54

VI.

ALTHOUGH the work of displacement must
be held mainly responsible if the dream
thoughts are not refound or recognised in
the dream content (unless the motive of the
changes be guessed), it is another and milder
kind of transformation which will be con-
sidered with the dream thoughts which
leads to the discovery of a new but readily
understood act of the dream work. The first
dream thoughts which are unravelled by
analysis frequently strike one by their un-
usual wording. They do not appear to be
expressed in the sober form which our
thinking prefers; rather are they expressed
symbolically by allegories and metaphors
like the figurative language of the poets. It
is not difficult to find the motives for this
degree of constraint in the expression of
dream ideas. The dream content consists

55

chiefly of visual scenes; hence the dream
ideas must, in the first place, be prepared
to make use of these forms of presenta-
tion. Conceive that a political leader’s
or a barrister’s address had to be trans-
posed into pantomime, and it will be
easy to understand the transformations to
which the dream work is constrained by
regard for this dramatisation of the dream
content.

Around the psychical stuff of dream
thoughts there are ever found reminiscences
of impressions, not infrequently of early
childhood—scenes which, as a rule, have
been visually grasped. Whenever pos-
sible, this portion of the dream ideas exer-
cises a definite influence upon the modelling
of the dream content; it works like a centre
of crystallisation, by attracting and re-
arranging the stuff of the dream thoughts.
The scene of the dream is not infrequently
nothing but a modified repetition, compli-
cated by interpolations of events that have
left such an impression; the dream but very

56

seldom reproduces accurate and unmixed
reproductions of real scenes.

The dream content does not, however, con-
sist exclusively of scenes, but it also includes
scattered fragments of visual images, con-
versations, and even bits of unchanged
thoughts. It will be perhaps to the point
if we instance in the briefest way the means
of dramatisation which are at the disposal
of the dream work for the repetition of the
dream thoughts in the peculiar language of
the dream.

The dream thoughts which we learn from
the analysis exhibit themselves as a psy-
chical complex of the most complicated
superstructure. Their parts stand in the
most diverse relationship to each other;
they form backgrounds and foregrounds,
stipulations, digressions, illustrations, de-
monstrations, and protestations. It may
be said to be almost the rule that one train
of thought is followed by its contradictory.
No feature known to our reason whilst
awake is absent. If a dream is to grow out

57

of all this, the psychical matter is submitted
to a pressure which condenses it extremely,
to an inner shrinking and displacement,
creating at the same time fresh surfaces,
to a selective interweaving among the
constituents best adapted for the con-
struction of these scenes. Having regard
to the origin of this stuff, the term regression
can be fairly applied to this process. The
logical chains which hitherto held the
psychical stuff together become lost in this
transformation to the dream content. The
dream work takes on, as it were, only the
essential content of the dream thoughts for
elaboration. It is left to analysis to restore
the connection which the dream work has
destroyed.

The dream’s means of expression must
therefore be regarded as meagre in com-
parison with those of our imagination,
though the dream does not renounce all
claims to the restitution of logical re-
lation to the dream thoughts. It rather
succeeds with tolerable frequency in re-
 

58

placing these by formal characters of
its own.

By reason of the undoubted connection
existing between all the parts of dream
thoughts, the dream is able to embody this
matter into a single scene. It upholds a
logical connection as approximation in time
and space, just as the painter, who groups
all the poets for his picture of Parnassus
who, though they have never been all to-
gether on a mountain peak, yet form ideally
a community. The dream continues this
method of presentation in individual
dreams, and often when it displays two ele-
ments close together in the dream content
it warrants some special inner connection
between what they represent in the dream
thoughts. It should be, moreover, ob-
served that all the dreams of one night
prove on analysis to originate from the
same sphere of thought.

The causal connection between two ideas
is either left without presentation, or re-
placed by two different long portions of

59

ON DREAMS

dreams one after the other. This presenta-
tion is frequently a reversed one, the be-
ginning of the dream being the deduction,
and its end the hypothesis. The direct
transformation of one thing into another in
the dream seems to serve the relationship
of cause and effect.

The dream never utters the alternative
“either-or,” but accepts both as having
equal rights in the same connection. When
“either-or” is used in the reproduction of
dreams, it is, as I have already mentioned,
to be replaced by “and.”

Conceptions which stand in opposition to
one another are preferably expressed in
dreams by the same element.^* There

^*It is worthy of remark that eminent philo-
logists maintain that the oldest languages used
the same word for expressing quite general anti-
theses. In C. Abel’s essay, “Ueber den Gegen-
sinn der Urworte^r” (1884), the following examples
of such words in English are given: “ gleam
— gloom ”; “ to lock — loch ”; “ down — The
Downs ”; “ to step—to stop.” In his essay on
“The Origin of Language” (“Linguistic Essays,”

60

ON DREAMS

seems no “not” in dreams. Opposition
between two ideas, the relation of conver-
sion, is represented in dreams in a very
remarkable way. It is expressed by the
reversal of another part of the dream con-
tent just as if by way of appendix. We
shall later on deal with another form of
expressing disagreement. The common
dream sensation of movement checked serves
the purpose of representing disagreement of
impulses—a conflict of the will.

Only one of the logical relationships—that
of similarity, identity, agreement—is found
highly developed in the mechanism of

p. 240), Abel says: “When the Englishman says
‘without,’ is not his judgment based upon the
comparative juxtaposition of two opposites, ‘with’
and ‘out’; ‘with’ itself originally meant ‘without,’
as may still be seen in ‘withdraw.’ ‘Bid’ includes
the opposite sense of giving and of proffering”
(Abel, “The English Verbs of Command,” “Lin-
guistic Essays,” p. 104; see also Freud, “Ueber
den Gegensinn der Urworte”; Jahrbuch für Psycho-
analytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen,
Band ii., part i., p. 179).—Translator.

61

ON DREAMS

dream formatio-
n. Dream work makes use
f these cases as a starting-
point for conden-
sation, drawing together everything which
shows such agreement to a fresh unity.

“ These short, crude observations naturally
do not suffice as an estimate of the abund-
ance of the dream’s formal means of pre-
senting the logical relationships of the
dream thoughts. In this respect, indi-
vidual dreams are worked up more nicely
or more carelessly, our text will have been
followed more or less closely, auxiliaries of
the dream work will have been taken more
or less into consideration. In the latter
case they appear obscure, intricate, inco-
herent. When the dream appears openly
absurd, when it contains an obvious para-
ox in its content, it is so of purpose.
Through its apparent disregard of all
logical claims, it expresses a part of the
intellectual content of the dream ideas.
Absurdity in the dream denotes disagree-
ment, scorn, disdain in the dream thoughts.
As this explanation is in entire disagreement

62

with the view that the dream owes its origin
to dissociated, uncritical cerebral activity,
I will emphasise my view by an example:

“One of my acquaintances, Mr. M–
has been attacked by no less a person than
Goethe in an essay with, we all maintain,
unwarrantable violence. Mr. M– has
naturally been ruined by this attack. He
complains very bitterly of this at a dinner-
party, but his respect for Goethe has not
diminished through this personal experience.
I now attempt to clear up the chronological
relations which strike me as improbable.
Goethe died in 1832. As his attack upon
Mr. M– must, of course, have taken place
before, Mr. M– must have been then a
very young man. It seems to me plausible
that he was eighteen. I am not certain, how-
ever, what year we are actually in, and the
whole calculation falls into obscurity. The
attack was, moreover, contained in Goethe’s
well-known essay on ‘Nature.’ ”

The absurdity of the dream becomes the
more glaring when I state that Mr. M–is

63

a young business man without any poetical
or literary interests. My analysis of the
dream will show what method there is in
this madness. The dream has derived its
material from three sources:

1. Mr. M—,
to whom I was introduced
at a dinner-
party, begged me one day to ex-
amine his elder brother, who showed signs
of mental trouble. In conversation with
the patient, an unpleasant episode oc-
curred. Without the slightest occasion he
disclosed one of his brother’s youthful esca-
pades. I had asked the patient the year of
his birth (year of death in dream), and led him
to various calculations which might show
up his want of memory.

2. A medical journal which displayed my
name among others on the cover had pub-
lished a ruinous review of a book by my
friend F— of Berlin, from the pen of a
very juvenile reviewer. I communicated
with the editor, who, indeed, expressed his
regret, but would not promise any redress.
Thereupon I broke off my connection with

64

ON DREAMS

the paper; in my letter of resignation I ex-
pressed the hope that our personal relations
would not suffer from this. Here is the real
source of the dream. The derogatory re-
ception of my friend’s work had made a deep
impression upon me. In my judgment, it
contained a fundamental biological dis-
covery which only now, several years later,
commences to find favour among the pro-
fessors.

3. A little while before, a patient gave
me the medical history of her brother, who,
exclaiming “Nature, Nature!” had gone
out of his mind. The doctors considered
that the exclamation arose from a study of
Goethe’s beautiful essay, and indicated that
the patient had been overworking. I ex-
pressed the opinion that it seemed more
plausible to me that the exclamation
“Nature!” was to be taken in that sexual
meaning known also to the less educated in
our country. It seemed to me that this
view had something in it, because the un-
fortunate youth afterwards mutilated his

65

ON DREAMS

genital organs. The patient was eighteen
years old when the attack occurred.

The first person in the dream-
thoughts be-
hind the ego was my friend who had been so
scandalously treated. “I now attempted to
clear up the chronological relations.” My
friend’s book deals with the chronological
relations of life, and, amongst other things,
correlates Goethe’s duration of life with
a number of days in many ways im-
portant to biology. The ego is, however,
represented as a general paralytic (“I am
not certain what year we are actually in”).
The dream exhibits my friend as behaving
like a general paralytic, and thus riots in
absurdity. But the dream thoughts run
ironically. “Of course he is a madman, a
fool, and you are the genius who under-
stands all about it. But shouldn’t it be the
other way round?” This inversion obvi-
ously took place in the dream when Goethe
attacked the young man, which is absurd,
whilst anyone, however young, can to-day
easily attack the great Goethe.

66

† I am prepared to maintain that no dream
is inspired by other than egoistic emotions.
The ego in the dream does not, indeed, re-
present only my friend, but stands for my-
self also. I identify myself with him be-
cause the fate of his discovery appears to
me typical of the acceptance of my own. If
I were to publish my own theory, which
gives sexuality predominance in the æti-
ology of psycho-
neurotic disorders (see the
allusion to the eighteen-
year-
old patient—
“Nature, Nature!”), the same criticism
would be levelled at me, and it would even
now meet with the same contempt.

When I follow out the dream thoughts
closely, I ever find only scorn and contempt
as correlated with the dream’s absurdity. It
is well known that the discovery of a
cracked sheep’s skull on the Lido in Venice
gave Goethe the hint for the so-
called ver-
tebral theory of the skull. My friend
plumes himself on having as a student
raised a hubbub for the resignation of an
aged professor who had done good work

67

(including some in this very subject of com-
parative anatomy), but who, on account
of decrepitude, had become quite incapable of
teaching. The agitation my friend inspired
was so successful because in the German
Universities an age limit is not demanded
for academic work. Age is no protection
against folly. In the hospital here I had for
years the honour to serve under a chief who,
long fossilised, was for decades notoriously
feeble-minded, and was yet permitted to
continue in his responsible office. A trait,
after the manner of the find in the Lido,
forces itself upon me here. It was to this
man that some youthful colleagues in the
hospital adapted the then popular slang of
that day: “No Goethe has written that,”
“No Schiller composed that,” etc.