Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis

One day the discovery was made that the symptoms of disease in certain nervous patients have meaning.^[25] It was upon this discovery that the psycho-analytic method of treatment was based. In this treatment it happened that patients in speaking of their symptoms also mentioned their dreams, whereupon the suspicion arose that these dreams too had meaning.

However, we will not pursue this historical path, but will strike off in the opposite direction. Our aim is to demonstrate the meaning of dreams, in preparation for the study of the neuroses. There are good grounds for this reversal of procedure, since the study of dreams is not merely the best preparation for that of the neuroses, but a dream is itself a neurotic symptom and, moreover, one which possesses for us the incalculable advantage of occurring in all healthy people. Indeed, if all human beings were healthy and would only dream, we could gather almost all the knowledge from their dreams which we have gained from studying the neuroses.

So dreams become the object of psycho-analytic research—another of these ordinary, under-rated occurrences, apparently of no practical value, like “errors,” and sharing with them the characteristic of occurring in healthy persons. But in other respects the conditions of work are rather less favourable. Errors had only been neglected by science, people had not troubled their heads much about them, but at least it was no disgrace to occupy oneself with them. True, people said, there are things more important but still something may possibly come of it. To occupy oneself with dreams, however, is not merely unpractical and superfluous, but positively scandalous: it carries with it the taint of the unscientific and arouses the suspicion of personal leanings towards mysticism. The idea of a medical student troubling himself about dreams when there is so much in neuropathology and psychiatry itself that is more serious, tumours as large as apples compressing the organ of the mind, hæmorrhages, chronic inflammatory conditions in which the alterations in the tissues can be demonstrated under the microscope! No, dreams are far too unworthy and trivial to be objects of scientific research.

There is yet another factor involved which, in itself, sets at defiance all the requirements of exact investigation. In investigating dreams even the object of research, the dream itself, is indefinite. A delusion, for example, presents clear and definite outlines. “I am the Emperor of China,” says your patient plainly. But a dream? For the most part it cannot be related at all. When a man tells a dream, has he any guarantee that he has told it correctly, and not perhaps altered it in the telling or been forced to invent part of it on account of the vagueness of his recollection? Most dreams cannot be remembered at all and are forgotten except for some tiny fragments. And is a scientific psychology or a method of treatment for the sick to be founded upon material such as this?

A certain element of exaggeration in a criticism may arouse our suspicions. The arguments brought against the dream as an object of scientific research are clearly extreme. We have met with the objection of triviality already in “errors,” and have told ourselves that great things may be revealed even by small indications. As to the indistinctness of dreams, that is a characteristic like any other—we cannot dictate to things their characteristics; besides, there are also dreams which are clear and well defined. Further, there are other objects of psychiatric investigation which suffer in the same way from the quality of indefiniteness, e.g. the obsessive ideas of many cases, with which nevertheless many psychiatrists of repute and standing have occupied themselves. I will recall the last case of the kind which came before me in medical practice. The patient, a woman, presented her case in these words: “I have a certain feeling, as if I had injured, or had meant to injure, some living creature—perhaps a child—no, no, a dog rather, as if perhaps I had pushed it off a bridge—or done something else.” Any disadvantage resulting from the uncertain recollection of dreams may be remedied by deciding that exactly what the dreamer tells is to count as the dream, and by ignoring all that he may have forgotten or altered in the process of recollection. Finally, one cannot maintain in so sweeping a fashion that dreams are unimportant things. We know from our own experience that the mood in which we awake from a dream may last throughout the day, and cases have been observed by medical men in which mental disorder began with a dream, the delusion which had its source in this dream persisting; further, it is told of historical persons that impulses to momentous deeds sprang from their dreams. We may therefore ask: what is the real cause of the disdain in which dreams are held in scientific circles? In my opinion it is the reaction from the overestimation of them in earlier times. It is well known that it is no easy matter to reconstruct the past, but we may assume with certainty (you will forgive my jest) that as early as three thousand years ago and more our ancestors dreamt in the same way as we do. So far as we know, all ancient peoples attached great significance to dreams and regarded them as of practical value; they obtained from them auguries of the future and looked for portents in them. For the Greeks and other Orientals, it was at times as unthinkable to undertake a campaign without a dream-interpreter as it would be to-day without air-scouts for intelligence. When Alexander the Great set out on his campaign of conquest the most famous interpreters of dreams were in his following. The city of Tyre, still at that time on an island, offered so stout a resistance to the king that he entertained the idea of abandoning the siege; then one night he dreamed of a satyr dancing in triumph, and when he related this dream to his interpreters they informed him that it foretold his victory over the city; he gave the order to attack and took Tyre by storm. Among the Etruscans and Romans other methods of foretelling the future were employed, but during the whole of the Græco-Roman period the interpretation of dreams was practised and held in high esteem. Of the literature on this subject the principal work at any rate has come down to us, namely, the book of Artemidorus of Daldis, who is said to have lived at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. How it happened that the art of dream-interpretation declined later and dreams fell into disrepute, I cannot tell you. The progress of learning cannot have had very much to do with it, for in the darkness of the middle ages things far more absurd than the ancient practice of the interpretation of dreams were faithfully retained. The fact remains that the interest in dreams gradually sank to the level of superstition and could hold its own only amongst the uneducated. In our day, there survive, as a final degradation of the art of dream-interpretation, the attempts to find out from dreams numbers destined to draw prizes in games of chance. On the other hand, exact science of the present day has repeatedly concerned itself with the dream, but always with the sole object of illustrating physiological theories. By medical men, naturally, a dream was never regarded as a mental process but as the mental expression of physical stimuli. Binz in 1876 pronounced the dream to be “a physical process, always useless and in many cases actually morbid, a process above which the conception of the world-soul and of immortality stands as high as does the blue sky above the most low-lying, weed-grown stretch of sand.” Maury compares dreams with the spasmodic jerkings of St. Vitus’ dance, contrasted with the co-ordinated movements of the normal human being; in an old comparison a parallel is drawn between the content of a dream and the sounds which would be produced if “someone ignorant of music let his ten fingers wander over the keys of an instrument.”

‘Interpretation’ means discovering a hidden meaning, but there can be no question of attempting this while such an attitude is maintained towards the dream-performance. Look up the description of dreams given in the writings of Wundt, Jodl and other recent philosophers: they are content with the bare enumeration of the divergences of the dream-life from waking thought with a view to depreciating the dreams; they emphasize the lack of connection in the associations, the suspended exercise of the critical faculty, the elimination of all knowledge, and other indications of diminished functioning. The single valuable contribution to our knowledge about dreams for which we are indebted to exact science relates to the influence upon the dream-content of physical stimuli operating during sleep. We have the work of a Norwegian author who died recently—J. Mourly Vold—two large volumes on experimental investigation of dreams (translated into German in 1910 and 1912), which are concerned almost entirely with the results obtained by change in the position of the limbs. These investigations have been held up to us as models of exact research in the subject of dreams. Now can you imagine what would be the comment of exact science on learning that we intend to try to find out the meaning of dreams? The comment that has perhaps been made already! However, we will not allow ourselves to be appalled at the thought. If it was possible for errors to have an underlying meaning, it is possible that dreams have one too; and errors have, in very many cases, a meaning which has eluded the researches of exact science. Let us adopt the assumption of the ancients and of simple folk, and follow in the footsteps of the dream-interpreters of old.

First of all, we must take our bearings in this enterprise, and make a survey of the field of dreams. What exactly is a dream? It is difficult to define it in a single phrase. Yet we need not seek after a definition, when all we need is to refer to something familiar to everyone. Still we ought to pick out the essential features in dreams. How are we to discover these features? The boundaries of the region we are entering comprise such vast differences, differences whichever way we turn. That which we can show to be common to all dreams is probably what is essential.

Well then—the first common characteristic of all dreams would be that we are asleep at the time. Obviously, the dream is the life of the mind during sleep, a life bearing certain resemblances to our waking life and, at the same time, differing from it widely. That, indeed, was Aristotle’s definition. Perhaps dream and sleep stand in yet closer relationship to each other. We can be waked by a dream; we often have a dream when we wake spontaneously or when we are forcibly roused from sleep. Dreams seem thus to be an intermediate condition between sleeping and waking. Hence, our attention is directed to sleep itself: what then is sleep?

That is a physiological or biological problem concerning which much is still in dispute. We can come to no decisive answer, but I think we may attempt to define one psychological characteristic of sleep. Sleep is a condition in which I refuse to have anything to do with the outer world and have withdrawn my interest from it. I go to sleep by retreating from the outside world and warding off the stimuli proceeding from it. Again, when I am tired by that world I go to sleep. I say to it as I fall asleep: “Leave me in peace, for I want to sleep.” The child says just the opposite: “I won’t go to sleep yet; I’m not tired, I want more things to happen to me!” Thus the biological object of sleep seems to be recuperation, its psychological characteristic the suspension of interest in the outer world. Our relationship with the world which we entered so unwillingly seems to be endurable only with intermission; hence we withdraw again periodically into the condition prior to our entrance into the world: that is to say, into intra-uterine existence. At any rate, we try to bring about quite similar conditions—warmth, darkness and absence of stimulus—characteristic of that state. Some of us still roll ourselves tightly up into a ball resembling the intra-uterine position. It looks as if we grown-ups do not belong wholly to the world, but only by two-thirds; one-third of us has never yet been born at all. Every time we wake in the morning it is as if we were newly born. We do, in fact, speak of the condition of waking from sleep in these very words: we feel “as if we were newly born,”—and in this we are probably quite mistaken in our idea of the general sensations of the new-born infant; it may be assumed on the contrary that it feels extremely uncomfortable. Again, in speaking of birth we speak of “seeing the light of day.”

If this is the nature of sleep, then dreams do not come into its scheme at all, but seem rather to be an unwelcome supplement to it; and we do indeed believe that dreamless sleep is the best, the only proper sleep. There should be no mental activity during sleep; if any such activity bestirs itself, then in so far have we failed to reach the true pre-natal condition of peace; we have not been able to avoid altogether some remnants of mental activity, and the act of dreaming would represent these remnants. In that event it really does seem that dreams do not need to have meaning. With errors it was different, for they were at least activities manifested in waking life; but if I sleep and have altogether suspended mental activity, with the exception of certain remnants which I have not been able to suppress, there is no necessity whatever that they should have any meaning. In fact, I cannot even make use of any such meaning, seeing that the rest of my mind is asleep. It can really then be a matter of spasmodic reactions only, of such mental phenomena only as have their origin in physical stimulation. Hence, dreams must be remnants of the mental activity of waking life disturbing sleep, and we might as well make up our minds forthwith to abandon a theme so unsuited to the purposes of psycho-analysis.

Superfluous as dreams may be, however, they do exist nevertheless, and we can try to account for their existence to ourselves. Why does not mental life go off to sleep? Probably because there is something that will not leave the mind in peace; stimuli are acting upon it and to these it is bound to react. Dreams therefore are the mode of reaction of the mind to stimuli acting upon it during sleep. We note here a possibility of access to comprehension of dreams. We can now endeavour to find out, in various dreams, what are the stimuli seeking to disturb sleep, the reaction to which takes the form of dreams. By doing this we should have worked out the first characteristic common to all dreams.

Is there any other common characteristic? Yes, there is another, unmistakable, and yet much harder to lay hold of and describe. The character of mental processes during sleep is quite different from that of waking processes. In dreams we go through many experiences, which we fully believe in, whereas in reality we are perhaps only experiencing the single disturbing stimulus. For the most part our experiences take the form of visual images; there may be feeling as well, thoughts, too, mixed up with them, and the other senses may be drawn in; but for the most part dreams consist of visual images. Part of the difficulty of reciting a dream comes from the fact that we have to translate these images into words. “I could draw it,” the dreamer often says to us, “but I do not know how to put it into words.” Now this is not exactly a diminution in the mental capacity, as seen in a contrast between a feeble-minded person and a man of genius. The difference is rather a qualitative one, but it is difficult to say precisely wherein it lies. G. T. Fechner once suggested that the stage whereon the drama of the dream (within the mind) is played out is other than that of the life of waking ideas. That is a saying which we really do not understand, nor do we know what it is meant to convey to us, but it does actually reproduce the impression of strangeness which most dreams make upon us. Again, the comparison of the act of dreaming with the performances of an unskilled hand in music breaks down here, for the piano will certainly respond with the same notes, though not with melodies, to a chance touch on its keys. We will keep this second common characteristic of dreams carefully in view, even though we may not understand it.

Are there any other qualities common to all dreams? I can think of none, but can see differences only, whichever way I look, differences too in every respect—in apparent duration, definiteness, the part played by affects, persistence in the mind, and so forth. This is really not what we should naturally expect in the case of a compulsive attempt, at once meagre and convulsive, to ward off a stimulus. As regards the length of dreams, some are very short, containing only one image, or very few, or a single thought, possibly even a single word; others are peculiarly rich in content, enact entire romances and seem to last a very long time. There are dreams as distinct as actual experiences, so distinct that for some time after waking we do not realize that they were dreams at all; others, which are ineffably faint, shadowy and blurred; in one and the same dream, even, there may be some parts of extraordinary vividness alternating with others so indistinct as to be almost wholly elusive. Again, dreams may be quite consistent or at any rate coherent, or even witty or fantastically beautiful; others again are confused, apparently imbecile, absurd or often absolutely mad. There are dreams which leave us quite cold, others in which every affect makes itself felt, pain to the point of tears, terror so intense as to wake us, amazement, delight, and so on. Most dreams are forgotten soon after waking; or they persist throughout the day, the recollection becoming fainter and more imperfect as the day goes on; others remain so vivid (as, for example, the dreams of childhood) that thirty years later we remember them as clearly as though they were part of a recent experience. Dreams, like people, may make their appearance once and never come back; or the same person may dream the same thing repeatedly, either in the same form or with slight alterations. In short, these scraps of mental activity at night-time have at command an immense repertory, can in fact create everything that by day the mind is capable of—only, it is never the same.

One might attempt to account for these diversities in dreams by assuming that they correspond to different intermediate states between sleeping and waking, different levels of imperfect sleep. Very well; but then in proportion as the mind approached the waking state there should be not merely an increase in the value, content, and distinctness of the dream-performance, but also a growing perception that it is a dream; and it ought not to happen that side by side with a clear and sensible element in the dream there is one which is nonsensical or indistinct, followed again by a good piece of work. It is certain that the mind could not vary its depth of sleep so rapidly as that. This explanation therefore does not help; there is in fact no short cut to an answer.

For the present we will leave the ‘meaning’ of the dream out of question, and try instead, by starting from the common element in dreams, to clear a path to a better understanding of their nature. From the relationship of dreams to sleep we have drawn the conclusion that dreams are the reaction to a stimulus disturbing sleep. As we have heard, this is also the single point at which exact experimental psychology can come to our aid; it affords proof of the fact that stimuli brought to bear during sleep make their appearance in dreams. Many investigations have been made on these lines, culminating in those of Mourly Vold whom I mentioned earlier; we have all, too, been in a position to confirm their results by occasional observations of our own. I will choose some of the earlier experiments to tell you. Maury had tests of this kind carried out upon himself. Whilst dreaming, he was made to smell some eau de Cologne, whereupon he dreamt he was in Cairo, in the shop of Johann Maria Farina, and this was followed by further crazy adventures. Again, someone gave his neck a gentle pinch, and he dreamt of the application of a blister and of a doctor who had treated him when he was a child. Again, they let a drop of water fall on his forehead and he was immediately in Italy, perspiring freely and drinking the white wine of Orvieto.

The striking feature about these dreams produced under experimental conditions will perhaps become still clearer to us in another series of “stimulus”-dreams. These are three dreams of which we have an account by a clever observer, Hildebrandt, and all three are reactions to the sound of an alarum-clock:

“I am going for a walk on a spring morning, and I saunter through fields just beginning to grow green, till I come to a neighbouring village, where I see the inhabitants in holiday attire making their way in large numbers to the church, their hymn-books in their hands. Of course! it is Sunday and the morning service is just about to begin. I decide to take part in it, but first as I am rather overheated I think I will cool down in the churchyard which surrounds the church. Whilst reading some of the epitaphs there I hear the bell-ringer go up into the tower, where I now notice, high up, the little village bell which will give the signal for the beginning of the service. For some time yet it remains motionless, then it begins to swing, and suddenly the strokes ring out, clear and piercing—so clear and piercing that they put an end to my sleep. But the sound of the bell comes from the alarum-clock.”

Here is another combination of images. “It is a bright winter day, and the roads are deep in snow. I have promised to take part in a sleighing expedition, but I have to wait a long time before I am told that the sleigh is at the door. Now follow the preparations for getting in, the fur rug is spread out and the foot-muff fetched and finally I am in my place. But there is still a delay while the horses wait for the signal to start. Then the reins are jerked and the little bells, shaken violently, begin their familiar janizary music, so loudly that in a moment the web of the dream is rent. Again it is nothing but the shrill sound of the alarum-clock.”

Now for the third example! “I see a kitchen-maid with dozens of piled-up plates going along the passage to the dining-room. It seems to me that the pyramid of china in her arms is in danger of overbalancing. I call out a warning: ‘Take care, your whole load will fall to the ground.’ Of course I receive the usual answer: that they are accustomed to carrying china in that way, and so on; meanwhile I follow her as she goes with anxious looks. I thought so—the next thing is a stumble on the threshold, the crockery falls, crashing and clattering in a hundred pieces on the ground. But—I soon become aware that that interminably prolonged sound is no real crash, but a regular ringing—and this ringing is due merely to the alarum-clock, as I realize at last on awakening.”

These dreams are very pretty, perfectly sensible, and by no means so incoherent as dreams usually are. We have no quarrel with them on those grounds. The thing common to them all is that in each case the situation arises from a noise, which the dreamer on waking recognizes as that of the alarum-clock. Hence we see here how a dream is produced, but we find out something more. In the dream there is no recognition of the clock, which does not even appear in it, but for the noise of the clock another noise is substituted; the stimulus which disturbs sleep is interpreted, but interpreted differently in each instance. Now why is this? There is no answer; it appears to be mere caprice. But to understand the dream we should be able to account for its choice of just this noise and no other to interpret the stimulus given by the alarum-clock. In analogous fashion we must object to Maury’s experiments that, although it is clear that the stimulus brought to bear on the sleeper does appear in the dream, yet his experiments don’t explain why it appears exactly in that form, which is one that does not seem explicable by the nature of the stimulus disturbing sleep. And further, in Maury’s experiments there was mostly a mass of other dream-material attached to the direct result of the stimulus, for example, the crazy adventures in the eau de Cologne dream, for which we are at a loss to account.

Now will you reflect that the class of dreams which wake one up affords the best opportunity for establishing the influence of external disturbing stimuli. In most other cases it will be more difficult. We do not wake up out of all dreams, and if in the morning we remember a dream of the night before, how are we to assign it to a disturbing stimulus operating perhaps during the night? I once succeeded in subsequently establishing the occurrence of a sound-stimulus of this sort, but only, of course, because of peculiar circumstances. I woke up one morning at a place in the Tyrolese mountains knowing that I had dreamt that the Pope was dead. I could not explain the dream to myself, but later my wife asked me: “Did you hear quite early this morning the dreadful noise of bells breaking out in all the churches and chapels?” No, I had heard nothing, my sleep is too sound, but thanks to her telling me this I understood my dream. How often may such causes of stimulus as this induce dreams in the sleeper without his ever hearing of them afterwards? Possibly very often: and possibly not. If we can get no information of any stimulus we cannot be convinced on the point. And apart from this we have given up trying to arrive at an estimation of the sleep-disturbing external stimuli, since we know that they only explain a fragment of the dream and not the whole dream-reaction.

We need not on that account give up this theory altogether; there is still another possible way of following it out. Obviously it is a matter of indifference what disturbs sleep and causes the mind to dream. If it cannot always be something external acting as a stimulus to one of the senses, it is possible that, instead, a stimulus operates from the internal organs—a so-called somatic stimulus. This supposition lies very close, and moreover it corresponds to the view popularly held with regard to the origin of dreams, for it is a common saying that they come from the stomach. Unfortunately, here again we must suppose that in very many cases information respecting a somatic stimulus operating during the night would no longer be forthcoming after waking, so that it would be incapable of proof. But we will not overlook the fact that many trustworthy experiences support the idea that dreams may be derived from somatic stimuli; on the whole it is indubitable that the condition of the internal organs can influence dreams. The relation of the content of many dreams to distention of the bladder or to a condition of excitation of the sex-organs is so plain that it cannot be mistaken. From these obvious cases we pass to others, in which, to judge by the content of the dream, we are at least justified in suspecting that some such somatic stimuli have been at work, since there is something in this content which can be regarded as elaboration, representation, or interpretation of these stimuli. Scherner, the investigator of dreams (1861), emphatically supported the view which traces the origin of dreams to organic stimuli, and contributed some excellent examples towards it. For instance, he sees in a dream “two rows of beautiful boys, with fair hair and delicate complexions, confronting each other pugnaciously, joining in combat, seizing hold of one another, and again letting go their hold, only to take up the former position and go through the whole process again”; his interpretation of the two rows of boys as the teeth is in itself plausible and seems to receive full confirmation when after this scene the dreamer “pulls a long tooth from his jaw.” Again, the interpretation of “long, narrow, winding passages” as being suggested by a stimulus originating in the intestine seems sound and corroborates Scherner’s assertion that dreams primarily endeavour to represent, by like objects, the organ from which the stimulus proceeds.

We must therefore be prepared to admit that internal stimuli can play the same rôle in dreams as external ones. Unfortunately, evaluation of this factor is open to the same objections. In a great number of instances the attribution of dreams to somatic stimuli must remain uncertain or incapable of proof; not all dreams, but only a certain number of them, rouse the suspicion that stimuli from internal organs have something to do with their origin; and lastly, the internal somatic stimulus will suffice no more than the external sensory stimulus to explain any other part of the dream than the direct reaction to it. The origin of all the rest of the dream remains obscure.

Now, however, let us direct our attention to a certain peculiarity of the dream-life which appears when we study the operation of these stimuli. The dream does not merely reproduce the stimulus, but elaborates it, plays upon it, fits it into a context, or replaces it by something else. This is a side of the dream-work which is bound to be of interest to us because possibly it may lead us nearer to the true nature of dreams. The scope of a man’s production is not necessarily limited to the circumstance which immediately gives rise to it. For instance, Shakespeare’s Macbeth was written as an occasional drama on the accession of the king who first united in his person the crowns of the three kingdoms. But does this historical occasion cover the whole content of the drama, or explain its grandeur and its mystery? Perhaps in the same way the external and internal stimuli operating upon the sleeper are merely the occasion of the dream and afford us no insight into its true nature.

The other element common to all dreams, their peculiarity in mental life, is on the one hand very difficult to grasp and on the other seems to afford no clue for further inquiry. Our experiences in dreams for the most part take the form of visual images. Can these be explained by the stimuli? Is it really the stimulus that we experience? If so, why is the experience visual, when it can only be in the very rarest instance that any stimulus has operated upon our eyesight? Or, can it be shown that when we dream of speech any conversation or sounds resembling conversation reached our ears during sleep? I venture to discard such a possibility without any hesitation whatever.

If we cannot get any further with the common characteristics of dreams as a starting-point, let us try beginning with their differences. Dreams are often meaningless, confused, and absurd, yet there are some which are sensible, sober, and reasonable. Let us see whether these latter sensible dreams can help to elucidate those which are meaningless. I will tell you the latest reasonable dream which was told to me, the dream of a young man: “I went for a walk in the Kärntnerstrasse and there I met Mr. X.; after accompanying him for a short time I went into a restaurant. Two ladies and a gentleman came and sat down at my table. At first I was annoyed and refused to look at them, but presently I glanced across at them and found that they were quite nice.” The dreamer’s comment on this was that the evening before he had actually been walking in the Kärntnerstrasse, which is the way he usually goes, and that he had met Mr. X. there. The other part of the dream was not a direct reminiscence, but only bore a certain resemblance to an occurrence of some time previously. Or here we have another prosaic dream, that of a lady. “Her husband says to her: ‘Don’t you think we ought to have the piano tuned?’ and she replies: ‘It is not worth it, for the hammers need fresh leather anyhow.’” This dream repeats a conversation which took place in almost the same words between herself and her husband the day before the dream. What then do we learn from these two prosaic dreams? Merely that there occur in them recollections of daily life or of matters connected with it. Even that would be something if it could be asserted of all dreams without exception. But that is out of the question; this characteristic too belongs only to a minority of dreams. In most dreams we find no connection with the day before, and no light is thrown from this quarter upon meaningless and absurd dreams. All we know is that we have met with a new problem. Not only do we want to know what a dream is saying, but if as in our examples that is quite plain, we want to know further from what cause and to what end we repeat in dreams this which is known to us and has recently happened to us.

I think you would be as tired as I of continuing the kind of attempts we have made up to this point. It only shows that all the interest in the world will not help us with a problem unless we have also an idea of some path to adopt in order to arrive at a solution. Till now we have not found this path. Experimental psychology has contributed nothing but some (certainly very valuable) information about the significance of stimuli in the production of dreams. Of philosophy we have nothing to expect, unless it be a lofty repetition of the reproach that our object is intellectually contemptible; while from the occult sciences we surely do not choose to borrow. History and the verdict of the people tell us that dreams are full of meaning and importance, and of prophetic significance; but that is hard to accept and certainly does not lend itself to proof. So then our first endeavours are completely baffled.

But unexpectedly there comes a hint from a direction in which we have not hitherto looked. Colloquial speech, which is certainly no matter of chance but the deposit, as it were, of ancient knowledge—a thing which must not indeed be made too much of—our speech, I say, recognizes the existence of something to which, strangely enough, it gives the name of “day-dreams.” Day-dreams are phantasies (products of phantasy); they are very common phenomena, are observable in healthy as well as in sick persons, and they also can easily be studied by the subject himself. The most striking thing about these ‘phantastic’ creations is that they have received the name of “day-dreams,” for they have nothing in common with the two universal characteristics of dreams. Their name contradicts any relationship to the condition of sleep and, as regards the second universal characteristic, no experience or hallucination takes place in them, we simply imagine something; we recognize that they are the work of phantasy, that we are not seeing but thinking. These day-dreams appear before puberty, often indeed in late childhood, and persist until maturity is reached when they are either given up or retained as long as life lasts. The content of these phantasies is dictated by a very transparent motivation. They are scenes and events which gratify either the egoistic cravings of ambition or thirst for power, or the erotic desires of the subject. In young men, ambitious phantasies predominate; in women, whose ambition centres on success in love, erotic phantasies; but the erotic requirement can often enough in men too be detected in the background, all their heroic deeds and successes are really only intended to win the admiration and favour of women. In other respects these day-dreams show great diversity and their fate varies. All of them are either given up after a short time and replaced by a new one, or retained, spun out into long stories, and adapted to changing circumstances in life. They march with the times, receiving as it were “date-stamps” upon them which show the influence of new situations. They form the raw material of poetic production; for the writer by transforming, disguising, or curtailing them creates out of his day-dreams the situations which he embodies in his stories, novels, and dramas. The hero of a day-dream is, however, always the subject himself, either directly imagined in the part or transparently identified with someone else.

Perhaps day-dreams are so called on account of their similar relation to reality, as an indication that their content is no more to be accepted as real than is that of dreams. But it is possible that they share the name of dreams because of some mental characteristic of the dream which we do not yet know but after which we are seeking. On the other hand, it is possible that we are altogether wrong in regarding this similarity of name as significant. That is a question which can only be answered later.

We thus realize our need of a new way of approach, a definite method, if we are to make any advance in our researches into dreams. I will now offer an obvious suggestion: let us accept as the basis of the whole of our further enquiry the following hypothesis—that dreams are not a somatic, but a mental, phenomenon. You know what this means; but what is our justification in making this assumption? We have none, but on the other hand there is nothing to prevent us. The position is this: if the dream is a somatic phenomenon it does not concern us; it can only be of interest to us on the hypothesis that it is a mental phenomenon. So we will assume that this hypothesis is true, in order to see what happens if we do so. The results of our work will determine whether we may adhere to the assumption, and uphold it in its turn as an inference fairly drawn. Now what exactly is the object of this enquiry of ours, or to what are we directing our efforts? Our object is that of all scientific endeavour—namely, to achieve an understanding of the phenomena, to establish a connection between them, and, in the last resort, wherever it is possible to increase our power over them.

So we continue our work on the assumption that dreams are a mental phenomenon. In that event, they are a performance and an utterance on the part of the dreamer, but of a kind that conveys nothing to us, and which we do not understand. Now supposing that I give utterance to something that you do not understand, what do you do? You ask me to explain, do you not? Why may not we do the same—ask the dreamer the meaning of the dream?

Remember, we have already found ourselves in a similar position. It was when we were enquiring into certain errors, and the instance we took was a slip of the tongue. Someone had said: “Then certain things were refilled,” and thereupon we asked—no, fortunately it was not we who asked, but other people who had nothing to do with psycho-analysis—they asked what he meant by this enigmatic expression. He answered at once that what he had intended to say was: “That was a filthy business,” but had checked himself and substituted the milder words: “Things were revealed there.” I explained to you then that this enquiry was the model for every psycho-analytic investigation, and you understand now that psycho-analytic technique endeavours as far as possible to let the persons being analysed give the answer to their own problems. The dreamer himself then should interpret his dream for us.

That is not so simple with dreams, however, as we all know. Where errors were concerned, this method proved possible in many cases; there were others where the person questioned refused to say anything and even indignantly repudiated the answer suggested to him. With dreams, instances of the first type are entirely lacking; the dreamer always says he knows nothing about it. He cannot very well repudiate our interpretation, since we have none to offer him. Shall we have to give up our attempt then? Since he knows nothing, and we know nothing, and a third person can surely know nothing either, there cannot be any prospect of finding the answer. Well, if you like, give up the attempt. But if you are not so minded, you can accompany me. For I assure you that it is not only quite possible, but highly probable, that the dreamer really does know the meaning of his dream; only he does not know that he knows, and therefore thinks that he does not.

At this point you will probably call my attention to the fact that I am again introducing an assumption, the second in quite a short context, and that by so doing I greatly detract from the force of my claim to a trustworthy method of procedure. Given the hypothesis that dreams are a mental phenomenon, and given further the hypothesis that there are in the minds of men certain things which they know without knowing that they know them—and so forth! You have only to keep in view the intrinsic improbability of both these hypotheses, and you may with an easy mind abandon all interest in the conclusions to be drawn from them.

Well, I have not brought you here either to delude you or to conceal anything from you. True, I announced that I would give a course of lectures entitled Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; but it was no part of my purpose to play the oracle, professing to show you an easy sequence of facts, whilst carefully concealing all difficulties, filling up gaps, and glossing over doubtful points, so that you might comfortably enjoy the belief that you have learnt something new. No, it is the very fact that you are beginners that makes me anxious to show you our science as it is, with all its excrescences and crudities, the claims that it makes and the criticism to which it may give rise. I know indeed that it is the same in every science and that, especially in the beginnings, it cannot be otherwise. I know too that, in teaching other sciences, an effort is made at first to hide these difficulties and imperfections from the learner. But that cannot be done in psycho-analysis. So I really have set up two hypotheses, the one within the other; and anyone who finds it all too laborious, or too uncertain, or who is used to higher degrees of certainty, or to more refined deductions, need go no further with me. Only I should advise him to leave psychological problems altogether alone, for it is to be feared that this is a field in which he will find no access to such exact and sure paths as he is prepared to tread. And, further, it is quite superfluous for any science which can offer a real contribution to knowledge to strive to make itself heard and to win adherents. Its reception must depend upon its results, and it can afford to wait until these have compelled attention.

But I may warn those of you who are not to be deterred in this way that my two assumptions are not of equal importance. The first, that dreams are a mental phenomenon, is the hypothesis which we hope to prove by the results of our work. The second has already been proved in a different field, and I am merely taking the liberty of transferring it thence to our problems.

Where, and in what connection, is it supposed to have been proved that a man can possess knowledge without knowing that he does so, which is the assumption we are making of the dreamer? Surely that would be a remarkable and surprising fact, which would change our conception of mental life and would have no need of concealment. Incidentally, it would be a fact belied in the very statement of it, which yet attempts to be literally true—a contradiction in terms. There is not, however, any attempt at concealment. We cannot blame the fact for people’s ignorance of it, or lack of interest in it, any more than we ourselves are to blame because all these psychological problems have been passed in judgement by persons who have held aloof from all the observations and experiments which alone can be conclusive.

The proof to which I refer was found in the sphere of hypnotic phenomena. In the year 1889 I was present at the remarkably impressive demonstrations by Liébault and Bernheim, in Nancy, and there I witnessed the following experiment. A man was placed in a condition of somnambulism, and then made to go through all sorts of hallucinatory experiences. On being wakened, he seemed at first to know nothing at all of what had taken place during his hypnotic sleep. Bernheim then asked him in so many words to tell him what had happened while he was under hypnosis. The man declared that he could not remember anything. Bernheim, however, insisted upon it, pressed him, and assured him that he did know and that he must remember, and lo and behold! the man wavered, began to reflect, and remembered in a shadowy fashion first one of the occurrences which had been suggested to him, then something else, his recollection growing increasingly clear and complete until finally it was brought to light without a single gap. Now, since in the end he had the knowledge without having learnt anything from any other quarter in the meantime, we are justified in concluding that these recollections were in his mind from the outset. They were merely inaccessible to him; he did not know that he knew them but believed that he did not know. In fact, his case was exactly similar to what we assume the dreamer’s to be.

I hope you are duly surprised that this fact is already established and that you will ask me: “Why did you not refer to this proof before, when we were considering errors and came to the point of ascribing to a man who had made a slip of the tongue intentions behind his speech, of which he knew nothing, and which he denied? If it is possible for a man to believe that he knows nothing of experiences of which nevertheless he does possess the recollection, it seems no longer improbable that there should be other mental processes going on within him about which also he knows nothing. We should certainly have been impressed by this argument and should have been in a better position to understand about errors.” Certainly, I might have brought forward this proof then, but I reserved it for a later occasion when there would be more need for it. Some of the errors explained themselves, others suggested to us that in order to understand the connection between the phenomena it would be advisable to postulate the existence of mental processes of which the person is entirely ignorant. With dreams we are compelled to seek our explanations elsewhere, and besides, I am counting on your being more ready to accept in this connection a proof from the field of hypnosis. The condition in which we perform errors must seem to you normal and, as such, to bear no similarity to that of hypnosis. On the other hand there exists a clear relationship between the hypnotic state and sleep, the essential condition of dreaming. Hypnosis is actually called artificial sleep; we say to the people whom we hypnotize: “Sleep,” and the suggestions made to them are comparable to the dreams of natural sleep. The mental situation is really analogous in the two cases. In natural sleep we withdraw our interest from the whole outer world; so also in hypnotic sleep, with the exception of the one person who has hypnotized us and with whom we remain in rapport. Again, the so-called “nurse’s sleep” in which the nurse remains in rapport with the child and can be wakened only by him is a normal counterpart of hypnotic sleep. So it does not seem so very audacious to carry over to natural sleep something which is a condition in hypnosis. The assumption that some knowledge about his dream exists in the dreamer and that this knowledge is merely inaccessible to him, so that he himself does not believe he has it, is not a wild invention. Incidentally, we observe here that a third way of approaching the study of dreams is thus opened out for us; we may approach it by the avenue of sleep-disturbing stimuli, by that of day-dreams, and now by that of the dreams suggested during hypnosis.

Now perhaps we shall return to our task with greater confidence. We see it is very probable that the dreamer knows something about his dream; the problem is how to make it possible for him to get at his knowledge and impart it to us. We do not expect him immediately to tell us what his dream means, but we do think he will be able to discover its source, from what circle of thoughts and interests it is derived. With errors, you will remember the man was asked how the slip of the tongue “refilled” had come about, and his first association gave us the explanation. The technique we employ in the case of dreams is very simple and is modelled on this example. Here again we shall ask the dreamer how he came to have the dream, and his next words must be regarded as giving the explanation in this case also. It makes no difference to us therefore, whether he thinks that he does or does not know anything about it, and we treat both cases alike.

This technique is certainly very simple, nevertheless I am afraid it will provoke most strenuous opposition in you. You will say: “Another assumption, the third! And the most improbable of all! When I ask the dreamer what ideas come to him about the dream, do you mean to say that his very first association will give the desired explanation? But surely he might have no association at all, or heaven only knows what the association might be. We cannot imagine upon what grounds such an expectation is based. It really implies too much trust in Providence, and this at a point where rather more exercise of the critical faculty would better meet the case. Besides, a dream is not like a single slip of the tongue but is made up of many elements. That being so, upon which association is one to rely?”

You are right in all the unessentials. It is true that a dream differs from a slip of the tongue in the matter of its many elements as well as in other points. We must take account of that in our technique. So I suggest to you that we divide the dream up into its various elements, and examine each element separately; then we shall have re-established the analogy with a slip of the tongue. Again, you are right in saying that the dreamer when questioned on the single elements of the dream may reply that he has no ideas about them. There are cases in which we accept this answer, and later I will tell you which these are; curiously enough, they are cases about which we ourselves may have certain definite ideas. But in general, when the dreamer declares that he has no ideas, we shall contradict him, press him to answer, assure him that he must have some idea and—shall find we are right. He will produce an association, any one, it does not matter to us what it is. He will be especially ready with information which we may term historical. He will say: “That is something which happened yesterday” (as in the instance of the two “prosaic” dreams quoted above) or: “That reminds me of something which happened recently,” and in this way we shall come to notice that dreams are much more often connected with impressions of the day before than we thought at first. Finally, with the dream as his starting-point, he will recall events which happened less recently, and at last even some which lie very far back in the past.

In regard to the main issue, however, you are wrong. When you think it arbitrary to assume that the first association of the dreamer must give us just what we are looking for, or at any rate lead to it, and further, that the association is much more likely to be quite capricious and to have no connection with what we are looking for, and that it only shows my blind trust in Providence if I expect anything else—then you make a very great mistake. I have already taken the liberty of pointing out to you that there is within you a deeply-rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice, that this belief is quite unscientific, and that it must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs even mental life. I ask you to have some respect for the fact that that one association, and nothing else, occurs to the dreamer when he is questioned. Nor am I setting up one belief against another. It can be proved that the association thus given is not a matter of choice, not indeterminate, and that it is not unconnected with what we are looking for. Indeed, I have recently learnt—not that I attach too much importance to the fact—that experimental psychology itself has brought forward similar proofs.

Because of the importance of the matter I ask you to pay special attention to this. When I ask a man to say what comes to his mind about any given element in a dream, I require him to give himself up to the process of FREE ASSOCIATION which follows when he keeps in mind the original idea. This necessitates a peculiar attitude of the attention, something quite different from reflection, indeed, precluding it. Many people adopt this attitude without any difficulty, but others when they attempt to do so display an incredible inaptitude. There is a still higher degree of freedom in association which appears when I dispense with any particular stimulus-idea and perhaps only describe the kind and species of association that I want; for example, ask someone to let a proper name or a number occur to him. An association of this sort should, one would say, be even more subject to choice and unaccountable than the kind used in our technique. Nevertheless, it can be shown that in every instance it will be strictly determined by important inner attitudes of mind, which are unknown to us at the moment when they operate, just as much unknown as are the disturbing tendencies which cause errors, and those tendencies which bring about so-called “chance” actions.

I myself and many after me have repeatedly made an examination of names and numbers called up without any particular idea as a starting-point; some of these experiments have been published. The method is this: a train of associations is stirred up by the name which occurred, and these associations, as you see, are no longer quite free, but are attached just so far as the associations to the different elements of the dream are attached; this train of associations is then kept up until the thoughts arising from the impulse have been exhausted. By that time, however, you will have explained the motivation and significance of the free association with a name. The experiments yield the same result again and again; the information they give us often includes a wealth of material and necessitates going far afield into its ramifications. The associations to numbers that arise spontaneously are perhaps the most demonstrative; they follow upon one another so swiftly and make for a hidden goal with such astounding certainty that one is really quite taken aback. I will give you just one example of a name-analysis of this sort, because it happens to be one which does not involve the handling of a great mass of material.

Once, when I was treating a young man, I happened to say something on this subject and to assert that in spite of our apparent freedom of choice in such matters we cannot, in point of fact, think of any name which cannot be shown to be narrowly determined by the immediate circumstances, the idiosyncrasies, of the person experimented with and his situation at the moment. As he was inclined to be sceptical, I proposed that he should make the experiment himself then and there. I knew that he had unusually numerous relationships of all sorts with women and girls, so I told him that I thought he would have an exceptionally large number to choose from if he were to let the name of a woman occur to him. He agreed. To my surprise, or rather perhaps to his own, he did not overwhelm me with an avalanche of women’s names, but remained silent for a time, and then confessed that the only name which came into his mind at all was “Albine.” “How curious! What do you connect with this name? How many Albines do you know?” Strangely enough, he knew no one of the name of Albine, and he found no associations to the name. One might infer that the analysis had failed; but no, it was already complete, and no further association was required. The man himself was unusually fair in colouring, and whilst talking to him in analysis I had often jokingly called him an albino; moreover, we were just in the midst of tracing the feminine element in his nature. So it was he himself who was this female albino, the “woman” who interested him most at the moment.

In the same way, the tunes which suddenly come into a man’s head can be shown to be conditioned by some train of thought to which they belong, and which for some reason is occupying his mind without his knowing anything about it. It is easy to show that the connection with the tune is to be sought either in the words which belong to it or in the source from which it comes: I must, however, make this reservation, that I do not maintain this in the case of really musical people of whom I happen to have had no experience; in them the musical value of the tune may account for its suddenly emerging into consciousness. The first case is certainly much more common; I know of a young man who for some time was absolutely haunted by the tune (a charming one, I admit) of the song of Paris in Helen of Troy, until his attention was drawn in analysis to the fact that at that time an “Ida” and a “Helen” were rivals in his interest.

If then the associations which arise quite freely are determined in this way and belong to some definite context, we are surely justified in concluding that associations attached to one single stimulus-idea must be equally narrowly conditioned. Examination shows as a fact that they are not only attached in the first place to the stimulus-idea which we have provided for them, but that they are also dependent, in the second place, on circles of thoughts and interests of strong affective value (complexes, as we call them) of whose influence at the time nothing is known, that is to say, on unconscious activities.

Associations attached in this way have been made the subject of very instructive experiments, which have played a notable part in the history of psycho-analysis. Wundt’s school originated the so-called ‘association-experiment,’ in which the subject of the experiment is bidden to reply to a given ‘stimulus-word’ as quickly as possible with whatever ‘reaction-word’ occurs to him. The following points may then be noted: the interval which elapses between the sounding of the stimulus-word and of the reaction-word, the nature of the latter, and possibly any mistake which comes in when the same experiment is repeated later, and so on. The Zurich School, under the leadership of Bleuler and Jung, arrived at the explanation of the reactions to the association-experiment by asking the person experimented upon to throw light upon any associations which seemed at all remarkable, by means of subsequent associations. In this way it became clear that these unusual reactions were most strictly determined by the complexes of the person concerned. By this discovery Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge between experimental psychology and psycho-analysis.

Having heard this you may possibly say: “We admit now that free associations are subject to determination and not a matter of choice, as we thought at first, and we admit this also in the case of associations to the elements of dreams. But it is not this that we are bothering about. You maintain that the association to each element in the dream is determined by some mental background to this particular element, a background of which we know nothing. We cannot see that there is any proof of this. Naturally we expect that the association to the dream-element will be shown to be conditioned by one of the complexes of the dreamer, but what good is that to us? That does not help us to understand the dream; it merely leads to some knowledge of these so-called complexes, as did the association-experiment; but what have these to do with the dream?”

You are right, but you are overlooking an important point, the very thing which deterred me from choosing the association-experiment as a starting-point for this discussion. In this experiment the stimulus-word, the single thing which determines the reaction, is chosen by us at will, and the reaction stands as intermediary between this stimulus-word and the complex aroused in the person experimented upon. In the dream, the stimulus-word is replaced by something derived from the mental life of the dreamer, from sources unknown to him, and hence may very probably be itself a ‘derivative of a complex.’ It is not, therefore, altogether fantastic to suppose that the further associations connected with the elements of the dream are determined by no other complex than that which has produced the particular element itself, and that they will lead to the discovery of that complex.

Let me give you another instance which may serve to show that, in the case of dreams, the facts bear out our expectations. The forgetting of proper names is really an excellent prototype of what happens in dream-analysis, only that in the former case one person alone is concerned, while in the interpretation of dreams there are two. When I forget a name temporarily, I am still certain that I know it, and by way of a détour through Bernheim’s experiment, we are now in a position to achieve a similar certainty in the case of the dreamer. Now this name which I have forgotten, and yet really know, eludes me. Experience soon teaches me that no amount of thinking about it, even with effort, is any use. I can, however, always think of another or of several other names instead of the forgotten one. When such a substitute name occurs to me spontaneously, only then is the similarity between this situation and that of dream-analysis evident. The dream-element also is not what I am really looking for; it is only a substitute for something else, for the real thing which I do not know and am trying to discover by means of dream-analysis. Again the difference is that when I forget a name I know perfectly well that the substitute is not the right one, whereas we only arrived at this conception of the dream-element by a laborious process of investigation. Now there also is a way in which, when we forget a name, we can by starting from the substitute, arrive at the real thing eluding our consciousness at the moment, i.e. the forgotten name. If I turn my attention to these substitute names and let further associations to them come into my mind, I arrive after a short or a long way round at the name I have forgotten, and in so doing I discover that the substitutes I have spontaneously produced had a definite connection with, and were determined by, the forgotten name.

I will give you an instance of an analysis of this sort: one day I found that I could not call to mind the name of the small country on the Riviera, of which Monte Carlo is the capital. It was most annoying, but so it was. I delved into all my knowledge about the country; I thought of Prince Albert of the House of Lusignan, of his marriages, of his passion for deep-sea exploration—in fact of everything I could summon up, but all to no purpose. So I gave up trying to think and, instead of the name I had lost, let substitute names come into my mind. They came quickly: Monte Carlo itself, then Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Albania was the first to attract my attention; it was immediately replaced by Montenegro, probably because of the contrast between black and white. Then I noticed that four of the substitute names have the same syllable “mon,” and immediately I recalled the forgotten word and cried out “Monaco.” You see the substitutes really originated in the forgotten name; the four first came from the first syllable and the last gave the sequence of the syllables and the whole of the final syllable. Incidentally, I could quite easily find out what had made me forget the name for the time being. Monaco is the Italian name for Munich, and it was some thoughts connected with this town which had acted as an inhibition.

Now that is a very pretty example, but it is too simple. In other cases you might have to take a longer succession of associations to the substitute name, and then the analogy to dream-analysis would be clearer. I have had experiences of that sort, too. A stranger once invited me to drink some Italian wine with him, and in the inn he found he had forgotten the name of the wine which he had meant to order on account of his very pleasant recollections of it. A number of dissimilar substitute names occurred to him, and from these I was able to infer that the thought of someone called Hedwig had made him forget the name of the wine. Sure enough, not only did he tell me that there had been a Hedwig with him on the occasion when he first tasted the wine, but this discovery brought back to him the name he wanted. He was now happily married, and “Hedwig” belonged to earlier days which he did not care to recall.

What is possible in the case of forgotten names must be also possible in the interpretation of dreams: starting from the substitute, we must be able to arrive at the real object of our search by means of a train of associations; and further, arguing from what happens with forgotten names, we may assume that the associations to the dream-element will have been determined not only by that element but also by the real thought which is not in consciousness. If we could do this, we should have gone some way towards justifying our technique.