INTRODUCTION

“The interpretation of dreams,” says Pro
fessor Freud in one place, “is the royal
road to a knowledge of the part the uncon
scious plays in the mental life.”

Even standing alone this statement is
sufficiently striking; it is at once a theory
and a challenge. But it does not stand
alone. It comes at the end of many years
of research among every class of mental
diseases. It comes, therefore, with the
authentication of experience. It is not to
be lightly set aside; it claims our study; and
the study of it will not go unrewarded.
The short essay here translated by Dr. Eder
is but an introduction to the vast field
opened up by Professor Sigm. Freud and
his colleagues. Already the journals of
clinical psychology, normal or morbid, are
full of the discussions of Professor Freud’s

v

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ON DREAMS

methods and results. There is a “Freud
School.” That alone is a proof that the
method is novel if not new. There are, of
course, violent opponents and critical stu-
dents. The opponents may provoke, but
it is to the critical students that Professor
Freud will prefer to speak. “The con-
demnation,” said Hegel, “that a great man
lays upon the world is to force it to explain
him.” Of a new method, either of research
or of treatment—and the Freud method is
both—the same may be said. It is certain
that, whatever our prejudice against details
may be, the theory of “psycho-analysis”
and the treatment based upon it deserves,
if only as a mental exercise, our critical
consideration. But Professor Freud is not
alone in the world of morbid psychology.
Let me digress for a moment.

Over twenty years ago it was my special
business to study and criticise several text-
books on insanity. To the study of these
textbooks I came after many years of dis-
cipline in normal psychology and the related

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ON DREAMS

sciences. When I came to insanity proper,
I found that practically not a single text-
book made any systematic effort to show
how the morbid symptoms we classified as
“mental diseases” had their roots in the
mental processes of the normal mind. In
his small book, “Sanity and Insanity,”
Dr. Charles Mercier did make an effort to
lay out, as it were, the institutes of insanity,
the normal groundwork out of which the
insanities grew, the groups of ideas that
to-
day serve to direct our conduct and
to-
morrow lose their adjustment to any but
a specially adapted environment. In his
later works, particularly in “Psychology,
Normal and Morbid,” Dr. Mercier has fol-
lowed up the central ideas of the early study.
All the more recent textbooks in English
contain efforts in the same direction; but
with a few striking exceptions they are
studies rather of physical symptoms associ-
ated with mental processes than of morbid
psychology proper. It was not until there
came from across the Channel Dr. Pierre

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ON DREAMS

Janet’s carefully elaborated studies on
Hysteria that I realised what a wealth of
psychological material had remained hidden
in our asylums, in our nervous homes, even
in our ordinary hospitals, and in the multi-
tudes of strange cases that occur in private
practice. Janet, a pupil of the Charcot
School—Charcot, who made la Salpêtrière
famous—pushed the minuté analysis of
morbid mental states into regions practi-
cally hitherto untouched. He was not alone.
His colleague, Professor Raymond, and
others in France and Germany, all work
with the same main ideas. Janet’s books
read like romances. His studies on Psycho-
logical Automatism, the Mental State of
Hystericals, Neuroses and Fixed Ideas, and
many others on the part played by the
unconscious, were such rich mines of fact
and suggestion that Professor William
James, in his “Principles of Psychology,”
said of them: “All these facts taken to-
gether, form unquestionably the beginning
of an inquiry which is destined to throw a

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ON DREAMS

new light into the very abysses of our
nature.” Curiously, not in this country—
the country of great psychologists, Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid,
Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith, James Mill,
John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among the
dead, and whole schools of distinguished
psychologists among the living—not in this
country, but in America, was the value of
the new material seriously considered. Here
and there, within recent years, in this
country, Janet’s elaborate studies have not
been fruitless; but I could not readily name
any clinician in this country that has pro-
duced similar studies. It is to the conti-
nents of Europe and America, which in this
field are in intimate touch, that we must
go if we are to see the rich outgrowths of
morbid psychology. I do not say that the
work done by our English students of
insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as
important as any done in the world, but it
is none the less true that, until a few years
ago, the methods of Janet, Raymond,

x

Bernheim, Beaunis, not to speak of Moll,
Forel, and Oppenheim, were practically un-
studied here. In America it has been
entirely different. Even the names of the
men are now familiar in our English maga-
zines—Muensterberg, Morton Prince, Boris
Sidis, Ernest Jones, J. Mark Baldwin, not
to mention William James and Stanley
Hall. It looks as if every new idea un-
earthed in the Old World is put to the test
by someone in the new. Britain remains
curiously cold.

It would be interesting to ask the reason.
Is it our metaphysical training? Is it the
failure of the philosophical schools to real-
ize the value of all this new raw material
of study? Is it, perhaps, the fear that “the
unity of consciousness” may be endangered
by the study of Double Personality, Mul-
tiple Personality, Dissociation of Conscious-
ness, Dormant Complexes, Hysterias, Pho-
bias, Obsessions, Psychoneuroses, Fixed
Ideas, Hysterical Amnesias, Hypermnesias,
and the masses of other notions correlated,

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roughly, under the term “unconscious” ?
The suggestion of fear is not mere conjec-
ture. Many years ago a distinguished
student of philosophy, a pupil and friend
of Sir William Hamilton, indicated to me,
when I spoke to him of some recent work
on Double Personality, that he had diffi-
culty in placing the new work, feeling that,
in admitting the possibility of multiple
personality, he was sacrificing the primary
concept of philosophy, the unity of con-
sciousness. It did not perhaps occur to
him that, when two so-called “persons”
speak together, there are, in popular lan-
guage, “two personalities” — each, no
doubt, in a separate body, but each having
his own “unity of consciousness.”

If this be a fact, is there any greater diffi-
culty in explaining the other fact that two
persons may be, as James put it, under
the same hat ? The metaphysical diffi-
culty, if there be a difficulty, is neither
more nor less in the one case than in the
other. But it is needless to ask why a whole

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field of study has been, relatively, neglected
in this country. For now we have begun
to make up leeway.

This translation by Dr. Eder is an intro-
duction to the latest phase of the study of
the unconscious. It brings us back to the
point I began with, the relation of the
normal to the morbid. Dreams are a part
of everyone’s normal experience, yet they
are shown here to be of the same tissue,
of the same mental nature, as other phe-
nomena that are undoubtedly morbid.
Dreams therefore offer in the normal a
budding-point for the study of morbid
growths. And the study of dreams by
Freud came long after his studies of such
neuroses as the phobias, hysterias, and the
rest. To dreams he applied the same method
of investigation and treatment as to the
others, and he found that dreams offered an
unlimited field for the same kind of study.

Perhaps, before going further, I should
attempt to disarm criticism about the
term “unconscious.” We speak of subcon-

xiii

sciousness, co-consciousness, unconscious
mind, unconscious cerebration; or what
other terms should we use? Here it is
better to avoid discussion, for we are con-
cerned less with theory than with practice.
And in Freud’s work, whether we accept
his theory or not, the practice is of primary
importance. He takes the view that no
conscious experience is entirely lost; what
seems to have vanished from the current
consciousness has really passed into a sub-
consciousness, where it lives on in an
organised form as real as if it were still
part of the conscious personality. This
view, with various modifications, is adopted
by many students of morbid psychology.
But there is another view. Muensterberg,
for instance, maintains that it is unneces-
sary to speak of “subconsciousness,” for
every fact can be explained in terms of
physiology. He would accept the term
“co-conscious” or “co-consciousness”; but
in one chapter he ends the discussion by
saying: “But whether we prefer the physio-
 

xiv

logical account or insist on the co-
conscious phenomena, in either case is there any
chance for the subconscious to slip in?
That a content of consciousness is to a high
degree dissociated, or that the idea of the
personality is split off, is certainly a symp-
tom of pathological disturbance, but it has
nothing to do with the constituting of two
different kinds of consciousness, or with
breaking the continuous sameness of con-
sciousness itself. The most exceptional and
most uncanny occurrences of the hospital
teach after all the same which our daily
experience ought to teach us: there is
no subconsciousness ” (“Psychotherapy,”
p. 157).

There are many refinements of distinction
that we could make here, and if any reader
is anxious to consider them, he will find
some of them in a small volume on “Sub-
conscious Phenomena,” by Muensterberg,
Ribot, and others (Rebman, London).

Here it is not of primary importance to
come to any conclusion on the best term

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ON DREAMS

to use or the complement theory of the
facts. The discussion is far from an end;
but the harvest of facts need not wait for
the end of the discussion.

Meanwhile, let it be said that Professor
Freud has been steeped in this whole sub-
ject from his student days. It is, however,
less important to discuss his theory than
to understand his method. The method is
called “psycho-analysis.” The name is
not inviting, and it might apply to any
form of mental analysis; but it is at least
consistently Greek in etymology, and has
taken on a technical meaning in the medical
schools. What is the method ?

Let it be granted that a person has under-
gone a strongly emotional experience—for
example, a sudden shock or fright. If the
person is highly nervous, the shock may
result in some degree of dissociation. This
may take the form of a loss of memory for
certain parts of the experience. Let it be
so. The ultimate result may be an un-
reasonable fear of some entirely harmless

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object or situation. The person is afraid
of a crowd, or afraid of a closed door, or has
an intense fear of some animal or person.
For this fear he can give no reason; he
cannot tell when it began nor why it per-
sists. He may more or less overcome it;
but he may not. All through his future life
he will go about with a helplessly unreason-
able fear of a closed door (claustrophobia)
or of a crowd (agoraphobia). Minor varieties
of such an affection are to be found in every
person’s experience. On investigation, how-
ever, the root of the fear can be discovered:
it is the product of the original emotional
shock. The intellectual details of the emo-
tional experience have completely vanished
from the memory, but the emotion remains,
and it is attached to some accidental object
or circumstance present in the original
experience. Thousands of illustrations
could be given. They are, unfortunately,
only too numerous. In this essay on the
Interpretation of Dreams the reader will
find many simple cases.

xvii

If, now, the person so affected is placed
in a quiet room, if he is requested to con-
centrate his mind on the disturbing object
or idea associated with his fear, if he is
encouraged to observe passively the chance
ideas which float up to him when he thus
concentrates himself, if he utters, under the
direction of his medical attendant, every
such idea as it comes into his mind, there is
a strange result. These ideas, coming ap-
parently by chance from nowhere in par-
ticular, are, when carefully studied, found
to be linked up with some past experience,
dating, perhaps, from months or years
away. If each idea as it emerges is fol-
lowed up, if the other ideas dragged into
consciousness by it are carefully recorded,
it is found that sooner or later entirely
forgotten experiences come into clear con-
sciousness. There are many ways of help-
ing this process. One of the ways is this:
Let a series of words be arranged; let the
doctor speak one of them to the patient;
let the patient, in the shortest time possible

xviii

to him, say right out whatever idea is
suggested to him by the word; let the time
taken to make the response be recorded in
seconds and fractions of a second–a thing
easy enough to do with a stop-
watch. Then, when the responses to a long series
of words are all recorded, and the time each
response has taken, it is found that some
responses have taken much longer than
others. This prolongation of the response-
time is always found whenever the test
word has stirred up a memory associated
with emotion. By following up further the
ideas stirred by this word, more ideas of a
related kind are discovered, often to the
patient’s surprise. Things long forgotten
come back to memory; circumstances that
apparently had no relation to the present
consciousness are found to be linked in
sequence with it–emotions, unreasoning
fears, anxieties, that apparently had no
relation to any particular experience, are
found at last to be part and parcel of things
that happened long ago. Once the doctor

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ON DREAMS

has his cue, he can range in many directions,
and probe the mind again and again, until
he reveals multitudes of suppressed memo-
ries, forgotten ideas, forgotten elements of
experience. He can even get back into
early childhood, which, to the patient him-
self, leaves many and many a blank area in
the memory. But always the doctor lights,
sooner or later, on some complex experience
in which the particular fear or anxiety
arose.

But now, if the case is a suitable one, a
still stranger thing happens. When the
forgotten experience has thus artfully been
brought into the full light of consciousness,
the patient finds himself satisfied with the
explanation, and loses his particular fear.
He can now go back over the whole history
of its genesis; he can link up the old ex-
perience to the new, and so he attains once
more satisfaction and peace of mind. Up
till now he could not be reasoned out of his
anxiety; he had always an answer for any
explanation; he had always a fresh foolish

xx

reason for his fear. Now all this vanishes.
He finds his mind once more running
smoothly, and his “phobia” gone. The
unreasoning dread has been tracked back
to its lair, and its lair has been destroyed
in the process.

There are many other methods of achiev-
ing the same result; let this generalised
sketch suffice.

What now is the theory? The theory is
that the mental experience or “complex”
had, for some reason and by some mechan-
ism, been submerged, or suppressed, or for-
gotten. Freud maintains that there is a
fundamental tendency in the mind to sup-
press every experience that is associated
with painful emotion. This doctrine is allied
to Bain’s “Law of Conservation”—that
painful experiences depress the vitality and
tend to disappear, while pleasant experi-
ences exalt the vitality and tend to remain
in memory. At any rate, by some process
the painful experience disappears from con-
scious memory, but it does not cease to

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ON DREAMS

exist. It may lie dormant, or it may work
subconsciously, and throw up the emotional
bubbles that continue, without a known
reason, to excite the ordinary conscious-
ness. But the complex, though deep and partly
dormant, never gets beyond reach. By the
method of concen-
tration, by the use of
“free associa-
tions,” by the following up of
all the clues offered by the ideas “fished
up,” the submerged complex can, element
by element, be brought back. When once
it is brought back the patient is restored,
the dormant complexes once more resume
their place in the total current of his ex-
perience, and the mind flows at peace.

This is, roughly, the method of psycho-
analysis. It has been applied in various
types of neuro-
sis—hysterias, obsessions, pho-
bias, etc. It has not always succeeded in
removing the morbid conditions, but it has
succeeded so often that it may legiti-
mately
be regarded as a method of treatment. As
a matter of discovery it is arduous, and
demands the highest skill and invention if

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ON DREAMS

it is to succeed. Incidentally it reveals
masses of unpleasant ideas, of painful ideas,
even of disgusting ideas; but, in the right
hands, it leads to the healing of the mind.

MACBETH. How does your patient, doctor?
DOCTOR. Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-
coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.
MACBETH. Cure her of that;
Canst thou not minister to a mind
diseas'd;
Pluck from the memory a rooted
sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the
brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious
antidote,
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that
perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR. Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

And here, insensibly, we have passed into
the World of Dreams. The morbid and
the normal have come together. Dreams

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ON DREAMS

are the awakening of dormant complexes;
they are transfigured experiences; they come
into consciousness trailing clouds of emo-
tion, and fill the dreamer’s imagination with
mysterious images. It is here that the
method of psycho-
analysis most fascinates
the student. It looks as if once more the
“interpretation of dreams” had become a
reality. The results of psycho-
analysis,
even when the method is applied with a
master hand and the details are interpreted
with a skill that comes only of a quick
imagination, are not entirely convincing;
but they are certainly such as to make more
and more observation desirable. In the
present short essay Professor Freud gives a
sketch of psycho-
analysis as it is applied to
the interpretations of dreams. His ex-
amples, if they are enough to illustrate the
theory, are hardly enough to prove it, but
they are intended as an introduction to his
more elaborate studies; and, hitherto, ob-
servers as they have increased in experi-
ence have gained in conviction. That the

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ON DREAMS

method goes a long way to prove that
dreams are not a chaotic sport of the brain,
but are a manifestation of ordered mental
experience, is beyond doubt. It would be
easy to show where the theory does not
cover facts, but it is equally easy to show
many facts that it does cover.

What, then, is the theory? Briefly this,
that dreams are very largely the expres-
sions of unfulfilled desires. Where, as in
children, the waking experience and the
sleeping experience differ from each other
by very little, the dream, or sleeping experi-
ence, readily takes the form of the ungrati-
fied desires of the day. But as the mind
grows older the dream expression of a desire
gets more intricate. By-and-by it is too
intricate to be deciphered from direct
memory, and then there is a chance for the
method of psycho-analysis. What of the
dream is remembered gives the cue for the
analysis. Take a remembered element of a
dream, track it back and back by free
association or other method, and you will

xxv

find that, at one or two removes, the
remembered element stirs up forgotten
elements, and ultimately brings coherence
out of incoherence.

This appears simple, but let the reader
study the dreams analysed in this essay,
and he will find himself stirred by a thou-
sand suggestions. For Professor Freud has
constructed empirical laws out of his masses
of material. The dream as it appears to
the dreamer he calls the manifest dream
ideas. But as these are too absurd to form
a coherent reality, he gives ground for
believing that they represent latent dream
ideas. The manifest dream is a mass of
symbols representing elements in the latent
dream ideas. How the latent dream ideas
generate the manifest dream is discovered
by psycho-
analysis, the translation from
the latent to the manifest is the effect
of the dream work. The dream work
is the very core of the difficulty. It is
round this that Professor Freud’s greatest
subtleties of method are focussed. He

xxvi

shows that every dream is linked to some-
thing that occurs on the previous day,
some recent experience, but the experience
emerges in the dream as part of the current
panorama of the subjective life, and there
is no date to the beginning of the panorama
—it may go back to any point in the indi-
vidual’s history, even into the preconscious
days of early infancy. The day’s experi-
ence and the life’s experience flow in a
single stream, and the images that appear
in dreams are but the symbols of all the
latent ideas of that experience. How, by
displacement of this element or that, com-
pound symbols are formed; how, by the
foreshortening of experience and the linking
of the past with the present in a single idea,
masses of old memories are clotted into a
single point; how, in the freedom of the
dream world, where the tension of the
waking life is relaxed, where the exacting
stimulations of the day are reduced, where
the consciousness of duty to be done in the
highly organised conditions of social conduct

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ON DREAMS

is lowered, where, in a word, the censor is
drowsy or asleep, where the dream symbols
shape themselves into dramatic scenes of
endless variety—these it is that Professor
Freud’s theory endeavours to set forth.
Displacement, condensation, dramatisation
—these are the short names for these long
and complicated processes. In the course
of his expositions, Professor Freud uses
these processes almost as if they were
demons, and he admits frankly their figura-
tive character. But he pleads that they
represent real processes, and is ready to
accept better names when he finds them.
To trace back the dream images to a definite
meaning in experience is the aim of the
psycho-analysis of dreams. And the suc-
cesses in these must be tested by the facts.
Sometimes the results are highly per-
suasive, sometimes they look highly fanci-
ful, always they are full of suggestion and
keep close to realities.

The dream symbolism, in particular, it is
easy to criticise; but, after all, dream symbol-

xxviii

ism is a reality. The point to investigate
is, what dream images are legitimately con-
sidered symbolic and what not. One has
only to remember that every word spoken
or written is a symbol, and a symbol in
much the same sense as the symbolism of
dreams, for every written or spoken word
is a complicated series of motions that
express meanings. The dream images are
complicated series of images that express
meanings. The difficulty of symbolism is
no greater in the one case than in the other.
But the variety of dream symbols is so
immense that the difficulties of tracing their
meaning are enormous. It is here that
the method meets its greatest difficulties;
but, equally, it is here that it scores its
greatest triumphs. Spoken or written lan-
guage is a technically organised system of
symbols; dream language is as yet a poorly
organised system of symbols. The method
of psycho-analysis aims at organising them.
Some test results are described in this essay;
multitudes of others are to be found in the

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ON DREAMS

literature that is flowing from the applica-
tion of the psycho-analytic method. Time
alone will show how far the organisation of
dream symbols into a definite “language
of dreams” is, in any given society, actual
or possible. But the effort of organisation
has led Professor Freud to another fine fetch
of theory, for his dream symbolism suggests
many curious explanations for the mytholo-
gies of all ages and all countries. Myth
symbols, that seem to defy explanation,
he traces back to their roots in the “un-
conscious” of primitive man.

That the emotions of sex should play an
enormous part in the processes of analysis
is to be expected; for the sex emotions are
among the deepest, if not the deepest, of
our nature, and colour every experience.
From their proximate beginning in infancy
—and Freud’s theory here is of immense
significance—to their multiform derivatives
in adult life, the sex emotions exercise an
influence on every phase of development,
and, in one form or another, are themselves

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ON DREAMS

a normal index of the stages of develop
ment. It is therefore reasonable to expect
that they should play a great part in the
formation of obsessions, of fixed ideas, of
perversions, of repressed complexes. In
every civilisation, as Freud indicates, the
sex emotions are the most difficult to con-
trol, and have demanded the greatest
amount of restraint.

Restraints lead to repressions, repressions
lead to dissociations, dissociations lead to
irregularities of action. When, therefore,
as in dreams, the restraints of the social day
are withdrawn, naturally the repressed
ideas tend to emerge once more. How
much these ideas account for in the hys-
terias, how much “the shocks of despised
love” affect even the normal life, needs no
emphasis, but Freud pushes his analysis
farther, and tracks the sex emotions, like
many other fundamental emotions, into a
thousand by-paths of ordinary experience.
But it would be foolishness to say that sex
emotions are everything in the ruins of the

xxxi

“Buried Temple.” Far from it. What is
true of the sex emotions is true of all other
emotions in their varying degrees, and
often what looks like predominant sex emo-
tions may turn out to be accidental rather
than causative, a concomitant symptom
rather than the initiatory centre of dis-
turbance. But these points are all contro-
versial. It is the object of Freud to put
them to the test. If his general theory be
true, the dream-world will more and more
become the revealer of our deepest and
oldest experience.
It would be easy to fill many pages with
illustrative items and relative criticisms,
but that is not the purpose of an intro-
duction. Here I am concerned simply to
recommend this essay to the careful study
of all those interested in the mental history
of the individual, and in the blotting out
from the mind of needless fears and
anxieties. And no one need hesitate to
enter on this study, whatever his meta-
physical theories may be. Even the “unity

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ON DREAMS

of consciousness” will not suffer, for,
through his unending efforts to link the
experiences of the day with the whole ex-
perience of the individual life, Professor
Freud, by the union of buried consciousness,
restores to the mind a new unity of con-
sciousness.

Dr. Eder, whose studies in this field have
been long and varied, does well to present
to British readers this essay which serves
as an introduction to the more elaborate
studies of Freud and his school, and I am
glad to have the privilege of saying so.

W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.