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.
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