260

VI

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

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

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? I 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 ”

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 Gärtner
(German : Gärtner=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

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

267

THE DREAM-WORK

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:

II. “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 upstairs 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 dyspnœa—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
closely 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,
“I am 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.

269

THE DREAM-WORK

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 dream.

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.^† 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 :

“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 :
cruelty towards her lover.

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

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

275

THE DREAM-WORK

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

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–propylæum. 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

277

THE DREAM-WORK

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). Further associations 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 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 psycho-
analytic treatment which gives her a great deal of
concern. Gold, moreover, recalls the gold cure for alcoholism
—Mr. 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 uclamparia—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
 

279

III. 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, “mæ deliciæ,” my own name, “my
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 Blaetter about a slanderous dwarf, “Saidhe
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
“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 it : 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.)

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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.

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 transforma-
tion. 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 I 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

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?”—“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.” I 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

283

THE DREAM-WORK

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 occurred.^*

(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
themselves.

^*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
dream 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

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

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 put in 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 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

287

THE DREAM-WORK

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
get into 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 thoroughly 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.

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THE DREAM-WORK

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-
ture.

290

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 elaboration 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

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.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

In the first place, the dream renders account of the con-
nection which 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 t with o
after a free space shows that t 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 joining 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

293

THE DREAM-WORK

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: “I am 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,
“either—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 is
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).

295

THE DREAM-WORK

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, II., 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,
old–young, 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 distinct
remnants of the same development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic
languages.

297

THE DREAM-WORK

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

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

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.

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THE DREAM-WORK

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

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 had 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 Ferenczi⁸⁷
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

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

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).

305

the following words : His father upbraids him because he arrives
so 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—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 indistinct 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

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

307

THE DREAM-
WORK

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 indistinct 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.

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 I 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.”

Jung⁹⁹ who, in his Beitrag zur Psychologie des Gerüchtes
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.” (l.c. p. 87).
Scherner⁵⁸ 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 Rank¹⁰⁶ in his work, A 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 described
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

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THE DREAM-
WORK

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. I
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
is 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

312

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
occurred shortly before about Goethe and the paralytic (p. 345).

313

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. Stekel¹¹⁴ 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

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-

315

THE DREAM-
WORK

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

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

316

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
is 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 an iron grating.
There, high up, stands the conductor with the features 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);
(b) is to be interpreted historically (as a reminiscence);
(c) 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
difficulties than the ancient writers of hieroglyphics imposed upon their
readers.

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

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

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

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^†: 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.^†† 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.

^§ A composite 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.

^‖ 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.

^†† Referring to the plurality of the persons who serve the purpose of her
fancy.

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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.^† 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
not 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,—I 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 Rank¹⁰⁶ under the title “Traum der sich selbst deutet”;
for another one which must be read in the “opposite direction,” see Stekel¹¹⁴,
p. 486.

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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

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
end 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.

325

THE DREAM-WORK

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 Ammocœtes.
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 3 florins and 65 kreuzer from her pocket-
book; but

326

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

327

THE DREAM-WORK

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:
“It 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 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

329

THE DREAM-WORK

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 butcher 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.

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. Fl. 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 not alive. But, noticing the mistake myself, I say : “Non
vixit.” 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
Fleischl, 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

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 vixit
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 Fleischl 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

333

THE DREAM-WORK

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 vixit. 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 Josef Street to Waehringer Street.

^†In addition Cæsar—Kaiser.

334

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 vivit to
branch off into non vixit, for in the language of later childhood
striking is called wichsen (German, wichsen—to smear with
shoe-polish, to tan, i.e., 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

335

THE DREAM-WORK

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 :

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 is 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

336

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 crowd 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

337

THE DREAM-WORK

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 day. These engravings contained an enormous number of
very small figures; a series of them treats of the horrors of the Thirty
Years’ War.

388

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 rail-
way 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 have we 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
grandfather is 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 dreamer has enter-
tained this wish. While nursing his father, the son often wishes his father’s
death ; i.e. he entertained the really compassionate desire that death finally
put an end to his suffering. While mourning after his father, 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-
proach as a dream ; and it was just because of the world-wide contrast
between the dream inciter and day thought that the dream had to come out
so absurdly (cf. with this, “Formulierungen über die zwei Prizipien des
seelischen Geschehens, Jahrbuch, Bleuler-Freud, III, 1, 1911).

339

THE DREAM-WORK

a 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
case in 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-
offspring) 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

341

THE DREAM-WORK

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 to mock the bad rhymes of the King
of Bavaria. He 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 !’”

342

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

343

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, &c., 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. I 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 censor-
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

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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

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 Mr. 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 Goethe’s 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

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

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THE DREAM-
WORK

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 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

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”—
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.)

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, “I 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: “I am 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
of its importance.^*

^*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
envy certain relatives who years ago had occasion to transplant their
children to another soil.

351

THE DREAM-
WORK

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 an 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. I 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.)

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

II. A similar case: One of my patients has a dream
which seems inter-
esting 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.” ^*

III. 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
to 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 A-
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.

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

353

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
gifted.

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 per-
son—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. Does
not this look like a critical impulse directed against the non-