The Interpretation of Dreams

This is the first in a sequence of Freud readings, recommended by Liz

VII: The Psychology of the Dream-Processes

A: The Forgetting of Dreams

An observation which I have been able to make in the course of preparing this manuscript has shown me that dreams are no more forgotten than other mental acts and can be compared, by no means to their disadvantage, with other mental functions in respect of their retention in memory.
It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds.
The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
We must conclude that during the night the resistance loses some of its power, though we know it does not lose the whole of it, since we have shown the part it plays in the formation of dreams as a distorting agent.

B: Regression

Dreams are psychical acts of as much significance as any others; their motive force is in every instance a wish seeking fulfilment; the fact of their not being recognizable as wishes and their many peculiarities and absurdities are due to the influence of the psychical censorship to which they have been subjected during the process of their formation; apart from the necessity of evading this censorship, other factors which have contributed to their formation are a necessity for the condensation of their psychical material, a regard for the possibility of its being represented in sensory images and - though not invariably - a demand that the structure of the dream shall have a rational and intelligible exterior.
The most general and the most striking psychological characteristic of the process of dreaming: a though, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or, as it seems to us, is experienced.
Dreams make use of the present tense in the same manner and by the same right as day-dreams. The present tense is the one in which wishes are represented as fulfilled.
It is not only in dreams that such transformations of ideas into sensory images occur: they are also found in hallucinations and visions, which may appear as independent entities, so to say, in health or as symptoms in the psychoneuroses.

We will picture the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, to the components of which we will give the name of agencies or systems.
These systems may perhaps stand in a regular spatial relation to one another, in the same kind of way in which the various systems of lenses in a telescope are arranged behind one another.
All our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or external) and ends in innervations (the transmission of energy into a system of nerves or specifically into an efferent system - a process tending towards discharge)
The psychical apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus. Reflex processes remain the model of every psychical function.
A trace is left in our psychical apparatus of the perceptions which impinge upon it. This we may describe as a "memory-trace"; and to the function relating to it we give the name of "memory". If we are in earnest over our plan of attaching psychical processes to systems, memory-traces can only consist in permanent modifications of the elements of the systems.
We shall suppose that a system in the very front of the apparatus receives the perceptual stimuli but retains no trace of them and thus has no memory, while behind it there lies a second system which transforms the momentary excitations of the first system into permanent traces.
Our perceptions are linked with one another in our memory - first and foremost according to simultaneity of occurrence. We speak of this fact as "association".
If the perceptual system has no memory whatever, it cannot retain any associative traces; the separate perceptual elements would be intolerably obstructed in performing their function if the remnant of an earlier connection were to exercise an influence upon a fresh perception. We must therefore assume the basis of association lies in the mnemonic systems.
Association would thus consist in the fact that, as a result of a diminution in resistances and of the laying down of facilitating paths, an excitation is transmitted from a given mnemonic element more readily to one mnemonic element than to another.
Closer consideration will show the necessity for supposing the existence not of one but of several such mnemonic elements, in which one and the same excitation, transmitted by the perceptual elements, leaves a variety of different permanent records. The first of these systems will naturally contain the record of association in respect to simultaneity in time; while the same perceptual material will be arranged in the later systems in respect to other kinds of coincidence, so that one of these later systems, for instance, will record relations of similarity, and so on with the others.
It is the perceptual system, which is without the capacity to retain modifications and is thus without memory, that provides our consciousness with the whole multiplicity of sensory qualities. On the other hand, our memories - not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds - are in themselves unconscious.
They can be made conscious; but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition. What we describe as our "character" is based on the memory-traces of our impressions; and moreover, the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us - those of our earliest youth - are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious. But if memories become conscious once more, they exhibit no sensory quality or a very slight one in comparison with perceptions.
The critical agency, we concluded, stands in a closer relation to consciousness than the agency criticized: it stands like a screen between the latter and consciousness. Further, we found reasons for identifying the critical agency with the agency which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary, conscious actions. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we replace these agencies by systems, then our last conclusion must lead us to locate the critical system at the motor end of the apparatus.
We will describe the last of the systems at the motor end as "the preconscious", to indicate that the excitatory processes occurring in it can enter consciousness without further impediment provided that certain other conditions are fulfilled: for instance, that they reach a certain degree of intensity, that the function which can only be described as "attention" is distributed in a particular way, and so on. This is at the same time the system which holds the key to voluntary movement.
We will describe the system that lies behind it as "the unconscious", because it has no access to consciousness except via the preconscious, in passing through which its excitatory process is obliged to submit to modifications.
When we consider the dream-wish, we shall find that the motive force for producing dreams is supplied by the Ucs; and owing to this latter factor we shall take the unconscious system as the starting-point of dream-formation.
This path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is barred to dream-thoughts during the daytime by the censorship imposed by resistance. During the night they are able to obtain access to consciousness; but the question arises as to how they do so and thanks to what modification.
The only way in which we can describe what happens in hallucinatory dreams is by saying that the excitation moves in a retrogressive direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system. If we describe as "progressive" the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life, then we may speak of dreams as having a "regressive" character.
This regression, then, is undoubtedly one of the psychological characteristics of the process of dreaming. but we must remember that it does not occur only in dreams. Intentional recollection and other constituent processes of our normal thinking involve a retrogressive movement in the psychical apparatus from a complex ideational act back to the raw material of the memory-traces underlying it.
In regression, the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.
During the day there is a continuous current from the perceptual system flowing in the direction of motor activity; but this current ceases at night and could no longer form an obstacle to a current of excitation flowing in the opposite sense.
Three kinds of regression (where what is older is also more primitive and nearer to perception):
- Topographical - reversal of perception to movement flow
- Temporal - harking back to older psychical structures
- Formal - where primitive forms of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones
Dreaming is, on the whole, an example of regression to the dreamer's earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it, and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.
Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood - a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation.
Nietzsche: In dreams, "some primeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path."

C: Wish-Fulfilment

Aristotle: a dream is thinking that persists in the state of sleep.
Four origins for wishes:
- Aroused during the day and not satisfied - though as adults we are more and more inclined to renounce as unprofitable to form and retain such intense wishes as children know
- Aroused during the day and repudiated
- Emerges from the suppressed part of the mind at night - unconscious wishes are always on the alert, ready at any time to find their way to expression when an opportunity arises for allying themselves with an impulse from the conscious and for transferring their own great intensity on to the latter's lesser one. These unconscious wishes are paths which have been laid down once and for all, which never fall into disuse and which, whenever an unconscious excitation re-cathects them, are always ready to conduct the excitatory process to discharge. If I may use a simile, they are only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey - ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood.
- Impulses that arise during the night (thirst, sexual needs, etc)
A wish which is represented in a dream must be an infantile one. In the case of adults it originates from the Ucs, in the case of children, where there is as yet no division or censorship between the Pcs and the Ucs, or where that division is only gradually being set up, it is an unfulfilled, unrepressed wish from waking life.
The mechanism of dream-formation would in general be greatly clarified if instead of the opposition between "conscious" and "unconscious" we were to speak of that between the "ego" and the "repressed".
The apparatus's efforts are directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli; consequently its first structure followed the plan of a reflex apparatus, so that any sensory excitation impinging on it could be promptly discharge along a motor path.
The aim of the first psychical activity was to produce a "perceptual identity" - a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.
Inhibition of the regression and the subsequent diversion of the excitation become the business of a second system, which is in control of voluntary movement - which for the first time, that is, makes use of movement for purposes remembered in advance.

D: Arousal by Dreams - The Function of Dreams - Anxiety-Dreams

Consciousness, which we look upon in the light of a sense organ for the apprehension of psychical qualities, is capable in waking life of receiving excitations from two directions:
- From the periphery of the whole apparatus, the perceptual system
- Pleasure and unpleasure, which prove to be almost the only psychical quality attaching to transpositions of energy in the inside of the apparatus. These releases of pleasure and unpleasure automatically regulate the course of the cathetic process.
In order to make more delicately adjusted performances possible, it later became necessary to make the course of ideas less dependent upon the presence or absence of unpleasure. For this purpose the Pcs system needed to have qualities of its own which could attract consciousness; and it seems highly probable that it obtained them by linking the preconscious processes with the mnemic system of indications of speech, system not without quality.
By means of the qualities of that system, consciousness, which had hitherto been a sense organ for perceptions alone, also became a sense organ for a portion of our thought-processes. Now therefore, there are, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one directed towards perception and the other towards the preconscious thought-processes.
The dream is treated by the Pcs just like any other perceptual content; it is met by the same anticipatory ideas, in so far as its subject-matter allows.
Unconscious wishes always remain active. They represent paths which can always be traversed, whenever a quantity of excitation makes use of them. Indeed it is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indescructible. In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.
Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs excitation, serves it as a safety-valve and at the same time preserves sleep of the preconscious in return for a small expenditure of waking activity.

E: The Primary and Secondary Processes - Repression

The effortless and regular avoidance by the psychical process of the memory or anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype and first example of psychical repression.
The second system can only cathect an idea if it is in a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it.
I propose to describe
- The psychical process of which the first system alone admits as the "primary process" (free, mobile psychical energy)
- The process which results from the inhibition imposed by the second system as the "secondary process" (bound, quiescent energy)
All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. Thinking must concern itself with the connecting paths between ideas, without being led astray by the intensities of those ideas.
The primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the course of life that the secondary processes unfold, and come to inhibit and overlay the primary ones; it may even by that their complete domination is not attained until the prime of life.
In consequence of the belated appearance of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the preconscious; the part played by the latter is restricted once and for all to directing along the most expedient paths the wishful impulses that arise from the unconscious.