Sigmund Freud

“ If a physicist can prove to you that the organic life of this planet must, within a short period of time, become completely extinct, do you also venture to say to him, "That cannot be so. This prospect is too unpleasant." On the contrary, you will be silent until another physicist proves some error in the assumptions or calculations of the first. If you reject the unpleasant, you are repeating the mechanism of dream construction instead of understanding and mastering it. ”

“ Our therapy is too long drawn-out, too extended for that. But perhaps you are still holding to one of the factors already mentioned, and think that you have found a factor through which our influence may be effective. If the restrictions of morality which are imposed by society have a share in the privation forced upon the patient, treatment might give him the courage, or possibly even the prescription itself, to cross these barriers, might tell him how gratification and health can be secured in the renunciation of that ideal which society has held up to us but often disregards. ”

“ As if to balance the scale, we have on the other hand the masochists, whose sole satisfaction consists in suffering every variety of humiliation and torture, symbolic and real, at the hands of the beloved one. There are still others who combine and confuse a number of these abnormal conditions. Moreover, in both these groups there are those who seek sexual satisfaction in reality, and others who are content merely to imagine such gratification, who need no actual object at all, but can supplant it by their own fantastic creations. ”

“ Difficulties turn up in the treatment. The patient asserts that he can think of nothing more. We are under the impression that he is no longer interested in the work, that he lightly passes over the injunction that, heedless of any critical impulse, he must say everything that comes to his mind. He behaves as though he were not under treatment, as though he had closed no agreement with the physician; he is clearly obsessed by something he does not wish to divulge. This is a situation which endangers the success of the treatment. We are distinctly confronted with a tremendous resistance. ”

“ Keep well in mind the impression that sexual life, as we call it, the function, of the libido, does not make its appearance as a completed whole, nor does it develop in its own image, but goes through a series of successive phases which are not similar to each other. In fact, it is a developmental sequence, like that from the grub to the butterfly. The turning point of the development is the subordination of all sexual partial-instincts to the primacy of the genitals, and thereby the subjection of sexuality to the function of reproduction. ”

“ Hate, too, expends itself without restraint. Revenge and murderous wishes toward those standing closest to the dreamer are not unusual, toward those best beloved in daily life, toward parents, brothers and sisters, toward one's spouse and one's own children. These censored wishes seem to arise from a veritable hell; no censorship seems too harsh to be applied against their waking interpretation.
But do not reproach the dream itself for this evil content. You will not, I am sure, forget that the dream is charged with the harmless, indeed the useful function of guarding sleep from disturbance. ”

“ It is not a far cry to suppose that it is convenient for the dream censorship to make use of symbolism since both lead to the same end, to making the dream strange and incomprehensible.
Whether or not in the further study of the dream we shall hit upon a new item that influences dream distortion, remains to be seen. I should not like to leave the subject of dream symbolism without once more touching upon the curious fact that it arouses such strong opposition in the case of educated persons, in spite of the fact that symbolism in myth, religion, art and speech is undoubtedly so prevalent. ”

“ I have already taken the liberty of pointing out that in each one of you there is a deep-rooted belief in psychic freedom and volition, a belief which is absolutely unscientific, and which must capitulate before the claims of a determinism that controls even the psychic life. I beg of you to accept it as a fact that only this one association will occur to the person questioned. But I do not put one belief in opposition to another. ”

“ The fact that we meet our parents in the dream as imperial or royal persons is at first surprising. But it has its parallel in the fairy tale. Doesn't it begin to dawn upon us that the many fairy tales which begin "Once upon a time there was a king and a queen" intend nothing else than, "Once there was a father and a mother?" In our families we refer to our children as princes, the eldest as the crown-prince. The king usually calls himself the father of the country. We playfully designate little children as worms, and say, sympathetically, "poor little worm." ”

“ One cannot maintain that the world was very grateful to psychoanalytic research for its discovery of the Oedipus-complex. On the contrary, it called forth the strongest resistance on the part of adults; and persons who had neglected to take part in denying this proscribed or tabooed feeling-relationship later made good the omission by taking all value from the complex through false interpretations. According to my unchanged conviction there is nothing to deny and nothing to make more palatable. One should accept the fact, recognized by the Greek myth itself, as inevitable destiny. ”

“ Certainly, but do not at this point allow yourselves to become guilty of the injustice which has so often been perpetrated against psychoanalysis, of reproaching it with denying one thing because it was asserting another. It is not our intention to deny the noble strivings of human nature, nor have we ever done anything to deprecate their value. On the contrary, I show you not only the censored evil dream-wishes, but also the censor which suppresses them and renders them unrecognizable. ”

“ It is really only natural; if the child has sexual life at all, it must necessarily be perverse, because aside from a few hazy illusions, the child does not know how sexuality gives rise to reproduction. The common characteristic of all perversions, on the other hand, is that they have abandoned reproduction as their aim. We term sexual activity perverse when it has renounced the aim of reproduction and follows the pursuit of pleasure as an independent goal. And so you realize that the turning point in the development of sexual life lies in its subjugation to the purpose of reproduction. ”

“ Something had to happen, some sort of relief had to be found and the mechanism of displacement which so constantly takes part in the origin of obsessional jealousy offered the most immediate mitigation. If not only she, old woman that she was, was in love with a young man but if also her old husband had an affair with a young girl, then she would be freed from the voice of her conscience which accused her of infidelity. The phantasy of her husband's infidelity was thus like a cooling salve on her burning wound. ”

“ All this really is not what we might expect of a compulsion-driven, irresistible, convulsive defense against a stimulus. As concerns the dimensions of dreams, there are very short ones which contain only one picture or a few, one thought—yes, even one word only—, others which are uncommonly rich in content, seem to dramatize whole novels and to last very long. There are dreams which are as plain as an experience itself, so plain that we do not recognize them as dreams for a long time after waking; others which are indescribably weak, shadowy and vague ”

“ The sucking at the mother's breast becomes the term of departure for all of sexual life, the unattained ideal of later sex gratification, to which the imagination often reverts in times of need. The mother's breast is the first object for the sexual instinct; I can scarcely bring home to you how significant this object is for centering on the sexual object in later life, what profound influence it exerts upon the most remote domains of psychic life through evolution and substitution. The suckling, however, soon relinquishes it and fills its place by a part of his own body. ”

“ Everyone of us who can look back over a longer or shorter life experience will probably say that he might have spared himself many disappointments and painful surprises if he had found the courage and decision to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he made in his intercourse with people, and to consider them as indications of the intentions which were still being kept secret. As a rule, one does not dare do this. One would feel as though he were again becoming superstitious via a detour through science. ”

“ There is no way in which to make sure that one man will not wield a technique less well, or utilize it more fully, than another. What might, for example, impress you as arbitrariness in the interpretation of symbols, is compensated for by the fact that as a rule the connection of the dream thoughts among themselves, the connection of the dream with the life of the dreamer, and the whole psychic situation in which the dream occurs, chooses just one of the possible interpretations advanced and rejects the others as useless for its purposes. ”

“ People will say to us: "Why are you so set on including within sexuality those manifestations of childhood, out of which the sexual later develops, but which, according to your own admission, are of uncertain origin? Why are you not satisfied rather with the physiological description, and simply say that even in the suckling one may notice activities, such as sucking objects or holding back excrements, which show us that he strives towards an organic pleasure? In that way you would have avoided the estranging conception of sexual life in the tiniest child." ”

“ It seems very possible to me that everything which is obtained during an analysis in the guise of phantasy, the seduction of children, the release of sexual excitement by watching parental intercourse, the threat of castration—or rather castration itself—were once realities in the primeval existence of mankind and that the imaginative child is merely filling in the gaps of individual truth with prehistoric truth. We have again and again suspected that the psychology of neuroses stores up more of the antiquities of human development than all other sources. ”

“ Are you ignorant of how uncontrolled and undependable the average human being is in all the affairs of sex life? Or do you not know that all the immoralities and excesses of which we dream nightly are crimes committed daily by waking persons? What else does psychoanalysis do here but confirm the old saying of Plato, that the good people are those who content themselves with dreaming what the others, the bad people, really do? ”

“ The sexual interest of children generally turns first to the mystery of birth—the same problem that is the basis of the questions asked by the sphinx of Thebes. This curiosity is for the most part aroused by the selfish fear of the arrival of a new child. The answer which the nursery has ready for the child, that the stork brings children, is doubted far more frequently than we imagine, even by very young children. The feeling that he has been cheated out of the truth by grown-ups, contributes greatly to the child's sense of solitude and to his independent development. ”

“ Our usefulness consists in replacing the unconscious by the conscious, in translating the unconscious into the conscious. You are right; that is exactly it. By projecting the unconscious into the conscious, we do away with suppressions, we remove conditions of symptom formation and transform a pathogenic into a normal conflict which can be decided in some way or other. This is the only psychic change we produce in our patients; its extent is the extent of our helpfulness. Wherever no suppression and no analogous psychic process can be undone, there is no place for our therapy. ”

“ We are apt to feel insulted that the patient has wasted our time with invented tales. There is an enormous gap in our thinking between reality and invention and we accord an entirely different valuation to reality. The patient, too, takes this same viewpoint in his normal thinking. When he offers the material which, by way of the symptom, leads back to the wish situations which are modeled upon the childhood experiences, we are at first, to be sure, in doubt whether we are dealing with reality or with phantasy. ”

“ In a short while, perhaps only after a violent struggle, she will renounce the gratification of onanism, yet still retain an undercurrent of depression in her attitude. If, during her early childhood, she chances to learn something about sexual intercourse, she will turn away in explicable disgust and seek to remain innocent. Probably she is at the time subjected anew to an irresistible impulse to onanism, of which she does not dare to complain. When the time arrives for her to find favor in the eyes of a man, a neurosis will suddenly develop and cheat her out of marriage and the joy of life. ”

“ If we accredit the emotional component of actual fear to the ego-libido, and the accompanying activity to the egoistic instinct to self-preservation, we have overcome every theoretical difficulty. Furthermore, you do not really believe that we flee because we experience fear? On the contrary, we first are afraid and then take to flight from the same motive that is awakened by the realization of danger. Men who have survived the endangering of their lives tell us that they were not at all afraid, they only acted. ”

“ We actually speak of a dream censor to which we may ascribe a contributing part in the dream distortion. Wherever there are gaps in the manifest dream, it is the fault of the dream censor. Indeed, we should go further, and recognize each time as a manifestation of the dream censor, those places at which a dream element is especially faint, indefinitely and doubtfully recalled among other, more clearly delineated portions. But it is only rarely that this censorship manifests itself so undisguisedly, so naively one may say, as in the example of the dream of the "services of love." ”

“ Forgetting proper names is really a splendid example for the case of dream analysis; only here there is present in one person what in the dream interpretation is divided between two persons. Though I have forgotten a name temporarily I still retain the certainty that I know the name; that certainty which we could acquire for the dreamer only by way of the Bernheim experiment. The forgotten name, however, is not accessible. Cogitation, no matter how strenuous, does not help. Experience soon tells me that. But I am able each time to find one or more substitute names for the forgotten name. ”

“ It is just in these first years of childhood which later are hidden by amnesia, that this egoism frequently shows itself in most extreme form, and from which regular but clear tendencies thereto, or real remnants thereof, show themselves. For the child loves itself first, and later learns to love others, to sacrifice something of its ego for another. Even those persons whom the child seems to love from the very beginning, it loves at the outset because it has need of them, cannot do without them, in others words, out of egoistical motives. ”

“ If the difference in age is greater, the new child may awaken certain sympathies as an interesting object, as a sort of living doll, and if the difference is eight years or more, motherly impulses, especially in the case of girls, may come into play. But to be truthful, when we disclose in a dream the wish for the death of a mother or sister we need seldom find it puzzling and may trace its origin easily to early childhood, often enough, also, to the propinquity of later years. ”

“ Why do not the sleep disturbing psychic stimuli do the job without it? And if they must, because of the dream censorship, disguise themselves through old forms of expression which are no longer comprehensible, what is the use of giving new life to old, long-outgrown psychic stimuli, wishes and character types, that is, why the material regression in addition to the formal? The only satisfactory answer would be this, that only in this manner can a dream be built up, that dynamically the dream-stimulus can be satisfied only in this way. ”

“ There is danger of not discovering the unconscious, of overlooking the great significance of the libido, of judging all conditions as they appear to the ego of the nervous person. It is obvious that this ego is neither a reliable nor an impartial authority. For this very ego is the force that denies and suppresses the unconscious; when the unconscious is concerned, how then could we expect justice to be done? The rejected claims of sexuality stand first in the line of these suppressions; it is natural that from the standpoint of the ego we can never learn their extent and significance. ”

“ Once, while the child was still in the womb, and after a tense scene with her husband, she beat her body with her fists in a fit of anger, in order to kill the child. How many mothers who to-day love their children tenderly, perhaps too tenderly, received them unwillingly, and at the time wished that the life within them would not develop further; indeed, translated this wish into various actions, happily harmless. The later death-wish against some loved one, which seems so strange, also has its origin in early phases of the relationship to that person. ”

“ We believe that the patient imparts to us a truth that is not yet sufficiently appreciated, when he complains that all his actions are spied upon and watched, all his thoughts recorded and criticized. He errs only in transferring this distressing force to something alien, outside of himself. He feels the dominance of a factor in his ego, which compares his actual ego and all of its activities to an ideal ego that he has created in the course of his development. ”

“ Preoccupation with the dream, however, is not merely impractical and superfluous, but actually ignominious; it carries the odium of the unscientific, awakens the suspicion of a personal leaning towards mysticism. The idea of a physician busying himself with dreams when even in neuropathology and psychiatry there are matters so much more serious—tumors the size of apples which incapacitate the organ of the psyche, hemorrhages, and chronic inflammations in which one can demonstrate changes in the tissues under the microscope! No, the dream is much too trifling an object, and unworthy of Science. ”