The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud

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СКАЧАТЬ thoughts were developed from such psychic images; their first material and the steps which led up to them were psychic impressions, or to be more exact, the memory images of these psychic impressions. Only later were words attached to these and then combined into thoughts. The dream-work therefore puts the thoughts through a regressive treatment, that is, one that retraces the steps in their development. In this regression, all that has been added to the thoughts as a new contribution in the course of the development of the memory pictures must fall away.

      This, then, is the dream-work. In view of the processes that we have discovered about it, our interest in the manifest dream was forced into the background. I shall, however, devote a few remarks to the latter, since it is after all the only thing that is positively known to us.

      It is natural that the manifest dream should lose its importance for us. It must be a matter of indifference to us whether it is well composed or resolved into a series of disconnected single images. Even when its exterior seems to be significant, we know that it has been developed by means of dream distortion and may have as little organic connection with the inner content of the dream as the facade of an Italian church has with its structure and ground plan. At other times this facade of the dream, too, has its significance, in that it reproduces with little or no distortion an important part of the latent dream thought. But we cannot know this before we have put the dream through a process of interpretation and reached a decision as to what amount of distortion has taken place. A similar doubt prevails when two elements in the dream seem to have been brought into close relations to one another. This may be a valuable hint, suggesting that we may join together those manifest thoughts which correspond to the elements in the latent dream; yet at other times we are convinced that what belongs together in thought has been torn apart in the dream.

      As a general rule we must refrain from trying to explain one part of the manifest dream by another, as if the dream were coherently conceived and pragmatically represented. At the most it is comparable to a Breccian stone, produced by the fusion of various minerals in such a way that the markings it shows are entirely different from those of the original mineral constituents. There is actually a part of the dream-work, the so-called secondary treatment, whose function it is to develop something unified, something approximately coherent from the final products of the dream-work. In so doing the material is often arranged in an entirely misleading sense and insertions are made wherever it seems necessary.

      On the other hand, we must not over-estimate the dream-work, nor attribute too much to it. The processes which we have enumerated tell the full tale of its functioning; beyond condensing, displacing, representing plastically, and then subjecting the whole to a secondary treatment, it can do nothing. Whatever of judgment, of criticism, of surprise, and of deduction are to be found in the dream are not products of the dream-work and are only very seldom signs of afterthoughts about the dream, but are generally parts of the latent dream thought, which have passed over into the manifest dream, more or less modified and adapted to the context. In the matter of composing speeches, the dream-work can also do nothing. Except for a few examples, the speeches in the dream are imitations and combinations of speeches heard or made by oneself during the day, and which have been introduced into the latent thought, either as material or as stimuli for the dream. Neither can the dream pose problems; when these are found in the dream, they are in the main combinations of numbers, semblances of examples that are quite absurd or merely copies of problems in the latent dream thought. Under these conditions it is not surprising that the interest which has attached itself to the dream-work is soon deflected from it to the latent dream thoughts which are revealed in more or less distorted form in the manifest dream. It is not justifiable, however, to have this change go so far that in a theoretical consideration one regularly substitutes the latent dream thought for the dream itself, and maintains of the latter what can hold only for the former. It is odd that the results of psychoanalysis should be misused for such an exchange. “Dream” can mean nothing but the result of the dream-work, that is, the form into which the latent dream thoughts have been translated by the dream-work.

      Dream-work is a process of a very peculiar sort, the like of which has hitherto not been discovered in psychic life. These condensations, displacements, regressive translations of thoughts into pictures, are new discoveries which richly repay our efforts in the field of psychoanalysis. You will realize from the parallel to the dream-work, what connections psychoanalytic studies will reveal with other fields, especially with the development of speech and thought. You can only surmise the further significance of these connections when you hear that the mechanism of the dream structure is the model for the origin of neurotic symptoms.

      I know too that we cannot as yet estimate the entire contribution that this work has made to psychology. We shall only indicate the new proofs that have been given of the existence of unconscious psychic acts — for such are the latent dream thoughts — and the unexpectedly wide approach to the understanding of the unconscious psychic life that dream interpretation opens up to us.

      The time has probably come, however, to illustrate separately, by various little examples of dreams, the connected facts for which you have been prepared.

32. “besitzen,” to straddle.

33. While revising these pages I chanced upon a newspaper article that I quote here as an unexpected supplement to the above lines.

      The Punishment of God

      A broken arm for broken faith

      Mrs. Anna M. the wife of a soldier in the reserve accused Mrs. Clementine C. of being untrue to her husband. The accusation reads that Mrs. C. had carried on an illicit relationship with Karl M. while her own husband was on the battlefield, from which he even sent her 70 Kronen a month. Mrs. C. had received quite a lot of money from the husband of the plaintiff, while she and her children had to live in hunger and in misery. Friends of her husband had told her that Mrs. C. had visited inns with M. and had caroused there until late at night. The accused had even asked the husband of the plaintiff before several infantrymen whether he would not soon get a divorce from his “old woman” and live with her. Mrs. C.‘s housekeeper had also repeatedly seen the husband of the plaintiff in her (Mrs. C.‘s) apartment, in complete negligée.

      Yesterday Mrs. C. denied before a judge in Leopoldstadt that she even knew M; there could be no question of intimate relation between them.

      The witness, Albertine M., however, testified that Mrs. C. had kissed the husband of the plaintiff and that she had surprised them at it.

      When M. was called as a witness in an earlier proceeding he had denied any intimate relation to the accused. Yesterday the judge received a letter in which the witness retracts the statement he made in the first proceeding and admits that he had carried on a love affair with Mrs. C., until last June. He says that he only denied this relationship in the former proceeding for the sake of the accused because before the proceeding she had come to him and begged on her knees that he should save her and not confess. “To-day,” wrote the witness, “I felt impelled to make a full confession to the court, since I have broken my left arm and this appears to me as the punishment of God for my transgression.”

      The judge maintained the penal offense had already become null and void, whereupon the plaintiff withdrew her accusation and the liberation of the accused followed.

      TWELFTH LECTURE

       THE DREAM

       ANALYSIS OF SAMPLE DREAMS

       Table of Contents

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