway division of the Western Station, in order
to take a train to Purkersdorf. I remarked to him that he
could stay with me a little longer, inasmuch as he did not go
to Purkersdorf by the state railway but by the Western Rail-
way. This is how it happens that in the dream I rode in the
wagon a distance which one usually rides on the train. In
reality, however, it was just the opposite ; I told my brother :
The distance which you ride on the state railway you could
ride in my company on the Western Railway. The whole
confusion of the dream is therefore produced by my inserting
in the dream the word “ wagon “ instead of “state railway,”
which, to be sure, does good service in bringing together the
driver and my brother. I then find in the dream some
nonsense which seems hardly straightened out by my ex-
planation, and which almost forms a contradiction to my
earlier speech (“ Of course I cannot ride with you on the rail-
way line itself ”). But as I have no occasion whatever for
confounding the state railway with the one-horse carriage, I
must have intentionally formed the whole puzzling story in
the dream in this way.

340 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

But with what intention ? We shall now learn what the
absurdity in the dream signifies, and the motives which ad-
mitted it or created it. The solution of the mystery in the
casein question is as follows : In the dream I needed something
absurd and incomprehensible in connection with riding ”
(Fahren) because in the dream thoughts I had a certain judg-
ment which required representation. On an evening at the
house of the hospitable and clever lady who appears in another
scene of the same dream as the “ hostess,” I heard two riddles
which I could not solve. As they were known to the other
members of the party, I presented a somewhat ludicrous
figure in my unsuccessful attempts to find a solution. They
were two equivoques turning on the words “ Nachkommen “
(to come after—ofispring) and “ vorfahren “ (to ride in
advance—forefathers, ancestry). They read as follows :

The coachman does it

At the master's behest;
Everyone has it;

In the grave does it rest.

(Ancestry.)

It was confusing to find half of the second riddle identical
with the first.
The coachman does it
At the master’s behest ;
Not everyone has it,
In the cradle does it rest.
(Offspring.)

As I had seen Count Thun ride in advance (vorfahren), so
high and mighty, and had merged into the Figaro-mood which
finds the merit of aristocratic gentlemen in the fact that they
have taken the trouble to be born (Nachkommen—to become
offspring), the two riddles became intermediary thoughts
for the dream-work. As aristocrats can be readily confounded
with coachmen, and as coachmen were in our country formerly
called brothers-in-law, the work of condensation could employ
my brother in the same representation. But the dream
thought at work in the background was as follows: It is
nonsense to be proud of one’s ancestry. (Vorfahren.) I would
rather be myself an ancestor. (Vorfahr.) For the sake of this
judgment, “it is nonsense,” we have the nonsense in the

THE DREAM-WORK 341

dream. We can now also solve the last riddle in this obscure
passage of the dream, namely, that I have already driven
before (vorher gefahren, vorgefahren) with the coachman.

Thus the dream is made absurd if there occurs as one of
the elements in the dream thoughts the judgment “ That
is nonsense,” and in general if disdain and criticism are the
motives for one of the trains of unconscious thought. Hence
absurdity becomes one of the means by which the dream
activity expresses contradiction, as it does by reversing a
relation in the material between the dream thoughts and
dream content, and by utilising sensations of motor impedi-
ment. But absurdity in the dream is not simply to be
translated by “no”; it is rather intended to reproduce the
disposition of the dream thoughts, this being to show mockery
and ridicule along with the contradiction. It is only for this
purpose that the dream activity produces anything ridicu-
lous. Here again it transforms a part of the latent content into
a manifest form."

As a matter of fact we have already met with a con-
vincing example of the significance of an absurd dream. The
dream, interpreted without analysis, of the Wagnerian per-
formance lasting until 7.45 in the morning, in which the
orchestra is conducted from a tower, &c. (see p. 316) is appa-
rently trying to say : It is a crazy world and an insane society.
He who deserves a thing doesn’t get it, and he who doesn’t
care for anything has it—and in this she means to compare
her fate with that of her cousin. The fact that dreams con-
cerning a dead father were the first to furnish us with examples
of absurdity in dreams is by no means an accident. The
conditions necessary for the creations of absurd dreams are
here grouped together in a typical manner. The authority
belonging to the father has at an early age aroused the criti-
cism of the child, and the strict demands he has made have

* Here the dream activity parodies the thought which it designates as
ridiculous, in that it creates something ridiculous in relation to it. Heine
does something similar when he tries 10 mock the bad rhymes of the King
of Bavaria. 116 does it in still worse rhymes:

“Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet
Und singt er, so stuerzt Apollo
Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht,
“Halt ein, ich werde sonst toll oh D ヵ

342 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

caused the child to pay particularly close attention to every
weakness of the father for its own extenuation : but the piety
with which the father’s personality is surrounded in our
thoughts, especially after his death, increases the censorship
which prevents the expressions of this criticism from becoming
conscious.

IV. The following is another absurd dream about a dead
father :

I receive a notice from the common council of my native city
concerning the costs of a confinement in the hospital in the year
1851, which was necessitated by an attack from which I suffered.
I make sport of the matter, for, in the first place, I was not yet alive
in the year 1851, and, in the second place, my father, to whom
the notice might refer, is already dead. I go to him in the ad-
joining room, where he is lying on a bed, and tell him about it.
To my astonishment he recalls that in that year—1851—he was
once drunk and had to be locked up or confined. It was when he
was working for the house of T——. "Then you drank, too?”
I ask. * You married soon after?” I figure that I was born
in 1856, which appears to me as though immediately following.

In view of the preceding discussion, we shall translate the
insistence with which this dream exhibits its absurdities as
the sure sign of a particularly embittered and passionate con-
troversy in the dream thoughts. With all the more astonish-
ment, however, we note that in this dream the controversy
is waged openly, and the father designated as the person
against whom the satire is directed. This openness seems to
contradict our assumption of a censor as operative in the
dream activity. We may say in explanation, however, that
here the father is only an interposed person, while the conflict
is carried on with another one, who makes his appearance in
the dream by means of a single allusion. While the dream
usually treats of revolt against other persons, behind which
the father is concealed, the reverse is true here; the father
serves as the man of straw to represent others, and hence
the dream dares thus openly to concern itself with a person
who is usually hallowed, because there is present the certain
knowledge that he is not in reality intended. We learn of
this condition of affairs by considering the occasion of the
dream. Now, it occurred after I had heard that an older

THE DREAM-WORK 348

colleague, whose judgment is considered infallible, had ex-
pressed disapproval and astonishment at the fact that one
of my patients was then continuing psychoanalytical work
with me for the fifth year. The introductory sentences of
the dream point with transparent disguise to the fact that
this colleague had for a time taken over the duties which my
father could no longer perform (expenses, fees at the hospital) ;
and when our friendly relations came to be broken I was
thrown into the same conflict of feelings which arises in the
case of misunderstanding between father and son in view of
the part played by the father and his earlier functions. The
dream thoughts now bitterly resent the reproach that I am
not making better progress, which extends itself from the treat-
ment of this patient to other things. Does this colleague
know anyone who can get on faster ? Does he not know that
conditions of this sort are usually incurable and last for life ?
What are four or five years in comparison to a whole life,
especially when life has been made so much easier for the
patient during the treatment ?

The impression of absurdity in this dream is brought
about largely by the fact that sentences from different divisions
of the dream thoughts are strung together without any re-
conciling transition. Thus the sentence, I go to him in the
adjoining room, dc., leaves the subject dealt with in the
preceding sentences, and faithfully reproduces the circum-
stances under which I told my father about my marriage
engagement. Thus the dream is trying to remind me of
the noble disinterestedness which the old man showed at that
time, and to put it in contrast with the conduct of another,
a new person. 1 now perceive that the dream is allowed to
make sport of my father for the reason that in the dream
thought he is held up as an example to another man, in full
recognition of his merit. It is in the nature of every censot-
ship that it permits the telling of untruth about forbidden
things rather than truth. The next sentence, in which my
father remembers having once been drunk, and having been
locked up for it, also contains nothing which is actually true
of my father. The person whom he covers is here a no less
important one than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I
followed with such great veneration, and whose attitude

344 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

towards me was changed into undisguised hostility after a
short period of indulgence. The dream recalls to me his own
statement that in his youth he was addicted to the chloroform
habit, and that for this he had to enter a sanatorium. It
recalls also a second experience with him shortly before his
death. I carried on an embittered literary controversy with
him concerning hysteria in the male, the existence of which
he denied, and when I visited him in his last illness and asked
him how he felt, he dwelt upon the details of his condition
and concluded with the words: * You know, I have always
been one of the prettiest cases of masculine hysteria.” Thus,
to my satisfaction, and to my astonishment, he admitted what
he had so long and so stubbornly opposed. But the fact that
in this scene I can use my father to cover Meynert is based
not upon the analogy which has been found to exist between
the two persons, but upon the slight, but quite adequate, re-
presentation of a conditional sentence occurring in the dream
thoughts, which in full would read as follows: “ Of course
if I were of the second generation, the son of a professor or
of a court-councillor, I should have progressed more rapidly.”
In the dream I now make a court-councillor and a professor
of my father. The most obvious and most annoying absurdity
of the dream lies in the treatment of the date 1851, which seems
to me to be hardly distinguishable from 1856, as though a
difference of five years would signify nothing whatever. But
it is just this idea of the dream thoughts which requires
expression. Four or five years—that is the length of time
which I enjoyed the support of the colleague mentioned at
the outset ; but it is also the time during which I kept my
bride waiting before I married her ; and, through a coincidence
that is eagerly taken advantage of by the dream thoughts,
it is also the time during which I am now keeping one of my
best patients waiting for the completion of his cure. “ What
are five years?” ask the dream thoughts. " That is no time
at all for me—that doesn’t come into consideration. I have time
enough ahead of me, and just as what you didn’t want to
believe came true at last, so I shall accomplish this also.”
Besides the number 51, when separated from the number of
the century, is determined in still another manner and in an
opposite sense; for which reason it occurs in the dream

THE DREAM-WORK 345

again. Fifty-one is an age at which a man seems particularly
exposed to danger, at which I have seen many of my colleagues
suddenly die, and among them one who had been appointed
to a professorship a few days before, after he had been waiting
a long time.

V. Another absurd dream which plays with figures, runs
as follows :

One of my acquaintances, Mr. M., has been attacked in an
essay by no less a person than Goethe, with justifiable vehemence,
we all think. Mr. M. has, of course, been crushed by this attack.
He complains of it bitterly at a dinner party ; but he says that
his veneration for Goethe has not suffered from this personal
experience. I try to find some explanation of the chronological
relations, which seem improbable to me. Goethe died in 1832;
since his attack upon M. must of course have taken place earlier,
Mr. M. was at the time a very young man. It seems plausible
to me that he was 18 years old. But I do not know exactly what
year it is at present, and so the whole calculation lapses into
obscurity. The attack, moreover, is contained in Goethes well-
known essay entitled " Nature.”

We shall soon find means to justify the nonsense of this
dream. Mr. M., with whom I became acquainted at a dinner-
party, had recently requested me to examine his brother, who
showed signs of paralytic insanity. The conjecture was right ;
the painful thing about this visit was that the patient exposed
his brother by alluding to his youthful pranks when there was
no occasion in the conversation for his doing so. I had asked
the patient to tell me the year of his birth, and had got him
to make several small calculations in order to bring out the
weakness of his memory—all of which tests he passed fairly
well. I see now that I am acting like a paralytic in the dream
(I do not know exactly what year it is at present). Other subject-
matter in the dream is drawn from another recent source.
The editor of a medical journal, a friend of mine, had accepted
for his paper a very unfavourable, a “ crushing," criticism of
the last book of my friend Fl. of Berlin, the author of which
was a very youthful reviewer, who was not very competent to
pass judgment. I thought I had a right to interfere, and
called the editor to account ; he keenly regretted the accept-
ance of the criticism, but would not promise redress. There-

346 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

upon I broke off relations with the journal, and in my letter
of resignation expressed the hope that our personal relations
would not suffer from the incident. The third source of this
dream is an account given by a female patient—it was fresh
in my memory at the time—of the mental disease of her brother
who had fallen into a frenzy, crying "Nature, Nature.” The
physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived
from a reading of Goethe’s beautiful essay, and that it pointed
to overwork in the patient in the study of natural philosophy.
I thought rather of the sexual sense in which even less cul-
tured people with us use the word “ Nature,” and the fact
that the unfortunate man later mutilated his genitals seemed
to show that I was not far wrong. Eighteen years was the
age of this patient at the time when the attack of frenzy
occurred.

If I add further that the book of my friend so severely
criticised (" It is a question whether the author is crazy or we
are” had been the opinion of another critic) treats of the
temporal relations of life and refers the duration of Goethe's
life to the multiple of a number significant from the point of
view of biology, it will readily be admitted that I am putting
myself in the place of my friend in the dream. (I try to find
some explanation of the chronological relations.) But I behave
like a paralytic, and the dream revels in absurdity. This
means, then, as the dream thoughts say ironically. * Of course
he is the fool, the lunatic, and you are the man of genius
who knows better. Perhaps, however, it is the other way
around ?" Now, this other way around is explicitly repre-
sented in the dream, in that Goethe has attacked the young
man, which is absurd, while it is perfectly possible even to-day
for a young fellow to attack the immortal Goethe, and in that
I figure from the year of Goethe's death, while I caused the
paralytic to calculate from the year of his birth.

But I have already promised to show that every dream
is the result of egotistical motives. Accordingly, I must
account for the fact that in this dream I make my friend's
cause my own and put myself in his place. My rational
conviction in waking thought is not adequate to do this.
Now, the story of the eighteen-year-old patient and of the
various interpretations of his cry, “ Nature,” alludes to my

THE DREAM-WORK 347

having brought myself into opposition to most physicians
by claiming sexual etiology for the psychoneuroses. I may
say to myself : “The same kind of criticism your friend met
with you will meet with too, and have already met with to
some extent,” and now I may replace the “ he ” in the dream
thoughts by “we.” “ Yes, you are right ; we two are the fools.”
That mea res agitur, is clearly shown by the mention of
the short, incomparably beautiful essay of Goethe, for it was
a public reading of this essay which induced me to study the
natural science while I was still undecided in the graduating
class of the Gymnasium.

VI. I am also bound to show of another dream in which
my ego does not occur that it is egotistic. On page 228 I
mentioned a short dream in which Professor M. says: “My
son, the myopic . . .”; and I stated that this was only a
preliminary dream to another one, in which I play a part.
Here is the main dream, omitted above, which challenges us
to explain its absurd and unintelligible word-formation.

On account of some happenings or other in the city of Rome
it is necessary for the children to flee, and this they do. The scene
is then laid before a gate, a two-winged gate in antique style (the
Porta Romana in Siena, as I know while I am still dreaming).
I am sitting on the edge of a well, and am very sad ; I almost weep.
A feminine person—nurse, nun—brings out the two boys and
hands them over to their father, who is not myself. The elder
of the two is distincily my eldest son, and I do not see the face of
the other ; the woman who brings the boy asks him for a parting
kiss. She is distinguished by a red nose. The boy denies her
the kiss, but says to her, extending his hand to her in parting,
“Auf Geseres," and to both of us (or to one of us) “ Auf
Ungeseres.” I have the idea that the latter indicates an advantage.

This dream is built upon a tangle of thoughts induced by
a play I saw at the theatre, called Das neue Ghetto (“ The
New Ghetto.”) The Jewish question, anxiety about the future
of my children who cannot be given a native country of their
own, anxiety about bringing them up so that they may have
the right of native citizens—all these features may easily be
recognised in the accompanying dream thoughts.

“We sat by the waters of Babylon and wept.” Siena,
like Rome, is famous for its beautiful fountains. In the dream

348 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I must find a substitute of some kind for Rome (cf. p. 163)
in localities which are known to me. Near the Porta Romana
of Siena we saw a large, brightly illuminated building, which
we found to be the Manicomio, the insane asylum. Shortly
before the dream I had heard that a co-religionist had been
forced to resign a position at a state asylum which he had
secured with great effort.

Our interest is aroused by the speech: “ Auf Geseres リ ー
where we might expect, from the situation maintained through-
out the dream, “ Auf Wiedersehen” (Au revoir)—and by its
quite meaningless opposite, “ Auf Ungeseres.”

According to information I have received from Hebrew
scholars, Geseres is a genuine Hebrew word derived from the
verb goiser, and may best be rendered by “ordained suffer-
ings, fated disaster.” From its use in the Jewish jargon one
might think it signified “wailing and lamentation.” Un
geseres is a coinage of my own and first attracts my attention ;
but for the present it baffles me. The little observation at
the end of the dream, that Ungeseres indicates an advan-
tage over Geseres opens the way to the associations
and to an explanation. The same relation holds good with
caviare ; the unsalted kind * is more highly prized than the
salted. Caviare to the general, “ noble passions"; herein
lies concealed a joking allusion to a member of my household,
of whom I hope—for she is younger than I—that she will
watch over the future of my children ; this, too, agrees with
the fact that another member of my household, our worthy
nurse, is clearly indicated in the nurse (or nun) of the dream.
But a connecting link is wanting between the pair, salted and
unsalted, and Geseres—ungeseres. This is to be found in
soured, and unsoured. In their flight or exodus out of Egypt,
the children of Israel did not have time to allow their bread
to be leavened, and in memory of the event to this day they
eat unsoured bread at Easter time. Here I can also find room
for the sudden notion which came to me in this part of the
analysis. I remembered how we promenaded about the city of
Breslau, which was strange to us, at the end of the Easter

* Note the resemblance of Geseres and Ungeseres to the German words
for salted and unsalted—gesalzen and ungesalzen; also to the German words
for soured and unsoured— gesauert and ungesauert. (Translator.)

THE DREAM-WORK 349

holidays, my friend from Berlin and I. A little girl asked me
to tell her the way to a certain street ; I had to tell her I did
not know it, whereupon I remarked to my friend, ' hope
that later on in life the little one will show more perspicacity
in selecting the persons by whom she allows herself to be
guided.” Shortly afterwards a sign caught my eye: * Dr.
Herod, office hours. . . .” I said to myself: “I hope
this colleague does not happen to be a children’s specialist.”
Meanwhile my friend had been developing his views on
the biological significance of bilateral symmetry, and had
begun a sentence as follows: “If we had but one eye
in the middle of our foreheads like Cyclops. . . .” This
leads us to the speech of the professor in the preliminary dream :
“My son, the myopic.” And now I have been led to the
chief source for Geseres. Many years ago, when this son of
Professor M., who is to-day an independent thinker, was
still sitting on his school-bench, he contracted a disease of
the eye, which the doctor declared gave cause for anxiety.
He was of the opinion that as long as it remained in one eye
it would not matter; if, however, it should extend to the
other eye, it would be serious. The disease healed in the
one eye without leaving any bad effects ; shortly afterwards,
however, its symptoms actually appeared in the other eye.
The terrified mother of the boy immediately summoned the
physician to the seclusion of her country resort. But he
took another view of the matter. * What sort of * Geseres’ is
this you are making ? “ he said to his mother with impatience.
“If one side got well, the other side will get well too.” And
so it turned out.

And now as to the connection between this and myself
and those dear to me. The school-bench upon which the son
of Professor M. learned his first lessons has become the property
of my eldest son—it was given to his mother—into whose
lips I put the words of parting in the dream. One of the
wishes that can be attached to this transference may now
easily be guessed. This school-bench is intended by its con-
struction to guard the child from becoming shortsighted and
one-sided. Hence, myopia (and behind the Cyclops) and the
discussion about bilateralism. The concern about one-
sidedness is of two-fold signification ; along with the bodily

350 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

one-sidedness, that of intellectual development may be re-
ferred to. Does it not seem as though the scene in the
dream, with all its madness, were putting its negative on just
this anxiety ? After the child has said his word of parting
on the one side, he calls out its opposite on the other side, as
though in order to establish an equilibrium. He is acting, as
it were, in obedience to bilateral symmetry !

Thus the dream frequently has the profoundest meaning
in places where it seems most absurd. In all ages those who
had something to say and were unable to say it without danger
to themselves gladly put on the cap and bells. The listener
for whom the forbidden saying was intended was more likely
to tolerate it if he was able to laugh at it, and to flatter him-
self with the comment that what he disliked was obviously
something absurd. The dream proceeds in reality just as
the prince does in the play who must counterfeit the fool,
and hence the same thing may be said of the dream which
Hamlet says of himself, substituting an unintelligible witti-
cism for the real conditions : Tam but mad north-north-west ;
when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.” *

Thus my solution of the problem of the absurdity of dreams
is that the dream thoughts are never absurd—at least not
those belonging to the dreams of sane persons—and that the
dream activity produces absurd dreams and dreams with
individual absurd elements if criticism, ridicule, and derision
in the dream thoughts are to be represented by it in its
manner of expression. My next concern is to show that the
dream activity is primarily brought about by the co-operation
of the three factors which have been mentioned—and of a
fourth one which remains to be cited—that it accomplishes
nothing short of a transposition of the dream thoughts, ob-
serving the three conditions which are prescribed for it, and
that the question whether the mind operates in the dream
with all its faculties, or only with a portion of them, is deprived

* This dream also furnishes a good example for the general thesis that
dreams of the same night, even though they be separated in memory, spring
from the same thought material. The dream situation in which I am
rescuing my children from the city of Rome, moreover, is disfigured by a
reference to an episode belonging to my childhood. The meaning is that I
enyy certain relatives who years ago had occasion to transplant their
children to another soil,

THE DREAM-WORK 351

of its cogency and is inapplicable to the actual circumstances.
But since there are plenty of dreams in which judgments
are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognised, in which
astonishment at some single element of the dream appears, and
arguments and explanations are attempted, I must meet the
objections which may be inferred from these occurrences by
the citation of selected examples.

My answer is as follows : Everything in the dream which
occurs as an apparent exercise of the critical faculty is to be
regarded, not as am {intellectual accomplishment of the dream
activity, but as belonging to the material of the dream thoughts,
and it has found its way from them as a finished structure to
the manifest dream content. 1 may go even further than this.
Even the judgments which are passed upon the dream as
it is remembered after awakening and the feelings which
are aroused by the reproduction of the dream, belong in good
part to the latent dream content, and must be fitted into their
place in the interpretation of the dream.

I. A striking example of this I have already given. A
female patient does not wish to relate her dream because it
is too vague. She has seen a person in the dream, and does
not know whether it is her husband or her father. Then
follows a second dream fragment in which there occurs a
“ manure-can,” which gives rise to the following reminiscence.
As a young housewife, she once jokingly declared in the
presence of a young relative who frequented the house that her
next care would be to procure a new manure-can. The next
morning one was sent to her, but it was filled with lilies of the
valley. This part of the dream served to represent the saying,
“Not grown on your own manure.” * When we complete
the analysis we find that in the dream thoughts it is a matter
of the after-effects of a story heard in youth, to the effect
that a girl had given birth to a child concerning whom it was
not clear who was the real father. The dream representation
here goes over into the waking thought, and allows one element
of the dream thoughts to be represented by a judgment
expressed in the waking state upon the whole dream.

* This German expression is equivalent to our saying “You are not

responsible for that,” or “That has not been acquired through your own
efforts,” (Translator.)

352 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

II. A similar case: One of my patients has a dream
which seems interesting to him, for he says to himself immedi-
ately after awakening : “ I must tell that to the doctor.” The
dream is analysed, and shows the most distinct allusion to
an affair in which he had become involved during the treat-
ment, and of which he had decided to tell me nothing.” *

ТП. Here is a third example from my own experience :

I go to the hospital with P. through a region in which houses
and gardens occur. With this comes the idea that I have already
seen this region in dreams several times. I do not know my
way very well ; P. shows me a way which leads through a corner
ło a restaurant (a room, not a garden); here I ask for Mrs.
Doni, and I hear that she is living in the background in a little
room with three children. I go there, and while on the way I
meet an indistinct person with my two little girls, whom I take
with me after I have stood with them for a while. A kind of
reproach against my wife for having left them there.

Upon awakening I feel great satisfaction, the cause for
this being the fact that I am now going to learn from the
analysis what is meant by the idea * I have already dreamed
of that.” + But the analysis of the dream teaches me nothing
on the subject ; it only shows me that the satisfaction belongs
to the latent dream content, and not to my judgment upon
the dream. It is satisfaction over the fact that I have had
children by my marriage. P. is a person in whose company
I walked the path of life for a certain space, but who has since
far outdistanced me socially and materially—whose marriage,
however, has remained childless. The two occasions for the
dream furnishing the proof of this may be found by means of
complete analysis. On the previous day I had read in the
paper the obituary notice of a certain Mrs. Dona À y (out
of which I make Doni), who had died in childbirth; I was
told by my wife that the dead woman had been nursed by the
same midwife she herself had had at the birth of our two

* The injunction or purpose contained in the dream, “I must tell
that to the doctor,” which occurs in dreams that are dreamed in the
course of psycho-analytical treatment, regularly corresponds to a great
resistance to the confession involved in the dream,and is not infrequently
followed by forgetting of the dream.

T A subject about which an extensive discussion has taken place in
the volumes of the Revue Philosophique—(Paramnesia in the Dream).

THE DREAM-WORK 358

youngest boys. The name Dona had caught my attention,
for I had recently found it for the first time in an English
novel. The other occasion for the dream may be found in
the date on which it was dreamed ; it was on the night before
the birthday of my eldest boy, who, it seems, is poetically

IV. The same satisfaction remained with me after awaken-
ing from the absurd dream that my father, after his death, had
played a political part among the Magyars, and it is motivated
by a continuance of the feeling which accompanied the last
sentence of the dream : " I remember that on his deathbed he
looked so much like Garibaldi, and I am glad that it has really
come true. (Here belongs a forgotten continuation.) I can now
supply from the analysis what belongs in this gap of the dream.
It is the mention of my second boy, to whom I have given the
first name of a great historical personage, who attracted me
powerfully during my boyhood, especially during my stay in
England. I had to wait for a year after making up my mind
to use this name in case the expected child should be a son,
and I greeted him with it in high satisfaction as soon as he was
born. It is easy to see how the father’s lust for greatness is
transferred in his thoughts to his children ; it will readily be
believed that this is one of the ways in which the suppression
of this lust which becomes necessary in life is brought about.
The little fellow won a place in the text of this dream by virtue
of the fact that the same accident—quite pardonable in a
child or a dying person—of soiling his clothes had happened
to him. With this may be compared the allusion “ Stuhl-
richter ” (judge on the stool-bench, i.e. presiding judge) and
the wish of the dream : To stand before one’s children great
and pure.

V. I am now called upon to find expressions of judgment
which remain in the dream itself, and are not retained in or
transferred to our waking thoughts, and I shall consider it a
great relief if I may find examples in dreams, which have
already been cited for other purposes. The dream about
Goethe's attacking Mr. M. seems to contain a considerable
number of acts of judgment. I try to find some explanation of
the chronological relations, which seem improbable to me. 8
not this look like a critical impulse directed against the non-

2

354 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

sensical idea that Goethe should have made a literary attack
upon a young man of my acquaintance ? “ It seems plausible
to me that he was 18 years old.” That sounds quite like
the result of a dull-witted calculation; and “7 do not know
exactly what year it is" would be an example of uncertainty
or doubt in the dream.

But I know from analysis that these acts of judgment,
which seem to have been performed in the dream for the first
time, admit of a different construction in the light of which
they become indispensable for interpreting the dream, and at
the same time every absurdity is avoided. With the sentence,
* I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations,”
I put myself in the place of my friend who is actually trying
to explain the chronological relations of life. The sentence
then loses its significance as a judgment that objects to the
nonsense of the previous sentences. The interposition, which
seems improbable to me,” belongs to the subsequent “ it seems
plausible to me.” In about the same words I had answered
the lady who told me the story of her brother's illness : “ It
seems improbable to me that the cry of "Nature, Nature,” had
anything to do with Goethe ; it appears much more plausible
that it had the sexual significance which is known to you.”
To be sure, a judgment has been passed here, not, however,
in the dream but in reality, on an occasion which is remembered
and utilised by the dream thoughts. The dream content
appropriates this judgment like any other fragment of the
dream thoughts.

The numeral 18, with which the judgment in the dream is
meaninglessly connected, still preserves a trace of the context
from which the real judgment was torn. Finally, “ 7 am not
certain what year it is” is intended for nothing else than
to carry out my identification with the paralytic, in the
examination of whom this point of confirmation had actually
been established.

In the solution of these apparent acts of judgment, in the
dream, it may be well to call attention to the rule of interpre-
tation which says that the coherence which is fabricated in
the dream between its constituent parts is to be disregarded
as specious and unessential, and that every dream element must
be taken by itself and traced to its source. The dream is

THE DREAM-WORK 355

a conglomeration, which is to be broken up into its elements
for the purposes of investigation. But other circumstances
call our attention to the fact that a psychic force is expressed
in dreams which establishes this apparent coherence—that
is to say, which subjects the material that is obtained by the
dream activity to a secondary elaboration. We are here con-
fronted with manifestations of this force, upon which we shall
later fix our attention as being the fourth of the factors which
take part in the formation of the dream.

VI. Iselect other examples of critical activity in the dreams
which have already been cited. In the absurd dream about
the communication from the common council I ask the ques-
tion : * You married shortly after ? I figure that I was born in
1856, which appears to me as though following immediately.
This quite takes the form of an inference. My father married
shortly after his attack in the year 1851 ; I am the oldest son,
born in 1856 : this agrees perfectly. We know that this in-
ference has been interpolated by the wish-fulfilment, and that
the sentence which dominates the dream thoughts is to the
following effect : 4 or 5 years, that is no time at all, that need not
enter the calculation. But every part of this chain of inferences
is to be determined from the dream thoughts in a different
manner, both as to its content and as to its form. 16 is the
patient—about whose endurance my colleague complains—
who intends to marry immediately after the close of the
treatment. The manner in which I deal with my father in
the dream recalls an inquest or examination, and with that the
person of a university instructor who was in the habit of taking
a complete list of credentials at the enrolment of his class :
“You were born when?” In 1856. “ Patre?” Then the
applicant gave the first name of his father with a Latin ending,
and we students assumed that the Aulic Councillor drew
inferences from the first name of the father which the name
of the enrolled student would not always have supplied. Ac-
cording to this, the drawing of inferences in the dream would
be merely a repetition of the drawing of inferences which
appears as part of the subject-matter in the dream thoughts.
From this we learn something new. If an inference occurs
in the dream content, it invariably comes from the dream
thoughts ; it may be contained in these as a bit of remembered

356 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

material, or it may serve as a logical connective in a series
of dream thoughts. In any case an inference in the dream
represents an inference in the dream thoughts. *

The analysis of this dream should be continued here.
With the inquest of the Professor there is connected the re-
collection of an index (published in Latin during my time)
of the university students; also of my course of studies.
The five years provided for the study of medicine were as usual
not enough for me. I worked along unconcernedly in the
succeeding years; in the circle of my acquaintances I was
considered a loafer, and there was doubt as to whether I
would “get through.” Then all at once I decided to take
my examinations; and I got “ through,” in spite of the post-
ponement. This is a new confirmation of the dream thoughts,
which I defiantly hold up to my critics: " Even though you
are unwilling to believe it, because I take my time, I shall
reach a conclusion (German Schluss, meaning either end or
conclusion, inference). It has often happened that way.”

In its introductory portion this dream contains several
sentences which cannot well be denied the character of an
argumentation. And this argumentation is not at all absurd ;
it might just as well belong to waking thought. In the dream
I make sport of the communication of the Common Council, for
in the first place I was not yet in the world in 1851, and in the
second place, my father, to whom it might refer, is already dead.
Both are not only correct in themselves, but coincide com-
pletely with the arguments that I should use in case I should
receive a communication of the sort mentioned. We know
from our previous analysis that this dream has sprung from
deeply embittered and scornful dream thoughts ; if we may
assume further that the motive for censorship is a very strong
one, we shall understand that the dream activity has every
reason to create a flawless refutation of a baseless insinuation
according to the model contained in the dream thoughts.
But analysis shows that in this case the dream activity has not
had the task of making a free copy, but it has been required

* These results correct in several respects my earlier statements
concerning the representation of logical relations (p. 290). The latter
described the general conditions of dream activity, but they did not take
into consideration its finest and most careful performances.

THE DREAM-WORK 357

to use subject-matter from the dream thoughts for its purpose.
It is as if in an algebraic equation there occurred plus and minus
signs, signs of powers and of roots, besides the figures, and
as if someone, in copying this equation without understanding
it, should take over into his copy the signs of operation as
well as the figures, and fail to distinguish between the two
kinds. The two arguments may be traced to the following
material. It is painful for me to think that many of the
assumptions upon which I base my solution of psychoneuroses,
as soon as they have become known, will arouse scepticism
and ridicule. Thus I must maintain that impressions from
the second year of life, or even from the first, leave a lasting
trace upon the temperament of persons who later become
diseased, and that these impressions—greatly distorted it is
true, and exaggerated by memory—are capable of furnishing
the original and fundamental basis of hysterical symptoms.
Patients to whom I explain this in its proper place are in the
habit of making a parody upon the explanation by declaring
themselves willing to look for reminiscences of the period
when they were not yet alive. It would quite accord with
my expectation, if enlightenment on the subject of the un-
suspected part played by the father in the earliest sexual
impulses of feminine patients should get a similar reception.
(Cf. the discussion on p. 218.) And, nevertheless, both
positions are correct according to my well-founded conviction.
In confirmation I recall certain examples in which the death
of the father happened when the child was very young, and
later events, otherwise inexplicable, proved that the child
had unconsciously preserved recollections of the persons who
had so early gone out of its life. I know that both of my
assertions are based upon inferences the validity of which will
be attacked. If the subject-matter of these very inferences
which I fear will be contested is used by the dream activity
for setting up incontestable inferences, this is a performance of
the wish-fulfilment.

VII. In a dream which I have hitherto only touched
upon, astonishment at the subject to be broached is distinctly
expressed at the outset.

* The elder Bruecke must have given me some task or other ;
strangely enough it relates to the preparation of my own lower

358 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

body, pelvis and legs, which I see before me as though in the dis-
secting room, but without feeling my lack of body and without a
trace of horror. Louise N. is standing near, and doing her work
next to me. The pelvis is eviscerated ; now the upper, now the
lower view of the same is seen, and the two views mingle. Thick
Jleshy red lumps (which even in the dream make me think of
hæmorrhoids) are to be seen. Also something had to be carefully
picked out, which lay over these and which looked like crumpled
tin-foil.* Then I was again in possession of my legs and made
a journey through the city, but took a wagon (owing to my fatigue).
To my astonishment the wagon drove into a house door, which
opened and allowed it to pass into a passage that was snapped
off at the end, and finally led further on into the open.t At last
I wandered through changing landscapes with an Alpine guide,
who carried my things. He carried me for some way, out of con-
sideration for my tired legs. The ground was muddy, and we
went along the edge ; people sat on the ground, a girl among them,
like Indians or Gypsies. Previously I had moved myself along
on the slippery ground, with constant astonishment that I was
so well able to do it after the preparation. At last we came to a
small wooden house which ended in an open window. Here the
guide set me down, and laid two wooden boards which stood in
readiness on the window sill, in order that in this way the chasm
might be bridged which had to be crossed in order to get to the
window. Now, I grew really frightened about my legs. In-
stead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying
upon wooden benches which were on the walls of the hut, and some-
thing like two sleeping children next to them. It seems as though
not the boards but the children were intended to make possible the
crossing. I awakened with frightened thoughts.

Anyone who has formed a proper idea of the abundance of
dream condensation will easily be able to imagine how great
a number of pages the detailed analysis of this dream must
fill. Luckily for the context, I shall take from it merely the
one example of astonishment, in the dream, which makes its
appearance in the parenthetical remark, “ strangely enough.”

* Stanniol, allusion to Stannius, the nervous system of fishes ; cf. p. 325.

+ The place in the corridor of my apartment house where the baby
carriages of the other tenants stand; it is also otherwise several times
over-determined.

THE DREAM-WORK 359

Let us take up the occasion of the dream. It is a visit of this
lady, Louise N., who assists at the work in the dream. She
says: “Lend me something to read.” I offer her Ske, by
Rider Haggard. “ A strange book, but full of hidden sense,”

I try to explain to her; “ the eternal feminine, the immor-
tality of our emotions— Here she interrupts me: “I
know that book already. Haven't you something of your
own?” “No, my own immortal works are still unwritten.”

“Well, when are you going to publish your so-called latest
revelations which you promised us would be good reading ? “
she asks somewhat sarcastically. I now perceive that she is
a mouthpiece for someone else, and I become silent. I think
of the effort it costs me to publish even my work on the Dream,
in which I have to surrender so much of my own intimate
character. “ The best that you know you can't tell to the
children.” The preparation of my own body, which I am ordered
to make in the dream, is thus the self-analysis necessitated in
the communication of my dreams. The elder Bruecke very
properly finds a place here ; in these first years of my scientific
work it happened that I neglected a discovery, until his ener-
getic commands forced me to publish it. But the other trains
of thought which start from my conversation with Louise N.
go too deep to become conscious; they are side-tracked by
way of the related material which has been awakened in me
by the mention of Rider Haggard's She. The comment
“ strangely enough “ goes with this book, and with another by
the same author, The Heart of the World, and numerous
elements of the dream are taken from these two fantastic
novels. The muddy ground over which the dreamer is carried,
the chasm which must be crossed by means of the boards
that have been brought along, come from She; the Indians,
the girl, and the wooden house, from the Heart of the World.
In both novels a woman is the leader, both treat of dangerous
wanderings ; She has to do with an adventurous journey to
the undiscovered country, a place almost untrodden by foot
of man. According to a note which I find in my record of the
dream, the fatigue in my legs was a real sensation of those
days. Doubtless in correspondence with this came a tired
frame of mind and the doubting question: "How much
further will my legs carry me?” The adventure in She

360 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

ends with the woman leader’s meeting her death in the
mysterious fire at the centre of the earth, instead of attaining
immortality for herself and others. A fear of this sort has
unmistakably arisen in the dream thoughts. The “ wooden
house,” also, is surely the coffin—that is, the grave. But
the dream activity has performed its masterpiece in repre-
senting this most unwished-for of all thoughts by means of
a wish-fulfilment. I have already once been in a grave, but
it was an empty Etruscan grave near Orvieto—a narrow
chamber with two stone benches on the walls, upon which the
skeletons of two grown-up persons had been laid. The interior
of the wooden house in the dream looks exactly like this,
except that wood has been substituted for stone. The dream
seems to say : "If you must so soon lie in your grave, let it
be this Etruscan grave,” and by means of this interpolation it
transforms the saddest expectation into one that is really to be
desired. As we shall learn, it is, unfortunately, only the idea
accompanying an emotion which the dream can change into
its opposite, not usually the emotion itself. Thus I awake
with “frightened thoughts,” even after the dream has been
forced to represent my idea—that perhaps the children will
attain what has been denied to the father—a fresh allusion to
the strange novel in which the identity of a person is preserved
through a series of generations covering two thousand years.
VIII. In the context of another dream there is a similar
expression of astonishment at what is experienced in the
dream. This, however, is connected with a striking and skil-
fully contrived attempt at explanation which might well be
called a stroke of genius—so that I should have to analyse the
whole dream merely for the sake of it, even if the dream did
not possess two other features of interest. I am travelling
during the night between the eighteenth and the nineteenth of
July on the Southern Railway, and in my sleep I hear some-
one call out : “ Hollthurn, 10 minutes.” I immediately think
of Holothurian—of a museum of natural history—that here is a
place where brave men have vainly resisted the domination of
their overlord. Yes, the counter reformation in Austria! As
though it were a place in Styria or the Tyrol. Now I distinctly
see a little museum in which the remains or the possessions of
these men are preserved. I wish to get off, but I hesitate to do so.

THE DREAM-WORK 361

Women with fruit are standing on the platform ; they crouch on
the floor, and in that position hold out their baskets in an inviting
manner. I hesitate, in doubt whether we still have time, but we
are still standing. I am suddenly in another compartment in
which the leather and the seats are so narrow that one’s back
directly touches the back rest.* I am surprised at this, but I
may have changed cars while asleep. Several people, among
them am English brother and sister ; a row of books distinctly
on a shelf on the wall. I see The Wealth of Nations, then
Matter and Motion (by Maxwell)—the books are thick and bound
in brown linen. The man asks his sister for a book by Schiller,
and whether she has forgotten it. These are books which first
seem mine, then seem to belong to the brother and sister. At this
point I wish to join in the conversation in order to confirm and
support what is being said——. I awaken sweating all over my
body, because all the windows are shut. The train stops at
Marburg.

While writing down the dream, a part of it occurs to me
which my memory wished to omit. I say to the brother and
sister about a certain work : " It is from . . .” but I correct
myself: “It is by . . >” The man remarks to his sister :
* He said it correctly.”

The dream begins with the name of a station, which prob-
ably must have partially awakened me. For this name,
which was Marburg, I substituted Hollthurn. The fact that
I heard Marburg when it was first called, or perhaps when it
was called a second time, is proved by the mention in the
dream of Schiller, who was born in Marburg, though not in
the one in Styria.f Now this time, although I was travelling
first-class, it was under very disagreeable circumstances. The
train was overcrowded ; I had met a gentleman and lady in
my compartment who seemed persons of quality, but who
did not have the good breeding or who did not think it worth

* This description is not intelligible even to myself, but I follow the
principle of reproducing the dream in those words which occur to me

while I am writing it down. The wording itself is a part of the dream
representation.

+ Schiller was not born in one of the Marburgs, but in Marbach, as
every graduate of a Gymnasium knows, and as I also knew. This again is
one of those errors (cf. p. 165) which are included as substitutes for an
intended deception at another place—an explanation of which I have
attempted in the Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens).

362 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

while to conceal their displeasure at my intrusion. My polite
salutation was not answered, and although the man and the
woman sat next each other (with their backs in the direction
in which we were riding), the woman made haste to pre-empt
the place opposite her and next the window with her umbrella ;
the door was immediately closed and demonstrative remarks
about the opening of windows were exchanged. Probably I
was quickly recognised as a person hungry for fresh air. It
was a hot night, and the air in the compartment, thus shut
on all sides, was almost suffocating. My experience as a
traveller leads me to believe that such inconsiderate, obtrusive
conduct marks people who have only partly paid for their
tickets, or not at all. When the conductor came, and I pre-
sented my dearly bought ticket, the lady called out ungra-
ciously, and as though threateningly : "My husband has a
pass.” She was a stately figure with sour features, in age
not far from the time set for the decay of feminine beauty ;
the man did not get a chance to say anything at all, and sat
there motionless. I tried to sleep. In the dream I take
terrible revenge on my disagreeable travelling companions ;
no one would suspect what insults and humiliations are con-
cealed behind the disjointed fragments of the first half of the
dream. After this desire has been satisfied, the second wish,
to exchange my compartment for another, makes itself evident.
The dream makes changes of scene so often, and without rais-
ing the least objection to such changes, that it would not have
been in the least remarkable if I had immediately replaced
my travelling companions by more pleasant ones for my re-
collection. But this was one of the cases where something
or other objected to the change of scene and considered ex-
planation of the change necessary. How did I suddenly get
into another compartment ? I surely could not remember
having changed cars. So there was only one explanation :
I must have left the carriage while asleep, a rare occurrence,
examples for which, however, are furnished by the experience
of the neuropathologist. We know of persons who under-
take railroad journeys in a crepuscular state without betraying
their abnormal condition by any sign, until some station on
the journey they completely recover consciousness, and are
then surprised at the gap in their memory. Thus, while I

THE DREAM-WORK 363

am still dreaming, I declare my own case to be such a one of
* Automatisme ambulatoire.”

Analysis permits another solution. The attempt at ex-
planation, which so astounds me if T am to attribute it to the
dream activity, is not original, but is copied from the neurosis
of one of my patients. I have already spoken on another
page of a highly cultured and, in conduct, kind-hearted man,
who began, shortly after the death of his parents, to accuse
himself of murderous inclinations, and who suffered because
of the precautionary measures he had to take to insure himself
against these inclinations. At first walking along the street
was made painful for him by the compulsion impelling him to
demand an accounting of all the persons he met as to whither
they had vanished ; if one of them suddenly withdrew from
his pursuing glance, there remained a painful feeling and a
thought of the possibility that he might have put the man out
of the way. This compulsive idea concealed, among other
things, a Cain-fancy, for “ all men are brothers.” Owing to
the impossibility of accomplishing his task, he gave up taking
walks and spent his life imprisoned within his four walls. But
news of murderous acts which have been committed outside
constantly reached his room through the papers, and his con-
science in the form of a doubt kept accusing him of being the
murderer. The certainty of not having left his dwelling for
weeks protected him against these accusations for a time,
until one day there dawned upon him the possibility that he
might have left his house while in an unconscious condition, and
might thus have committed the murder without knowing any-
thing about it. From that time on he locked his house door,
and handed the key over to his old housekeeper, and strictly
forbade her to give it into his hands even if he demanded it.

This, then, is the origin of the attempted explanation,
that I may have changed carriages while in an unconscious
condition—it has been transferred from the material of the
dream thoughts to the dream in a finished state, and is obvi-
ously intended to identify me with the person of that patient.
My memory of him was awakened by an easy association. I
had made my last night journey with this man a few weeks
before. He was cured, and was escorting me into the country,
to his relatives who were summoning me ; as we had a compart-

364 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

ment to ourselves, we left all the windows open through the
night, and, as long as I had remained awake, we had a delight-
ful conversation. I knew that hostile impulses towards his
father from the time of his childhood, in connection with
sexual material, had been at the root of his illness. By
identifying myself with him, I wanted to make an analogous
confession to myself. The second scene of the dream really
resolves itself into a wanton fancy to the effect that my two
elderly travelling companions had acted so uncivilly towards
me for the reason that my arrival prevented them from ex-
changing love-tokens during the night as they had intended.
This fancy, however, goes back to an early childhood scene
in which, probably impelled by sexual inquisitiveness, I
intruded upon the bedroom of my parents, and was driven
from it by my father’s emphatic command.

I consider it superfluous to multiply further examples.
All of them would confirm what we have learned from those
which have been already cited, namely, that an act of judg-
ment in the dream is nothing but the repetition of a prototype
which it has in the dream thoughts. In most cases it is an
inappropriate repetition introduced in an unfitting connection ;
occasionally, however, as in our last example, it is so artfully
disposed that it may give the impression of being an inde-
pendent thought activity in the dream. At this point we
might turn our attention to that psychic activity which
indeed does not seem to co-operate regularly in the formation of
dreams, but whose effort it is, wherever it does co-operate,
to fuse together those dream elements that are incongruent
on account of their origins in an uncontradictory and intel-
ligible manner. We consider it best, however, first to take up
the expressions of emotion which appear in the dream, and to
compare them with the emotions which analysis reveals to
us in the dream thoughts.

(9) The Affects in the Dream.

A profound remark of Stricker’s 77 has called our attention
to the fact that the expressions of emotion in the dream do
not permit of being disposed of in the slighting manner in
which we are accustomed to shake off the dream itself, after

THE DREAM-WORK 365

we have awakened. “If I am afraid of robbers in the dream,
the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is
real," and the same is true if I am glad in the dream. Accord-
ing to the testimony of our feelings, the emotion experienced
in the dream is in no way less valid than one of like intensity
experienced in waking life, and the dream makes its claim to be
taken up as a part of our real mental experiences, more ener-
getically on account of its emotional content than on account
of its ideal content. We do not succeed in accomplishing this
separation in waking life, because we do not know how to
estimate an emotion psychically except in connection with a
presentation content. Ifin kind or in intensity an affect and an
idea are incongruous, our waking judgment becomes confused.

The fact that in dreams the presentation content does not
entail the affective influence which we should expect as neces-
sary in waking thought has always caused astonishment.
Striimpell was of the opinion that ideas in the dream are
stripped of their psychic values. But neither does the dream
lack opposite instances, where the expression of intense affect
appears in a content, which seems to offer no occasion for its
development. I am in a horrible, dangerous, or disgusting
situation in the dream, but I feel nothing of fear or aversion ;
on the other hand, I am sometimes terrified at harmless things
and glad at childish ones.

This enigma of the dream disappears more suddenly and
more completely than perhaps any other of the dream pro-
blems, if we pass from the manifest to the latent content.
We shall then no longer be concerned to explain it, for it will
no longer exist. Analysis teaches us that presentation contents
have undergone displacements and substitutions, while affects
have remained unchanged. No wonder, then, that the pre-
sentation content which has been altered by dream disfigure-
ment no longer fits the affect that has remained intact : but
there is no cause for wonder either after analysis has put the
correct content in its former place.

In a psychic complex which has been subjected to the in-
fluence of the resisting censor the affects are the unyielding
constituent, which alone is capable of guiding us to a correct
supplementation. This state of affairs is revealed in psycho-
neuroses even more distinctly than in the dream. Here the

366 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

affect is always in the right, at least as far as its quality goes ;
its intensity may even be increased by means of a displace-
ment of neurotic attention. If a hysteric is surprised that
he is so very afraid of a trifle, or if the patient with compulsive
ideas is astonished that he develops such painful self-reproach
out of a nonentity, both of them err in that they regard the
presentation content—the trifle or the nonentity—as the essen-
tial thing, and they defend themselves in vain because they
make this presentation content the starting point in their
thought. Psychoanalysis, however, shows them the right way
by recognising that, on the contrary, the affect is justified,
and by searching for the presentation which belongs to it
and which has been suppressed by means of replacement.
The assumption is here made that the development of affect
and the presentation content do not constitute such an in-
dissoluble organic union as we are accustomed to think, but
that the two parts may be, so to speak, soldered together in
such a way that they may be detached from one another by
means of analysis. Dream interpretation shows that this
is actually the case.

I give first an example in which analysis explains the ap-
parent absence of affect in a presentation content which ought
to force a development of emotion.

I. The dreamer sees three lions in a desert, one of which is
laughing, but she is not afraid of them. Then, however, she must
have fled from them, for she is trying to climb a tree, but she finds
that her cousin, who is a teacher of French, is already up in the
tree, &c.

The analysis gives us the following material for this dream:
A sentence in the dreamer’s English lesson had become the
indifferent occasion for it : “ The lion's greatest beauty is his
mane.” Her father wore a beard which surrounded his face
like a mane. The name of her English teacher was Miss
Lyons. An acquaintance of hers had sent her the ballads of
Loewe (German, Loewe—lion). These, then, are the three
lions ; why should she have been afraid of them ? She has
read a story in which a negro who has incited his fellows to
revolt is hunted with bloodhounds and climbs a tree to save
himself. Then follow fragments in wanton mood, like the
following. Directions for catching lions from Die Fliegende

THE DREAM-WORK 367

Blaetter : * Take a desert and strain it; the lions will re-
main.” Also a very amusing, but not very proper anecdote
about an official who is asked why he does not take greater
pains to win the favour of his superior officer, and who answers
that he has been trying to insinuate himself, but that the man
ahead of him is already wp. The whole matter becomes in-
telligible as soon as one learns that on the day of the dream
the lady had received a visit from her husband’s superior. He
was very polite to her, kissed her hand, and she was not afraid
of him at all, although he is a “ big bug “ (German—Grosses
Tier=“ big animal") and plays the part of a “ social lion “
in the capital of her country. This lion is, therefore, like the
lion in the Midsummer Nights Dream, who unmasks as Snug,
the joiner, and of such stuff are all dream lions made when one
is not afraid.

II. As my second example, I cite the dream of the girl who
saw her sisters little son lying dead in a coffin, but who, I may
now add, felt no pain or sorrow thereat. We know from
analysis why not. The dream only concealed her wish to
see the man she loved again ; the affect must be attuned to
the wish, and not to its concealment. There was no occasion
for sorrow at all.

In a number of dreams the emotion at least remains con-
nected with that presentation content which has replaced the
one really belonging to it. In others the breaking up of the
complex is carried further. The affect seems to be entirely
separated from the idea belonging to it, and finds a place
somewhere else in the dream where it fits into the new ar-
rangement of the dream elements. This is similar to what
we have learned of acts of judgment of the dream. If there
is a significant inference in the dream thoughts, the dream
also contains one; but in the dream the inference may be
shifted to entirely different material. Not infrequently this
shifting takes place according to the principle of antithesis.

I illustrate the latter possibility by the following dream,
which I have subjected to the most exhaustive analysis.

III. A castle by the sea ; afterwards it lies not directly on the
sea, but on a narrow canal that leads to the sea. A certain Mr.
P. is the governor of it. I stand with him in a large salon with
three windows, in front of which rise the projections of a wall,

368 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

like battlements of a fort. I belong to the garrison, perhaps as
a volunteer marine officer. We fear the arrival of hostile war-
ships, for we are in a state of war. Mr. P. has the intention of
leaving ; he gives me instructions as to what must be done in case
the dreaded event happens. His sick wife is in the threatened
castle with her children. As soon as the bombardment begins the
large hall should be cleared. He breathes heavily, and tries to get
away ; I hold him back, and ask him in what way I should send
him news in case of need. He says something else, and then all
at once falls over dead. I have probably taxed him unnecessarily
with my questions. After his death, which makes no further im-
pression upon me, I think whether the widow is to remain in the
castle, whether I should give notice of the death to the commander-
in-chief, and whether I should take over the direction of the castle
as the next in command. I now stand at the window, and muster
the ships as they pass by ; they are merchantmen that dart past
upon the dark water, several of them with more than one smoke-
stack, others with bulging decks (that are quite similar to the
railway stations in the preliminary dream which has not been
told). Then my brother stands next to me, and both of us look
out of the window on to the canal. At the sight of a ship we are
frightened, and call out: “ Here comes the warship!” It turns
out, however, that it is only the same ships which I have already
known that are returning. Now comes a little ship, strangely cut
off, so that it ends in the middle of its breadth ; curious things like
cups or salt-cellars are seen on the deck. We call as though with
one voice : " That is the breakfast-ship.”

The rapid motion of the ships, the deep blue of the water,
the brown smoke of the funnels, all this together makes a
highly tense, sombre impression.

The localities in this dream are put together from several
journeys to the Adriatic Sea (Miramare, Duino, Venice,
Aquileja). A short but enjoyable Easter trip to Aquileja
with my brother, a few weeks before the dream, was still fresh
in my memory. Besides, the naval war between America
and Spain, and the worry connected with it about my relatives
living in America, play a part. Manifestations of emotion
appear at two places in this dream. In one place an emotion
that would be expected is lacking—it is expressly emphasized
that the death of the governor makes no impression upon me ;

THE DREAM-WORK 369

at another point, where I see the warships I am frightened,
and experience all the sensations of fright while I sleep. The
distribution of affects in this well-constructed dream has been
made in such a way that every obvious contradiction is
avoided. For there is no reason why I should be frightened
at the governor’s death, and it is fitting that as the commander
of the castle I should be alarmed by the sight of the warship.
Now analysis shows that Mr. P. is nothing but a substitute for
my own Ego (in the dream I am his substitute). I am the
governor who suddenly dies. The dream thoughts deal with
the future of those dear to me after my premature death.
No other disagreeable thought is to be found among the
dream thoughts. The fright which is attached to the sight
of the warship must be transferred from it to this disagree-
able thought. Inversely, the analysis shows that the region
of the dream thoughts from which the warship comes is filled
with most joyous reminiscences. It was at Venice a year
before, one charmingly beautiful day, that we stood at the
windows of our room on the Riva Schiavoni and looked upon
the blue lagoon, in which more activity could be seen that day
than usually. English ships were being expected, they were
to be festively received ; and suddenly my wife called out,
happy as a child : * There come the English warships!” In
the dream I am frightened at the very same words ; we see
again that speeches in the dream originate from speeches in,
life. I shall soon show that even the element “ English “ in
this speech has not been lost for the dream activity. I thus
convert joy into fright on the way from the dream thoughts
to the dream content, and I need only intimate that by means
of this very transformation I give expression to a part of the
latent dream content. The example shows, however, that the
dream activity is at liberty to detach the occasion for an affect
from its context in the dream thoughts, and to insert it at
any other place it chooses in the dream content.

I seize the opportunity which is incidentally offered, of
subjecting to closer analysis the “ breakfast ship,” whose
appearance in the dream so nonsensically concludes a situation
that has been rationally adhered to. If I take a closer view
of this object in the dream, I am now struck by the fact that it
was black, and that on account of its being cut off at its greatest

2A

370 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

breadth it closely resembled, at the end where it was cut off,
an object which had aroused our interest in the museums of
the Etruscan cities. This object was a rectangular cup of
black clay with two handles, upon which stood things like coffee
cups, or tea cups, very similar to our modern breakfast table
service. Upon inquiring, we learned that this was the toilet
set of an Etruscan lady, with little boxes for rouge and powder ;
and we said jokingly to each other that it would not be a bad
idea to take a thing like that home to the lady of the house.
The dream object, therefore, signifies black toilet ” (German,
toilette—dress)—mourning—and has direct reference to a
death. The other end of the dream object reminds us of the
“ boat" (German, Nachen), from the root véxus, as a philo-
logical friend has told me, upon which corpses were laid in
prehistoric times and were left to be buried by the sea. With
this circumstance is connected the reason for the return of
the ships in the dream.

“ Quietly the old man on his rescued boat drifts into the
harbour.”

It is the return voyage after the shipwreck (German, schiff-
bruch ; ship-breaking, i.e. shipwreck), the breakfast-ship looks
as though it were broken off in the middle. But whence comes
the name “ breakfast ”-ship ? Here is where the “ English “
comes in, which we have left over from the warships. Break-
fast—a breaking of the fast. Breaking again belongs to
ship-wreck (Schiffbruch), and fasting is connected with the
mourning dress.

The only thing about this breakfast-ship, which has been
newly created by the dream, is its name. The thing has
existed in reality, and recalls to me the merriest hours of my
last journey. As we distrusted the fare in Aquileja, we took
some food with us from Goerz, and bought a bottle of excellent
Istrian wine in Aquileja, and while the little mail-steamer slowly
travelled through the Canal delleMee and into the lonely stretch
of lagoon towards Grado, we took our breakfast on deck—we
were the only passengers—and it tasted to us as few break-
fasts have ever tasted. This, then, was the " breakfast-ship,”
and it is behind this very recollection of great enjoyment that
the dream hides the saddest thoughts about an unknown and
ominous future,

THE DREAM-WORK 371

The detachment of emotions from the groups of ideas
which have been responsible for their development is the most
striking thing that happens to them in the course of dream
formation, but it is neither the only nor even the most essential
change which they undergo on the way from the dream
thoughts to the manifest dream. If the affects in the dream
thoughts are compared with those in the dream, it at once
becomes clear that wherever there is an emotion in the dream,
this is also to be found in the dream thoughts ; the converse,
however, is not true. In general, the dream is less rich in
affects than the psychic material from which it is elaborated.
As soon as I have reconstructed the dream thoughts I see that
the most intense psychic impulses are regularly striving in
them for self-assertion, usually in conflict with others that
are sharply opposed to them. If I turn back to the dream,
I often find it colourless and without any of the more intense
strains of feeling. Not only the content, but also the affec-
tive tone of my thoughts has been brought by the dream
activity to the level of the indifferent. I might say that a
suppression of the affects has taken place. Take, for example,
the dream of the botanical monograph. It answers to a pas-
sionate plea for my freedom to act as I am acting and to arrange
my life as seems right to me and to me alone. The dream
which results from it sounds indifferent ; I have written a
monograph ; it is lying before me ; it is fitted with coloured
plates, and dried plants are to be found with each copy. It
is like the peacefulness of a battlefield ; there is no trace left
of the tumult of battle.

It may also turn out differently—vivid affective expressions
may make their appearance in the dream; but we shall first
dwell upon the unquestionable fact that many dreams appear
indifferent, while it is never possible to go deeply into the dream
thoughts without deep emotion.

A complete theoretical explanation of this suppression of
emotions in the course of the dream activity cannot be given
here ; it would require a most careful investigation of the
theory of the emotions and of the mechanism of suppression.
I shall find a place here for two thoughts only. I am forced
—on other grounds—to conceive the development of affects
as a centrifugal process dirccted towards the interior of the

372 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

body, analogous to the processes of motor and secretory
innervation. Just as in the sleeping condition the omission
of motor impulses towards the outside world seems to be
suspended, so a centrifugal excitement of emotions through
unconscious thought may be made more difficult during sleep.
Thus the affective impulses aroused during the discharge of
the dream thoughts would themselves be weak excitements,
and therefore those getting into the dream would not be
stronger. According to this line of argument the “ suppres-
sion of the affects ” would not be a result of the dream activity
at all, but a result of the sleeping condition. This may be so,
but this cannot possibly be all. We must also remember that
all the more complex dreams have shown themselves to be a
compromised result from the conflict of psychic forces. On
the one hand, the thoughts that constitute the wish must
fight the opposition of a censorship; on the other hand, we
have often seen how, even in unconscious thinking, each train
of thought is harnessed to its contradictory opposite. Since
all of these trains of thought are capable of emotion, we shall
hardly make a mistake, broadly speaking, if we regard the
suppression of emotion as the result of the restraint which the
contrasts impose upon one another and which the censor
imposes upon the tendencies which it has suppressed. The
restraint of affects would accordingly be the second result of the
dream censor as the disfigurement of the dream was the first.

I shall insert an example of a dream in which the indif-
ferent affective tone of the dream content may be explained by
a contrast in the dream thoughts. I have the following short
dream to relate, which every reader will read with disgust :

IV. A bit of rising ground, and on it something like a toilet
in the open ; a very long bench, at the end of which is a large
toilet aperture. All of the back edge is thickly covered with little
heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A shrub
behind the bench. I urinate upon the bench ; a long stream of
urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement easily come
off and fall into the opening. It seems as though something
remained at the end nevertheless.

Why did I experience no disgust in this dream ?

Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and satis-
fying thoughts have co-operated in the formation of this dream.

THE DREAM-WORK 373

Upon analysing it I immediately think of the Augean stables
cleansed by Hercules. I am this Hercules. The rising ground
and the shrub belong to Aussee, where my children are now
staying. I have discovered the infantile etiology of the neu-
roses and have thus guarded my own children from becoming
ill. The bench (omitting the aperture, of course) is the faith-
ful copy of a piece of furniture which an affectionate female
patient has made me a present of. This recalls how my patients
honour me. Even the museum of human excrement is sus-
ceptible of less disagreeable interpretation. However much I
am disgusted with it, it is a souvenir of the beautiful land of
Italy, where in little cities, as everyone knows, water-closets
are not equipped in any other way. The stream of urine that
washes everything clean is an unmistakable allusion to great-
ness. It is in this manner that Gulliver extinguishes the
great fire in Lilliput; to be sure, he thereby incurs the dis-
pleasure of the tiniest of queens. In this way, too, Gargantua,
the superman in Master Rabelais, takes vengeance upon the
Parisians, straddling Notre Dame and training his stream
of urine upon the city. Only yesterday I was turning over
the leaves of Garnier’s illustrations of Rabelais before I went
to bed. And, strangely enough, this is another proof that I
am the superman! The platform of Notre Dame was my
favourite nook in Paris; every free afternoon I was accus-
tomed to go up into the towers of the church and climb about
among the monsters and devil-masks there. The circum-
stances that all the excrement vanishes so rapidly before
the stream correspond to the motto : Aflavit et dissipati sunt,
which I shall some day make the title of a chapter on the
therapeutics of hysteria.

And now as to the occasion giving rise to the dream. It
had been a hot afternoon in summer ; in the evening I had
given a lecture on the relation between hysteria and the per-
versions, and everything which I had to say displeased me
thoroughly, appeared to me stripped of all value. I was
tired, found no trace of pleasure in my difficult task, and
longed to get away from this rummaging in human filth, to
see my children and then the beauties of Italy. In this mood
I went from the auditorium to a café, to find some modest
refreshment in the open air, for my appetite had left me.

374 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

But one of my audience went with те; he begged for per-
mission to sit with me while I drank my coffee and gulped
down my roll, and began to say flattering things to me. He
told me how much he had learned from me, and that he
now looked at everything through different eyes, that I had
cleansed the Augean stables, i.e. the theory of the neuroses,
of its errors and prejudices—in short, that I was a very great
man. My mood was ill-suited to his song of praise ; I struggled
with disgust, and went home earlier in order to extricate myself.
Before I went to sleep I turned over the leaves of Rabelais,
and read a short story by 0. F. Meyer entitled Die Leiden
eines Knaben (The Hardships of a Boy).

The dream had been drawn from these materials, and the
novel by Meyer added the recollection of childish scenes
(ef. the dream about Count Thun, last scene). The mood of the
day, characterised by disgust and annoyance, is continued in
the dream in the sense that it is permitted to furnish nearly
the entire material for the dream content. But during the
night the opposite mood of vigorous and even exaggerated
self-assertion was awakened, and dissipated the earlier mood.
The dream had to take such a form as to accommodate the
expression of self-depreciation and exaggerated self-assertion
in the same material. This compromise formation resulted
in an ambiguous dream content, but likewise in an indifferent
strain of feeling owing to the restraint of the contrasts upon
each other.

According to the theory of wish-fulfilment this dream
could not have happened had not the suppressed, but at the
same time pleasurable, train of thought concerning personal
aggrandisement been coupled with the opposing thoughts of
disgust. For disagreeable things are not intended to be re-
presented by the dream ; painful thoughts that have occurred
during the day can force their way into the dream only if they
lend a cloak to the wish-fulfilment. The dream activity can
dispose of the affects in the dream thoughts in still another
way, besides admitting them or reducing them to zero. 7
can change them into their opposite. We have already be-
come acquainted with the rule of interpretation that every
element of the dream may be interpreted by its opposite, as
well as by itself. One can never tell at the outset whether to

THE DREAM-WORK 375

set down the one or the other ; only the connection can decide
this point. A suspicion of this state of affairs has evidently
got into popular consciousness ; dream books very often pro-
ceed according to the principle of contraries in their interpre-
tation. Such transformation into opposites is made possible
by the intimate concatenation of associations, which in our
thoughts finds the idea of a thing in that of its opposite. Like
every other displacement this serves the purposes of the censor,
but it is also often the work of the wish-fulfilment, for wish-
fulfilment, consists precisely in this substitution of an un-
welcome thing by its opposite. The emotions of the dream
thoughts may appear in the dream transformed into their
opposites just as well as the ideas, and it is probable that this
inversion of emotions is usually brought about by the dream
censor. The suppression and inversion of affects are useful
in social life, as the current analogy for the dream censor has
shown us—above all, for purposes of dissimulation. If I
converse with a person to whom I must show consideration
while T am saying unpleasant things to him, it is almost more
important that I should conceal the expression of my emotion
from him, than that I modify the wording of my thoughts.
If T speak to him in polite words, but accompany them by
looks or gestures of hatred and disdain, the effect which I
produce upon this person is not very different from what it
would have been if I had recklessly thrown my contempt into
his face. Above all, then, the censor bids me suppress my
emotions, and if I am master of the art of dissimulation, I
can hypocritically show the opposite emotion—smiling where
I should like to be angry, and pretending affection where I
should like to destroy.

We already know of an excellent example of such an in-
version of emotion for the purposes of the dream censor. In
the dream about my uncle’s beard I feel great affection for my
friend R., at the same time that, and because, the dream
thoughts berate him as a simpleton. We have drawn our
first proof for the existence of the censor from this example
of the inversion of emotions. Nor is it necessary here to
assume that the dream activity creates a counter emotion of
this kind out of nothing ; it usually finds it lying ready in the
material of the dream thoughts, and intensifies it solely with

376 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the psychic force of the resisting impulse until a point is
reached where the emotion can be won over for the formation
of the dream. In the dream of my uncle, just mentioned, the
affectionate counter emotion has probably originated from
an infantile source (as the continuation of the dream would
suggest), for the relation between uncle and nephew has
become the source of all my friendships and hatreds, owing to
the peculiar nature of my childish experiences (cf. analysis
on p. 334).

There is a class of dreams deserving the designation “ hypo-
critical,” which puts the theory of wish-fulfilment to a severe
test. My attention was called to them when Mrs. Dr. M.
Hilferding brought up for discussion in the Vienna Psycho-
analytic Society the dream reported by Rosegger, which is
reprinted below.

In Waldheimat, vol. xi., Rosegger writes as follows in his
story, Fremd gemacht, p. 303 :

+ I have usually enjoyed healthful sleep, but I have lost the
rest of many a night. With my modest existence as a student
and literary man, I have for long years dragged along with me
the shadow of a veritable tailor’s life, like a ghost from which
I could not become separated. I cannot say that I have
occupied myself so often and so vividly with thoughts of my
past during the day. An assailer of heaven and earth arising
from the skin of the Philistine has other things to think about.
Nor did I, as a dashing young fellow, think about my noc-
turnal dreams ; only later, when I got into the habit of think-
ing about everything or when the Philistine within me again
asserted itself, it struck me that whenever I dreamed I was
always the journeyman tailor, and was always working in
my master’s shop for long hours without any remuneration.
As I sat there and sewed and pressed I was quite aware that I
no longer belonged there, and that as a burgess of a town I
had other things to attend to ; but I was for ever having vaca-
tions, and going out into the country, and it was then that I
sat near my boss and assisted him. I often felt badly, and
regretted the loss of time which I might spend for better and
more useful purposes. If something did not come up to the
measure and cut exactly, I had to submit to a reproach from

THE DREAM-WORK 877

the boss. Often, as I sat with my back bent in the dingy
shop, I decided to give notice that I was going to quit.
On one occasion I actually did so, but the boss took no
notice of it, and the next time I was again sitting near him
and sewing.

“ How happy I was when I woke up after such weary hours !
And I then resolved that, if this dream came intruding again,
I would throw it off with energy and would cry aloud : “It
is only a delusion, I am in bed, and I want to sleep.” . . .
And the next night I would be sitting in the tailor shop
again.

“Thus years passed with dismal regularity. While the
boss and I were working at Alpelhofer’s, at the house of the
peasant where I began my apprenticeship, it happened that
he was particularly dissatisfied with my work. ‘I should
like to know where in the world your thoughts are ? cried he,
and looked at me gloomily, I thought the most sensible thing
for me to do would be to get up and explain to the boss that I
was with him only as a favour, and then leave. But I did not
do this. I submitted, however, when the boss engaged an
apprentice, and ordered me to make room for him on the bench.
I moved into the corner, and kept on sewing. On the same
day another tailor was engaged ; he was bigoted, as he was a
Czech who had worked for us nineteen years before, and then
had fallen into the lake on his way home from the public-
house. When he tried to sit down there was no room for him.
I looked at the boss inquiringly, and he said to me, ` You
have no talent for the tailoring business ; you may go; you
are free.’ My fright on that occasion was so overpowering
that I awoke.

“The morning gray glimmered through the clear window
of my beloved home. Objects of art surrounded me; in
the tasteful bookcase stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic
Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe—all
shining and immortal. From the adjoining room resounded
the clear little voices of the children, who were waking and
prattling with their mother. I felt as if I had found again
that idyllically sweet, that peaceful, poetical, and spiritual life
which I have so often and so deeply conceived as the contem-
plative fortune of mankind. And still I was vexed that I

378 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

had not given my boss notice first, instead of allowing him to
discharge me.

“ And how remarkable it is; after the night when the
boss ‘discharged me” I enjoyed rest; I no longer dreamed
of my tailoring—of this experience which lay in the remote
past, which in its simplicity was really happy, and which,
nevertheless, threw a long shadow over the later years of
my life.”

I. In this dream, the series of the poet who, in his younger
years, has been a journeyman tailor, it is hard to recognise
the domination of the wish-fulfilment. All the delightful
things occurred during the waking state, while the dream
seemed to drag along the ghostlike shadow of an unhappy
existence which had been long forgotten. My own dreams of
a similar nature have put me in a position to give some ex-
planation for such dreams. As a young doctor I for a long
time worked in the chemical institute without being able to
accomplish anything in that exacting science, and I therefore
never think in my waking state about this unfruitful episode
in my life, of which I am really ashamed. On the other hand,
it has become a recurring dream with me that I am working in
the laboratory, making analyses, and having experiences there,
&c. ; like the examination dreams, these dreams are disagree-
able, and they are never very distinet. During the analysis
of one of these dreams my attention was directed to the word
“analysis,” which gave me the key to an understanding of
these dreams. For I had since become an “analyst.” I
make analyses which are highly praised—to be sure, psycho-
analyses. I then understood that when T grew proud of these
analyses of the waking state, and wanted to boast how much
I had accomplished thereby, the dream would hold up to me
at night those other unsuccessful analyses of which I had
no reason to be proud ; they are the punitive dreams of the
upstart, like those of the tailor who became a celebrated poet.
But how is it possible for the dream to place itself at the service
of self-criticism in its conflict with parvenu-pride, and to take
as its content a rational warning instead of the fulfilment of
a prohibitive wish? I have already mentioned that the
answer to this question entails many difficulties. We may

THE DREAM-WORK 379

conclude that the foundation of the dream was at first formed
by a phantasy of overweening ambition, but that only its
suppression and its abashment reached the dream content
in its stead. One should remember that there are masochistic
tendencies in the psychic life to which such an inversion
might be attributed. But a more thorough investigation of
the individual dreams allows the recognition of still another
element. In an indistinct subordinate portion of one of my
laboratory dreams, I was just at the age which placed me in the
most gloomy and most unsuccessful year of my professional
career ; Istill had no position and no means of support, when
I suddenly found that I had the choice of many women whom
I could marry ! I was, therefore, young again, and, what is
more, she was young again—the woman who has shared with
me all these hard years. In this way one of the wishes which
constantly frets the heart of the ageing man was revealed as
the unconscious dream inciter. The struggle raging in the
other psychic strata between vanity and self-criticism has
certainly determined the dream content, but the more deeply-
rooted wish of youth has alone made it possible as a dream.
One may say to himself even in the waking state : To be sure
it is very nice now, and times were once very hard ; but it
was nice, too, even then, you were still so young.

In considering dreams reported by a poet one may often
assume that he has excluded from the report those details
which he perceived as disturbing and which he considered
unessential. His dreams, then, give us a riddle which could
be readily solved if we had an exact reproduction of the dream
content.

O. Rank has called my attention to the fact that in Grimm’s
fairy tale of the valiant little tailor, or “ Seven at one Stroke,”
a very similar dream of an upstart is related. The tailor,
who became the hero and married the king's daughter,
dreamed one night while with the princess, his wife, about his
trade ; the latter, becoming suspicious, ordered armed guards
for the following night, who should listen to what was spoken
in the dream, and who should do away with the dreamer.
But the little tailor was warned, and knew enough to correct
his dream.

The complex of processes—of suspension, subtraction

380 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

and inversion—through which the affects of the dream
thoughts finally become those of the dream, may well be
observed in the suitable synthesis of completely analysed
dreams. I shall here treat a few cases of emotional excitement
in the dream which furnish examples of some of the cases
discussed.

In the dream about the odd task which the elder Bruecke
gives me to perform—of preparing my own pelvis—the
appropriate horror is absent in the dream itself. Now this is a
wish-fulfilment in various senses. Preparation signifies self-
analysis, which I accomplish, as it were, by publishing my
book on dreams, and which has been so disagreeable to me that
I have already postponed printing the finished manuscript
for more than a year. The wish is now actuated that I may
disregard this feeling of opposition, and for that reason I feel
no horror (Grauen, which also means to grow grey) in the dream.
I should also like to escape the horror—in the other (German)
sense—of growing grey ; for I am already growing grey fast,
and the grey in my hair warns me withal to hold back no
longer. For we know that at the end of the dream the thought
secures expression in that I should have to leave my children
to get to the goal of their difficult journey.

In the two dreams that shift the expression of satisfaction
to the moments immediately after awakening, this satisfac-
tion is in the one case motivated by the expectation that I
am now going to learn what is meant by “I have already
dreamed of it,” and refers in reality to the birth of my first
child, and in the other case it is motivated by the conviction
that “ that which has been announced by a sign “ is now going
to happen, and the latter satisfaction is the same which I
felt at the arrival of my second son. Here the same emotions
that dominated in the dream thoughts have remained in the
dream, but the process is probably not so simple as this in
every dream. If the two analyses are examined a little, it
will be seen that this satisfaction which does not succumb to
the censor receives an addition from a source which must fear
the censor; and the emotion drawn from this source would
certainly arouse opposition if it did not cloak itself in a similar
emotion of satisfaction that is willingly admitted, if it did
not, as it were, sneak in behind the other. Unfortunately, I am

THE DREAM-WORK 381

unable to show this in the case of the actual dream specimen,
but an example from another province will make my meaning
intelligible. I construct the following case : Let there be a
person near me whom I hate so that a strong feeling arises
in me that I should be glad if something were to happen to
him. But the moral part of my nature does not yield to this
sentiment ; I do not dare to express this ill-wish, and when
something happens to him which he does not deserve, I suppress
my satisfaction at it, and force myself to expressions and
thoughts of regret. Everyone will have found himself in
such a position. But now let it happen that the hated person
draws upon himself a well-deserved misfortune by some fault ;
now I may give free rein to my satisfaction that he has been
visited by a just punishment, and I express opinion in the
matter which coincides with that of many other people who
are impartial. But I can see that my satisfaction turns out
to be more intense than that of the others, for it has received
an addition from another source—from my hatred, which has
hitherto been prevented by the inner censor from releasing
an emotion, but which is no longer prevented from doing so
under the altered circumstances. This case is generally typi-
cal of society, where persons who have aroused antipathy or are
adherents of an unpopular minority incur guilt. Their punish-
ment does not correspond to their transgression but to their
transgression plus the ill-will directed against them that has
hitherto been ineffective. Those who execute the punish-
ment doubtless commit an injustice, but they are prevented
from becoming aware of it by the satisfaction arising from
the release within themselves of a suppression of long standing.
In such cases the emotion is justified according to its quality,
but not according to its quantity ; and the self-criticism that
has been appeased as to the one point is only too ready to
neglect examination of the second point. Once you have
opened the doors, more people get through than you originally
intended to admit.

The striking feature of the neurotic character, that in-
citements capable of producing emotion bring about a result
that is qualitatively justified but is quantitatively excessive,
is to be explained in this manner, in so far as it admits of a
psychological explanation at all. The excess is due to sources

382 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of emotion which have remained unconscious and have hitherto
been suppressed, which can establish in the associations a
connection with the actual incitement, and which can thus
find release for its emotions through the vent which the un-
objectionable and admitted source of emotion opens. Our
attention is thus called to the fact that we may not consider
the relation of mutual restraint as obtaining exclusively
between the suppressed and the suppressing psychic judg-
ment. The cases in which the two judgments bring about a
pathological emotion by co-operation and mutual strength-
ening deserve just as much attention. The reader is requested
to apply these hints regarding the psychic mechanism for the
purpose of understanding the expressions of emotion in the
dream. A satisfaction which makes its appearance in the
dream, and which may readily be found at its proper place
in the dream thoughts, may not always be fully explained
by means of this reference. As a rule it will be necessary to
search for a second source in the dream thoughts, upon which
the pressure of the censor is exerted, and which under the pres-
sure would have resulted not in satisfaction, but in the opposite
emotion—which, however, is enabled by the presence of the
first source to free its satisfaction affect from suppression and
to reinforce the satisfaction springing from the other source.
Hence emotions in the dream appear as though formed
by the confluence of several tributaries, and as though
over-determined in reference to the material of the dream
thoughts ; sources of affect which can furnish the same affect
join each other in the dream activity in order to produce it."

Some insight into these tangled relations is gained from
analysis of the admirable dream in which “ Non vixit ” con-
stitutes the central point (cf. p. 333). The expressions of emo-
tion in this dream, which are of different qualities, are forced
together at two points in the manifest content. Hostile and
painful feelings (in the dream itself we have the phrase, seized
by strange emotions ”) overlap at the point where I destroy
my antagonistic friend with the two words. At the end of
the dream I am greatly pleased, and am quite ready to believe
in a possibility which I recognise as absurd when I am awake,

* As analogy to this, I have since explained the extraordinary effect of
pleasure produced by tendency ” wit.

THE DREAM-WORK 383

namely, that there are revenants who can be put out of the way
by a mere wish.

I have not yet mentioned the occasion for this dream. It
is an essential one, and goes a long way towards explaining it.
I had received the news from my friend in Berlin (whom I
have designated as F.) that he is about to undergo an opera-
tion and that relatives of his living in Vienna would give me
information about his condition. The first few messages after
the operation were not reassuring, and caused me anxiety. I
should have liked best to go to him myself, but at that time I
was affected with a painful disease which made every move-
ment a torture for me. I learn from the dream thoughts that
I feared for the life of my dear friend. I knew that his
only sister, with whom I had not been acquainted, had died
early after the shortest possible illness. (In the dream F. tells
about his sister, and says: “ In three-quarters of an hour she
was dead.") I must have imagined that his own constitution
was not much stronger, and that I should soon be travelling,
in spite of my health, in answer to far worse news—and that
I should arrive too late, for which I should reproach myself for
ever.* This reproach about arriving too late has become the
central point of the dream, but has been represented in a scene
in which the honoured teacher of my student years—Bruecke—
reproaches me for the same thing with a terrible look from his
blue eyes. The cause of this deviation from the scene will
soon be clear; the dream cannot reproduce the scene itself
in the manner in which it occurred to me. To be sure, it leaves
the blue eyes to the other man, but it gives me the part of
the annihilator, an inversion which is obviously the result of
the wish-fulfilment. My concern for the life of my friend, my
self-reproach for not having gone to him, my shame (he had
repeatedly come to me in Vienna), my desire to consider myself
excused on account of my illness—all of this makes up a
tempest of feeling which is distinctly felt in sleep, and which
raged in every part of the dream thoughts.

But there was another thing about the occasion for the

% It is this fancy from the unconscious dream thoughts which peremp-
torily demands non vivit instead of non vizit. “ You have come too late, he
is no longer alive.” Tho fact that the manifest situation also tends
towards “ non vivit ” has been mentioned on page 334.

384 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

dream which had quite the opposite effect. With the un-
favourable news during the first days of the operation, I also
received the injunction to speak to no one about the whole
affair, which hurt my feelings, for it betrayed an unnecessary
distrust of my discretion. I knew, of course, that this request
did not proceed from my friend, but that it was due to clumsi-
ness or excessive timidity on the part of the messenger, but
the concealed reproach made me feel very badly because it
was not altogether unjustified. Only reproaches which " have
something in them ” have power to irritate, as everyone knows.
For long before, in the case of two persons who were friendly
to each other and who were willing to honour me with their
friendship, I had quite needlessly tattled what the one had
said about the other; to be sure this incident had nothing
to do with the affairs of my friend F. Nor have I forgotten
the reproaches which I had to listen to at that time. One
of the two friends between whom I was the trouble-maker
was Professor Fleischl ; the other one I may name Joseph, a
name which was also borne by my friend and antagonist P.,
who appears in the dream.

Two dream elements, first inconspicuously, and secondly
the question of Fl. as to how much of his affairs I have mentioned
to P., give evidence of the reproach that I am incapable of
keeping anything to myself. But it is the admixture of these
recollections which transposes the reproach for arriving too
late from the present to the time when I was living in Bruecke's
laboratory ; and by replacing the second person in the annihi-
lation scene of the dream by a Joseph I succeed in representing
not only the first reproach that I arrive too late, but also a
second reproach, which is more rigorously suppressed, that I
keep no secrets. The condensing and replacing activity of
this dream, as well as the motives for it, are now obvious.

My anger at the injunction not to give anything away,
originally quite insignificant, receives confirmation from
sources that flow far below the surface, and so become a
swollen stream of hostile feelings towards persons who are in
reality dear to me. The source which furnishes the confirma-
tion is to be found in childhood. I have already said that
my friendships as well as my enmities with persons of my own
age go back to my childish relations with my nephew, who

THE DREAM-WORK 385

was a year older than I. In these he had the upper hand,
and I early learned how to defend myself ; we lived together
inseparably, loved each other, and at the same time, as state-
ments of older persons testify, scuffled with and accused each
other. In a certain sense all my friends are incarnations of
this first figure, “ which early appeared to my blurred sight “ ;
they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned in the
years of adolescence, and then we acted Cæsar and Brutus.
An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been
indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have
always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently
my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend
and enemy coincided in the same person, not simultaneously,
of course, nor in repeated alterations, as had been the case in
my first childhood years.

I do not here wish to trace the manner in which a recent
occasion for emotion may reach back to one in childhood—
through connections like these I have just described—in order
to find a substitute for itself, in this earlier occasion for the
sake of increased emotional effect. Such an investigation
would belong to the psychology of the unconscious, and would
find its place in a psychological explanation of neuroses. Let
us assume for the purposes of dream interpretation that a
childhood recollection makes its appearance or is formed by
the fancy, say to the following effect : Two children get into
a fight on account of some object—just what we shall leave
undecided, although memory or an allusion of memory has a
very definite one in mind—and each one claims that he got
to it first, and that he, therefore, has first right to it. They
come to blows, for might makes right ; and, according to the
intimation of the dream, I must have known that I was in the
wrong (noticing the error myself), but this time I remain the
stronger and take possession of the battlefield ; the defeated
combatant hurries to my father, his grandfather, and accuses
me, and I defend myself with the words which I know from
my father: * I hit him because he hit me.” Thus this re-
collection, or more probably fancy, which forces itself upon my
attention in the course of the analysis—from my present
knowledge I myself do not know how—becomes an inter-
mediary of the dream thoughts that collects the emotional

23

386 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

excitements obtaining in the dream thoughts, as the bowl of a
fountain collects the streams of water flowing into it. From
this point the dream thoughts flow along the following paths :
“It serves you quite right if you had to vacate your place
for me; why did you try to force me out of my place ? I
don’t need you ; I'll soon find someone else to play with,” &c.
Then the ways are opened through which these thoughts again
follow into the representation of the dream. For such an
“ ôte-toi que је m'y mette “ I once had to reproach my de-
ceased friend Joseph. He had been next to me in the line of
promotion in Bruecke's laboratory, but advancement there
was very slow. Neither of the two assistants budged from
his place, and youth became impatient. My friend, who
knew that his time of life was limited, and who was bound by
no tie to his superior, was a man seriously ill; the wish for his
removal permitted an objectionable interpretation—he might
be moved by something besides promotion. Several years
before, the same wish for freedom had naturally been more
intense in my own case; wherever in the world there are
gradations of rank and advancement, the doors are opened
for wishes needing suppression. Shakespeare's Prince Hal
cannot get rid of the temptation to see how the crown fits
even at the bed of his sick father. But, as may easily be
understood, the dream punishes this ruthless wish not upon
me but upon him.%

“ As he was ambitious, I slew him.” As he could not wait
for the other man to make way for him, he himself has been
put out of the way, I harbour these thoughts immediately
after attending the unveiling of the statue to the other man
at the university. A part of the satisfaction which I feel in
the dream may therefore be interpreted : Just punishment ;
it served you right.

At the funeral of this friend a young man made the follow-
ing remark, which seemed out of place : “ The preacher talked
as though the world couldn't exist without this one human
being.” The displeasure of the sincere man, whose sorrow

* It is striking that the name Joseph plays such a large part in my
dreams (see the dream about my uncle). Ican hide my ego in the dream
behind persons of this name with particular ease, for Joseph was the name
of the dream interpreter in the Bible.

THE DREAM-WORK 387

has been marred by the exaggeration, begins to arise in him.
But with this speech are connected the dream thoughts :
“No one is really irreplaceable; how many men have I
already escorted to the grave, but I am still living, I have
survived them all, T claim the field.” Such a thought at the
moment when I fear that when I travel to see him I shall find
my friend no longer among the living, permits only of the
further development that I am glad I am surviving someone,
that it is not I who have died, but he—that I occupy the field
as I once did in the fancied scene in childhood. This satis-
faction, coming from sources in childhood, at the fact that I
claim the field, covers the larger part of the emotion which
appears in the dream. I am glad that I am the survivor—
I express this sentiment with the naive egotism of the husband
who says to his wife : “ If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.”
It is such a matter of course for my expectation that I am not
to be the one.

It cannot be denied that great self-control is necessary to
interpret one’s dreams and to report them. 16 is necessary
for you to reveal yourself as the one scoundrel among all the
noble souls with whom you share the breath of life. Thus,
I consider it quite natural that revenants exist only as long as
they are wanted, and that they can be obviated by a wish.
This is the thing for which my friend Joseph has been punished.
But the revenants are the successive incarnations of the friend
of my childhood ; I am also satisfied at the fact that I have
replaced this person for myself again and again, and a substi-
tute will doubtless soon be found even for the friend whom I
am about to lose. No one is irreplaceable.

But what has the dream censor been doing meanwhile ?
Why does it not raise the most emphatic objection to a train
of thought characterised by such brutal selfishness, and change
the satisfaction that adheres to it into profound repugnance ?
I think it is because other unobjectionable trains of thought
likewise result in satisfaction and cover the emotion coming
from forbidden infantile sources with their own. In another
stratum of thought I said to myself at that festive unveiling :
** 1 have lost so many dear friends, some through death, some
through the dissolution of friendship—is it not beautiful that
I have found substitutes for them, that I have gained one who

388 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

means more to me than the others could, whom I shall from
now on always retain, at the age when it is not easy to form
new friendships ? ” The satisfaction that I have found this
substitute for lost friends can be taken over into the dream
without interference, but behind it there sneaks in the inimical
satisfaction from the infantile source. Childish affection un-
doubtedly assists in strengthening the justifiable affection of
to-day ; but childish hatred has also found its way into the
representation.

But besides this there is distinct reference in the dream to
another chain of thoughts, which may manifest itself in the
form of satisfaction. My friend had shortly before had a little
daughter born, after long waiting. I knew how much he had
grieved for the sister whom he lost at an early age, and I wrote
to him that he would transfer to this child the love he had felt
for her. This little girl would at last make him forget his
irreparable loss.

Thus this chain also connects with the intermediary thoughts
of the latent dream content, from which the ways spread out
in opposite directions: No one is irreplaceable. You see,
nothing but revenanis ; all that one has lost comes back. And
now the bonds of association between the contradictory ele-
ments of the dream thoughts are more tightly drawn by the
accidental circumstance that the little daughter of my friend
bears the same name as the girl playmate of my own youth,
who was just my own age and the sister of my oldest friend
and antagonist. I have heard the name “ Pauline ” with
satisfaction, and in order to allude to this coincidence I have
replaced one Joseph in the dream by another Joseph, and have
not overlooked the similarity in sound between the names
Fleischl and F. From this point a train of thought runs to the
naming of my own children. 1 insisted that the names should
not be chosen according to the fashion of the day but should
be determined by regard for the memory of beloved persons.
The children’s names make them “ revenants.” And, finally,
is not the having of children the only access to immortality
for us all ?

I shall add only a few remarks about the emotions of the
dream from another point of view. An emotional inclination
— what we call a mood—may occur in the mind of a sleeping

THE DREAM-WORK 389

person as its dominating element, and may induce a corre-
sponding mood in the dream. This mood may be the result
of the experiences and thoughts of the day, or it may be of
somatic origin ; in either case it will be accompanied by the
chains of thought that correspond to it. The fact that in the
one case this presentation content conditions the emotional
inclination primarily, and that in the other case it is brought
about secondarily by a disposition of feeling of somatic origin
remains without influence upon the formation of the dream.
This formation is always subject to the restriction that it can
represent only a wish-fulfilment, and that it may put its psychic
motive force at the service only of the wish. The mood that
is actually present will receive the same treatment as the sen-
sation which actually comes to the surface during sleep (cf.
P- 198), which is either neglected or reinterpreted so as to
signify a wish-fulfilment. Disagrecable moods during sleep
become a motive force of the dream by actuating energetic
wishes, which the dream must fulfil. The material to which
they are attached is worked over until it finally becomes suit-
able for the expression of the fulfilled wish. The more intense
and the more dominating the element of the disagreeable mood
in the dream thought, the more surely will the wish-impulses
that have been most rigorously suppressed take advantage of
the opportunity to secure representation, for they find that
the difficult part of the work necessary in securing representa-
tion has already been accomplished in that the repugnance is
already actually in existence, which they would otherwise
have had to produce by their own effort. With this discus-
sion we again touch upon the problem of anxiety dreams,
which we may regard as bounding the province of the dream
activity.

(A) Secondary Elaboration.

We may at last proceed to an exposition of the fourth of
the factors which take part in the formation of the dream.

If we continue the examination of the dream content, in
the manner already outlined—that is, by testing striking occur-
rences as to their origin in the dream thoughts—we encounter
elements which can be explained only by making an entirely

390 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

new assumption. I have in mind cases where one shows
astonishment, anger, or resistance in a dream, and that, too,
against a party of the dream content itself. Most of these
exercises of the critical faculty in dreams are not directed
against the dream content, but prove to be portions of dream
material which have been taken over and suitably made use
of, as I have shown by fitting examples. Some things of this
sort, however, cannot be disposed of in such a way; their
correlative cannot be found in the dream material. What,
for instance, is meant by the criticism not infrequent in dreams :
“Well, it’s only a dream”? This is a genuine criticism of
the dream such as I might make if I were awake. Not at all
infrequently it is the forerunner to waking; still oftener it
is preceded by a painful feeling, which subsides when the cer-
tainty of the dream state has been established. The thought :
“ But it’s only a dream,” occurring during the dream, has the
same object which is meant to be conveyed on the stage
through the mouth of the beautiful Helen von Offenbach ;
it wants to minimise what has just occurred and secure in-
dulgence for what is to follow. Its purpose is to reassure and,
so to speak, put to sleep a certain instance which at the given
moment has every reason to be active and to forbid the con-
tinuation of the dream—or the scene. It is pleasanter to go
on sleeping and to tolerate the dream, “ because it's only a
dream anyway.” I imagine that the disparaging criticism,
* But it's only a dream,” enters into the dream at the moment
when the censor, which has never been quite asleep, feels that
it has been surprised by the already admitted dream. It is
too late to suppress the dream, and the instance therefore
carries with it that note of fear or of painful feeling which pre-
sents itself in the dream. It is an expression of the esprit
d'escalier on the part of the psychic censor.

In this example we have faultless proof that not every-
thing which the dream contains comes from the dream thoughts,
but that a psychic function which cannot be differentiated
from our waking thoughts may make contributions to the dream
content. The question now is, does this occur only in alto-
gether exceptional cases, or does the psychic instance which
is usually active only as censor take a regular part in the
formation of dreams ?

THE DREAM-WORK 391

One must decide unhesitatingly for the latter view. It
is indisputable that the censoring instance, whose influence
we have so far recognised only in limitations and omissions in
the dream content, is also responsible for interpolations and
amplifications in this content. Often these interpolations are
easily recognised ; they are reported irresolutely, prefaced
by an “as if,” they are not in themselves particularly vivid,
and are regularly inserted at points where they may serve to
connect two portions of the dream content or improve the
sequence between two sections of the dream. They manifest
less ability to stick in the memory than genuine products of
the dream material ; if the dream is subject to forgetting, they
are the first to fall away, and I am strongly inclined to believe
that our frequent complaint that we have dreamed so much,
that we have forgotten most of this and have remembered
only fragments of it, rests on the immediate falling away of
just these cementing thoughts. In a complete analysis these
interpolations are often betrayed by the fact that no material
is to be found for them in the dream thoughts. But after
careful examination I must designate this case as a rare one ;
usually interpolated thoughts can be traced to an element
in the dream thoughts, which, however, can claim a place in
the dream neither on account of its own merit nor on account
of over-determination. The psychic function in dream forma-
tion, which we are now considering, aspires to the original
creations only in the most extreme cases ; whenever possible,
it makes use of anything available it can find in the dream
material.

The thing which distinguishes and reveals this part of the
dream activity is its tendency. This function proceeds in a
manner similar to that which the poet spitefully attributes
to the philosopher ; with its scraps and rags, it stops up the
breaches in the structure of the dream. The result of its
effort is that the dream loses the appearance of absurdity
and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible
experience. But the effort is not always crowned with com-
plete success. Thus dreams occur which may seem fault-
lessly logical and correct upon superficial examination ; they
start from a possible situation, continue it by means of consis-
tent changes, and end up—although this is very rare—with

392 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

a not unnatural conclusion. These dreams have been subjected
to the most thorough elaboration at the hands of a psychic
function similar to our waking thought; they seem to have
a meaning, but this meaning is very far removed from the
real signification of the dream. If they are analysed, one is
convinced that the secondary elaboration has distorted the
material very freely, and has preserved its proper relations as
little as possible. These are the dreams which have, so to
speak, already been interpreted before we subject them to
waking interpretation. In other dreams this purposeful
elaboration has been successful only to a certain point; up
to this point consistency seems to be dominant, then the dream
becomes nonsensical or confused, and perhaps finally it lifts
itself for a second time in its course to an appearance of
rationality. In still other dreams the elaboration has failed
completely ; we find ourselves helpless in the presence of a
senseless mass of fragmentary contents.

I do not wish to deny to this fourth dream-moulding power,
which will soon seem to us a familiar one—it is in reality the
only one among the four dream-moulders with which we are
familiar, —I do not wish to deny this fourth factor the capability
of creatively furnishing the dream with new contributions.
But surely its influence, like that of the others, manifests
itself preponderatingly in the preferring and choosing of
already created psychic material in the dream thoughts.
Now there is a case where it is spared the work, for the most
part, of building, as it were, a fagade to the dream, by the fact
that such a structure, waiting to be used, is already to be found
complete in the material of the dream thoughts. The element
of the dream thoughts which I have in mind, I am in the habit
of designating as a phantasy “ ; perhaps I shall avoid
misunderstanding if I immediately adduce the day dream of
waking life as an analogy.* The part played by this element
in our psychic life has not yet been fully recognised and in-
vestigated by the psychiatrists ; in this study M. Benedikt has,
it seems to me, made a highly promising beginning. The sig-
nificance of the day dream has not yet escaped the unerring
insight of poets; the description of the day dreams of one
of his subordinate characters which A. Daudet gives us in

* Réve, petit roman—day-dream, story.

THE DREAM-WORK 393

Nabab is universally known. A study of the psychoneuroses
discloses the astonishing fact that these phantasies or day
dreams are the immediate predecessors of hysterical symptoms
—at least of a great many of them ; hysterical symptoms
directly depend not upon the memories themselves, but upon
phantasies built on the basis of memories. The frequent
occurrence of conscious day phantasies brings these formations
within the scope of our knowledge; but just as there are
such conscious phantasies, so there are a great many un-
conscious ones, which must remain unconscious on account
of their content and on account of their origin from repressed
material. A more thorough examination into the character
of these day phantasies shows with what good reason the
same name has been given to these formations as to the pro-
ducts of our nocturnal thought,—dreams. They possess an
essential part of their properties in common with nocturnal
dreams ; an examination of them would really have afforded
the shortest and best approach to an understanding of night
dreams.

Like dreams, they are fulfilments of wishes; like dreams
a good part of them are based upon the impressions of childish
experiences ; like dreams their creations enjoy a certain amount
of indulgence from the censor. If we trace their formation,
we see how the wish motive, which is active in their production,
has taken the material of which they are built, mixed it to-
gether, rearranged it, and composed it into a new unit. They
bear the same relation to the childish memories, to which
they go back, as some of the quaint palaces of Rome bear to
the ancient ruins, whose freestones and pillars have furnished
the material for the structure built in modern form.

In the “secondary elaboration” of the dream content
which we have ascribed to our fourth dream-making factor,
we again find the same activity which in the creation of day
dreams is allowed to manifest itself unhampered by other
influences. We may say without further preliminary that
this fourth factor of ours seeks to form something like a day
dream from the material at hand. Where, however, such a
day dream has already been formed in connection with the
dream thought, this factor of the dream-work will preferably
get control of it, and strive to introduce it into the dream

394 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

content. There are dreams which consist merely of the repe-
tition of such a day fancy, a fancy which has perhaps remained
unconscious—as, for instance, the dream of the boy that he
is riding with the heroes of the Trojan war in a war chariot.
In my dream “ Autodidasker,” at least the second part of the
dream is the faithful repetition of a day phantasy—harmless
in itself —about my dealings with Professor N. The fact that
the phantasy thus provided more often forms only one part of
the dream, or that only one part of the phantasy that makes its
way to the dream content, has its origin in the complexity of
the conditions which the dream must satisty at its genesis. On
the whole, the phantasy is treated like any other component of
the latent material ; still it is often recognisable in the dream
as a whole. In my dreams parts often occur which are empha-
sized by an impression different from that of the rest. They
seem to me to be in a state of flux, to be more coherent and at
the same time more transient than other pieces of the same
dream. I know that these are unconscious phantasies which
get into the dream by virtue of their association, but I have
never succeeded in registering such a phantasy. For the rest
these phantasies, like all other component parts of the dream
thoughts, are jumbled together and condensed, one covered
up by another, and the like ; but there are all degrees, from
the case where they may constitute the dream content or at
least the dream façade unchanged to the opposite case, where
they are represented in the dream content by only one of their
elements or by a remote allusion to such an element. The
extent to which the phantasies are able to withstand the de-
mands of the censor and the tendency to condensation are, of
course, also decisive of their fate among the dream thoughts.
In my choice of examples for dream analysis I have,
wherever possible, avoided those dreams in which unconscious
fancies play a somewhat important part, because the intro-
duction of this psychic element would have necessitated ex-
tensive discussion of the psychology of unconscious thought.
But I cannot entirely omit the “ phantasy “ even in this matter
of examples, because it often gets fully into the dream and
still more often distinctly pervades it. I may mention one
more dream, which seems to be composed of two distinct and
opposed phantasies, overlapping each other at certain places,

THE DREAM-WORK 395

of which the first is superficial, while the second becomes, as
it were, the interpreter of the first.%

The dream—it is the only one for which I have no careful
notes—is about to this effect : The dreamer—an unmarried
young man—is sitting in an inn, which is seen correctly ;
several persons come to get him, among them someone who
wants to arrest him. He says to his table companions, が ま
will pay later, I am coming back.” But they call to him,
laughing scornfully : “ We know all about that ; that’s what
everybody says.” One guest calls after him: “ There goes
another one.” He is then led to a narrow hall, where he finds
a woman with a child in her arms. One of his escorts says :
“That is Mr. Müller.” A commissioner or some other official
is running through a bundle of tickets or papers repeating
Miiller, Miiller, Miiller. At last the commissioner asks him
a question, which he answers with * Yes.” He then takes
a look at the woman, and notices that she has grown a
large beard.

The two component parts are here easily separated. What
is superficial is the phantasy of being arrested ; it seems to be
newly created by the dream-work. But behind it appears the
phantasy of marriage, and this material, on the contrary, has
undergone but slight change at the hands of the dream
activity. The features which are common to both phantasies
come into distinct prominence as in a Galton's composite
photograph. The promise of the bachelor to come back to
his place at the club table, the scepticism of the drinking com-
panions, sophisticated in their many experiences, the calling
after : * There goes (marries) another one,”—all these features
can easily be capable of the other interpretation. Likewise
the affirmative answer given to the official. Running through
the bundle of papers with the repetition of the name, corre-

% T have analysed a good example of a dream of this kind having 8
origin in the stratification of several phantasios, in the Bruchstiick einer
Hysterie Analyse, 1905. Moreover I undervalued the significance of such
phantasies for dream formation, as long as I was working chiefly with my
own dreams, which were based rarely upon day dreams, most froquently
upon discussions and mental conflicts. With other persons it is often
much easier to prove the full analogy between the noctwrnal dream and the day
dream. Tt is often possible in an hysterical patient to replace an attack by
a dream : it is then obvious that the phantasy of day dreams is the first
step for both psychic formations.

396 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

sponds to a subordinate but well-recognised feature of the
marriage ceremonies—the reading aloud of the congratulatory
telegrams which have arrived irregularly, and which, of
course, are all addressed to the same name. In the matter of
the bride’s personal appearance in this dream, the marriage
phantasy has even got the better of the arrest phantasy which
conceals it. The fact that this bride finally displays a beard,
I can explain from an inquiry—I had no chance to make an
analysis. The dreamer had on the previous day crossed the
street with a friend who was just as hostile to marriage as
himself, and had called his friend’s attention to a beautiful
brunette who was coming towards them. The friend had
remarked : " Yes, if only these women wouldn't get beards,
as they grow older, like their fathers.”

Of course there is no lack of elements in this dream,on which
the dream disfigurement has done more thorough work. Thus
the speech : “I will pay later,” may have reference to the
conduct of the father-in-law in the matter of dowry—which
is uncertain. Obviously all kinds of scruples are preventing
the dreamer from surrendering himself with pleasure to the
phantasy of marrying. One of these apprehensions—lest one’s
freedom be lost when one marries—has embodied itself in the
transformation to a scene of arrest.

Let us return to the thesis that the dream activity likes
to make use of a phantasy which is finished and at hand,
instead of creating one afresh from the material of the dream
thoughts ; we shall perhaps solve one of the most interesting
riddles of the dream if we keep this fact in mind. I have on
page 21 related the dream of Maury,® who is struck on the
back of the neck with a stick, and who awakes in the possession
of a long dream—a complete romance from the time of the
French Revolution. Since the dream is represented as co-
herent and as explicable by reference to the disturbing stimulus
alone, about the occurrence of which stimulus the sleeper could
suspect nothing, only one assumption seems to be left, namely,
that the whole richly elaborated dream must have been com-
posed and must have taken place in the short space of time
between the falling of the stick on Maury’s cervical vertebra
and the awakening induced by the blow. We should not feel
justified in ascribing such rapidity to the waking mental

THE DREAM-WORK 397

activity, and so are inclined to credit the dream activity with
a remarkableacceleration of thought as one of its characteristics.

Against this inference, which rapidly becomes popular,
more recent authors (Le Lorrain, Egger,” and others) have
made emphatic objection. They partly doubt the correctness
with which the dream was reported by Maury, and partly try
to show that the rapidity of our waking mental capacity is
quite as great as that which we may concede without reserva-
tion to the dream activity. The discussion raises fundamental
questions, the settlement of which I do not think concerns
me closely. But I must admit that the argument, for instance,
of Egger has not impressed me as convincing against the
guillotine dream of Maury. I would suggest the following
explanation of this dream : Would it be very improbable that
the dream of Maury exhibits a phantasy which had been pre-
served in his memory in a finished state for years, and which
was awakened—I should rather say alluded to—at the moment
when he became aware of the disturbing stimulus ? The diffi-
culty of composing such a long story with all its details in the
exceedingly short space of time which is here at the disposal
of the dreamer then disappears; the story is already com-
posed. If the stick had struck Maury's neck when he was
awake there would perhaps have been time for the thought :
“Why, that's like being guillotined.” But as he is struck
by the stick while asleep, the dream activity quickly finds
occasion in the incoming stimulus to construct a wish-fulfil-
ment, as though it thought (this is to be taken entirely figura-
tively): “Here is a good opportunity to realise the wish
phantasy which I formed at such and such a time while I was
reading.” That this dream romance is just such a one as a
youth would be likely to fashion under the influence of power-
ful impressions does not seem questionable to me. Who
would not have been carried away—especially a Frenchman
and a student of the history of civilisation—by descriptions of
the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women,
the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die
with a light heart, and preserved their quick wit and refine-
ment of life until the fatal summons ? How tempting to
fancy one’s self in the midst of all this as one of the young men
who parts from his lady with a kiss of the hand to climb

398 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

fearlessly upon the scaffold! Or perhaps ambition is the
ruling motive of the phantasy—the ambition to put one’s self
in the place of one of those powerful individuals who merely,
by the force of their thinking and their fiery eloquence, rule
the city in which the heart of mankind is beating so convul-
sively, who are impelled by conviction to send thousands of
human beings to their death, and who pave the way for the
transformation of Europe; who, meanwhile, are not sure of
their own heads, and may one day lay them under the knife
of the guillotine, perhaps in the rôle of one of the Girondists
or of the hero Danton ? The feature, “accompanied by an
innumerable multitude,” which is preserved in the memory,
seems to show that Maury’s phantasy is an ambitious one of
this sort.

But this phantasy, which has for a long time been ready,
need not be experienced again in sleep ; it suffices if it is, so
to speak, “ touched off.” What I mean is this : If a few notes
are struck and someone says, as in Don Juan : “ That is from
Figaro's Wedding by Mozart,” memories suddenly surge up
within me, none of which I can in the next moment recall
to consciousness. The characteristic phrase serves as an en-
trance station from which a complete whole is simultaneously
put in motion. It need not be different in the case of un-
conscious thought. The psychic station which opens the way
to the whole guillotine phantasy is set in motion by the waking
stimulus. This phantasy, however, is not passed in review
during sleep, but only afterwards in waking memory. Upon
awakening one remembers the details of the phantasy, which in
the dream was regarded as a whole. There is, withal, no means
of making sure that one really has remembered anything which
has been dreamed. The same explanation, namely, that one
is dealing with finished phantasies which have been set in
motion as wholes by the waking stimulus, may be applied to
still other dreams which proceed from a waking stimulus—
for instance to the battle dream of Napoleon at the explosion
of the bomb. 1 do not mean to assert that all waking dreams
admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated
discharge of ideas in dreams is to be altogether solved in this
manner.

We must not neglect the relation of this secondary elabora-

THE DREAM-WORK 399

tion of the dream content to the other factors in the dream
activity. Might the procedure be as follows: the dream-
creating factors, the impulse to condense, the necessity of
evading the censor, and the regard for dramatic fitness in the
psychic resources of the dream—these first of all create a pro-
visional dream content, and this is then subsequently modified
until it satisfies the exactions of a second instance ? This is
hardly probable. It is necessary rather to assume that the
demands of this instance are from the very beginning lodged
in one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy, and
that this condition, just like those of condensation, of censor-
ship, and of dramatic fitness, simultaneously affect the whole
mass of material in the dream thoughts in an inductive and
selective manner. But of the four conditions necessary for
the dream formation, the one last recognised is the one whose
exactions appear to be least binding upon the dream.
That this psychic function, which undertakes the so-called
secondary elaboration of the dream content is identical
with the work of our waking thought may be inferred with
great probability from the following consideration :—Our
waking (foreconscious) thought behaves towards a given object
of perception just exactly as the function in question behaves
towards the dream content. It is natural for our waking
thought to bring about order in the material of perception,
to construct relationships, and to make it subject to the re-
quirements of an intelligible coherence. Indeed, we go too
far in doing this ; the tricks of prestidigitators deceive us by
taking advantage of this intellectual habit. In our effort to
put together the sensory impressions which are offered to us
in a comprehensible manner, we often commit the most bizarre
errors and even distort the truth of the material we have
before us. Proofs for this are too generally familiar to need
more extended consideration here. We fail to see errors in a
printed page because our imagination pictures the proper words.
The editor of a widely-read French paper is said to have risked
the wager that he could print the words “from in front” or
“ from behind “ in every sentence of a long article without any
of his readers noticing it. He won the wager. A curious ex-
ample of incorrect associations years ago caught my attention
in a newspaper. After the session of the French chamber,

400 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

at which Dupuy quelled a panic caused by the explosion of a
bomb thrown into the hall by an anarchist by saying calmly,
“ La séance continue,” the visitors in the gallery were asked
to testify as to their impression of the attempted assassination.
Among them were two provincials. One of these told that
immediately after the conclusion of a speech he had heard a
detonation, but had thought that it was the custom in parlia-
ment to fire a shot whenever a speaker had finished. The
other, who had apparently already heard several speakers,

had got the same idea, with the variation, however, that he

supposed this shooting to be a sign of appreciation following

an especially successful speech.

Thus the psychic instance which approaches the dream
content with the demand that it must be intelligible, which
subjects it to preliminary interpretation, and in doing so
brings about a complete misunderstanding of it, is no other
than our normal thought. In our interpretation the rule will
be in every case to disregard the apparent coherence of the
dream as being of suspicious origin, and, whether the elements
are clear or confused, to follow the same regressive path to the
dream material.

We now learn upon what the scale of quality in dreams
from confusion to clearness—mentioned above, page 305—
essentially depends. Those parts of the dream with which
the secondary elaboration has been able to accomplish some-
thing seem to us clear; those where the power of this activity
has failed seem confused. Since the confused parts of the
dream are often also those which are less vividly imprinted,
we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is also re-
sponsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the
individual dream structures.

If I were to seek an object of comparison for the definitive
formation of the dream as it manifests itself under the in-
fluence of normal thinking, none better offers itself than those
mysterious inscriptions with which Die Fliegende Blaetter has
so long amused its readers. The reader is supposed to find a
Latin inscription concealed in a given sentence which, for the
sake of contrast, is in dialect and as scurrilous as possible in
significance. For this purpose the letters are taken from their
groupings in syllables and are newly arranged. Now and then

THE DREAM-WORK 401

a genuine Latin word results, at other places we think that we
have abbreviations of such words before us, and at still other
places in the inscription we allow ourselves to be carried along
over the senselessness of the disjointed letters by the semblance
of disintegrated portions or by breaks in the inscription. If
we do not wish to respond to the jest we must give up
looking for an inscription, must take the letters as we see them,
and must compose them into words of our mother tongue,
unmindful of the arrangement which is offered.

I shall now undertake a résumé of this extended discussion
of the dream activity. We were confronted by the question
whether the mind exerts all its capabilities to the fullest
development in dream formation, or only a fragment of its
capabilities, and these restricted in their activity. Our
investigation leads us to reject such a formulation of the
question entirely as inadequate to our circumstances. But if we
are to remain on the same ground when we answer as that on
which the question is urged upon us, we must acquiesce in
two conceptions which are apparently opposed and mutually
exclusive. The psychic activity in dream formation resolves
itself into two functions—the provision of the dream thoughts
and the transformation of these into the dream content. The
dream thoughts are entirely correct, and are formed with all
the psychic expenditure of which we are capable ; they belong
to our thoughts which have not become conscious, from which
our thoughts which have become conscious also result by
means of a certain transposition. Much as there may be
about them which is worth knowing and mysterious, these
problems have no particular relation to the dream, and have
no claim to be treated in connection with dream problems.
On the other hand, there is that second portion of the activity
which changes the unconscious thoughts into the dream
content, an activity peculiar to dream life and characteristic
of it. Now, this peculiar dream-work is much further removed
from the model of waking thought than even the most decided
depreciators of psychic activity in dream formation have
thought. It is not, one might say, more negligent, more
incorrect, more easily forgotten, more incomplete than
waking thought; it is something qualitatively altogether
different from waking thought, and therefore not in any way

90

402 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

comparable to it. It does not in general think, calculate, or
judge at all, but limits itself to transforming. It can be ex-
haustively described if the conditions which must be satisfied
at its creation are kept in mind. This product, the dream,
must at any cost be withdrawn from the censor, and for this
purpose the dream activity makes use of the displacement of
psychic intensities up to the transvaluation of all psychic
values ; thoughts must exclusively or predominatingly be
reproduced in the material of visual and acoustic traces of
memory, and this requirement secures for the dream-work
the regard for presentability, which meets the requirement by
furnishing new displacements. Greater intensities are (prob-
ably) to be provided than are each night at the disposal of
the dream thoughts, and this purpose is served by the prolific
condensation which is undertaken with the component parts
of the dream thoughts. Little attention is paid to the logical
relations of the thought material; they ultimately find a
veiled representation in the formal peculiarities of the dream.
The affects of the dream thoughts undergo lesser changes
than their presentation content. As a rule they are sup-
pressed ; where they are preserved they are freed from the
presentations and put together according to their similarity.
Only one part of the dream-work—the revision varying in
amount, made by the partially roused conscious thought—
at all agrees with the conception which the authors have tried
to extend to the entire activity of dream formation.