Sándor Ferenczi

“ The dream-work succeeded in uniting two experiences of the day before, the breaking of the pitcher and the visit of the betrothed pair, with that train of thought, always emotively toned, which, though already suppressed in childhood, was always in condition to lend its affective energy to any present mental image which could be brought into even a superficial connection with it. Freud compares the dream to the promotion of a business undertaking, in which the unconscious, suppressed complex furnishes the capital, that is, the affective energy, while the wishes play the rôle of promoters. ”

“ If, finally, we compare the point of departure of the dream, the dream thoughts, with the content of the naively related dream, we see that the dream is nothing else than the concealed fulfillment of a repressed wish. ”

“ I may say at this point, that Freud's theory of dreams and his method of interpretation only approach the popular conception in so far as to ascribe to dreams sense and meaning. But the newly discovered facts sustain in no way the belief of those who would base dreams on the interference of higher powers, and see prophecies in them. Freud's theory considers the dream as a mental product dependent upon endopsychic occurrences, and is not calculated to strengthen the belief of those who consider the dream as a device of higher powers or as the clairvoyance of the sleeper. ”

“ The interpretation of dreams was for thousands of years a special science, a particular cult, whose priests and priestesses often decided the fate of countries and called forth revolutions which changed the history of the world. This now antiquated science rested on the unshakable belief that the dream, though in a concealed way and by obscure analogies, was quite capable of interpretation by the initiate, revealed the future, and that by these nocturnal phenomena the higher powers desired to prepare mortals for approaching events of importance. ”

“ Such exhibition dreams are so frequent that Freud was able to put them in the class of his "typical dreams," which recur with most people from time to time and have the same origin. They are based on the fact that there is living on in all of us an undying longing for the return of the paradisical conditions of childhood; this is the " golden age," that poets and Utopians project from the past into the future. It is a very common means of dream disguise to circumvent the censorship by presenting the wish not as such, but only in the form of an allusion in the dream. ”

“ The censorship of affairs of sex is, as already said, much milder in dream life than during waking hours, so that in dreams we experience and crave sexual experiences without bounds, even representing in our dreams experiences and acts reminding one of the so-called perversions. I avail myself as an example of the dream of a patient who was extraordinarily modest in waking life. ”

“ Any halfway intelligent man can be brought to tell out all the thoughts associated with the fragments of the dream, whether clever or stupid, coherent or senseless, pleasant or unpleasant, suppressing the shame perhaps bound up with them. ”

“ Very often in his dream he seems "big," endowed with all the freedom and power of his parents, which he wishes for so ardently by day. Wish dreams like these also occur to adults. The difficult test (about which we are so anxious) seems in dreams splendidly passed, dear relatives awaken from their graves and assure us that they are not dead, we appear to ourselves rich, powerful, endowed with great oratorical gifts, the most beautiful of women solicit our favor, and so on. ”

“ It is a noteworthy phenomenon of dream work that the material of abstract thought, the concept, is capable of presentation in the dream only little or not at all, that rather the dream as it were dramatizes thoughts only in optic or acoustic senseimages, changes them to scenes enacted on a stage, and in this way brings them to presentation. Freud characterizes very strikingly the difficulty which this necessity of working only with concrete material imposes upon the dream, when he says that the dream itself has to turn the thoughts of a political editorial into illustrations. ”

“ And when we compare the manifest dream, often very short, with the rich material which is brought to light during the process of analysis, and when we consider that in spite of this quantitative difference all the elements of the latent dream-content are contained in some way in the portion which is manifest to us, we must agree that Freud is right when he considers this dream-condensation as the most toilsome part of the creation of the dream. ”

“ The associative analysis of a dream is only the reversal of the synthetic work which the psyche executes at night while it transforms the unwelcome thought and the unpleasant sensation which disturb sleep into wish-fulfilling dream-images. ”

“ We have been for a long time familiar with the thought that there is no chance in the physical world, no event without sufficient cause; on the ground of psychoanalytic experience we must suppose just as strong a determination of every mental activity, however arbitrary it may seem. It is therefore an unjustified fear that the activity of association when freed from all restraints in such analysis, will give results which have no value. ”

“ Even in the presentation of a simple negative the dream can succeed only with great difficulty, so that as we know from Freud we can never tell in advance whether the dream thought is to be interpreted in a positive or a negative way. Considering the complexities of our mental organism it is only too easily seen that affirmation and negation of the same thoughts and feelingcomplexes is to be met with in the dream thoughts side by side, or, rather in succession. ”

“ We have the dream related to us, divide the given material into several parts or sections, and require the dreamer to tell all that occurs to him when he directs his attention, not to the whole of the dream, but to a definite part of it, to a particular event or word-image occurring in it. This association must, however, be wholly free, consequently the single thing forbidden is the dominance of critical choice among the irruptive ideas. ”

“ When we consider these facts we come to the conclusion that Freud is in the right when he says that dreams express such impulses as wish-fulfillments, as the fulfillment of wishes from that part of our childhood which seems long since outgrown. ”

“ This analysis may serve as an example for all those dreams which apparently contradict Freud's wish theory, and which have to do with very unwelcome things or even with the non-fulfillment of wishes. If we seek out the latent dream thoughts concealed behind these painfully toned dreams, it becomes clear to us that, as Freud himself expresses it the non-fulfillment of a wish in a dream always means the fulfillment of some other wish. ”

“ The nerve stimuli during sleep offer then, as it were, only the opportunity for the unfolding of certain immanent tendencies of the psychic life. Analysis shows that dreams caused by nerve stimulation are also open or concealed wish-fulfillments: the thirsty man drinks great amounts of water in his dreams, the hungry man satisfies himself; the sick man who is disturbed by the ice-packing on his head throws it away, for he thinks of himself in his dream as already well; the painful throbbing of a boil on the perinaeum leads to the dream idea of riding. ”

“ This sentence contains the most essential results of Freud's investigation of dreams. The idea that the dream fulfills wishes, which in the rude world of facts must be unfulfilled, seems to share in the language of abandoned popular science. "Dreams" are used metaphorically in most languages for "wishes" and the Hungarian proverb says just this, that "swine dream of acorns, the goose of maize" which is only to be regarded as an allusion to the similar direction of human dreams.
Some of the dreams of adults and most of the dreams of children are purely wish-fulfillment dreams. ”

“ Dreams are fond of using ambiguous words and interpretations of all sorts of expressions in concrete or metaphorical senses in order to make abstract concepts and thoughts capable of presentation and so of inclusion in the dream.
The memory of every halfway educated man contains a large number of proverbs, quotations, modes of expression, parables, fragments of verse and so forth. The content of these offers an ever present, very suitable material which can be applied to the scenic presentation of a thought or to an allusion to it. ”

“ The work of condensation and displacement go hand in hand. The dream makes harmless an important thought, which would disturb the rest of the sleeper, or be censured on ethical grounds. It as it were goes beyond such a thought, by attaching to its more unessential parts memory images until the condensed psychic intensity of these latter is able to distract the attention from the particularly interesting thought. ”

“ But psychoanalysis convinces us that when the dream links together or fuses two features or concepts, it furnishes a less successful product of the same work of condensation to which the less obvious parts of the dream owe their disguise. One of the rules of the art of dream interpretation states that in cases of such composite images the dream material of the single constituents must first be sought, and then only can it be determined on what basis of a common element or similarity the welding together has taken place. ”

“ Childish memories make continual and always significant contributions to the creation of the dream. Freud has also established the fact that the earliest age of childhood is not only not free from sexual excitations, but that rather infantile sexuality, not yet restrained by education, is expressly of a perverse character. ”

“ For the most part we attain in dreams just that which we painfully miss on waking.
The same tendency to wish-fulfillment rules not only nocturnal, but day dreams as well, the fancies in which we can catch ourselves at unoccupied moments or during monotonous activity. Freud has observed that women's fancies deal for the most part with things which immediately or mediately belong to the sex life (of being loved, proposals, beautiful clothes) , those of men predominantly with power and esteem, but also with sexual satisfaction. ”

“ Most psychologists and physiologists are inclined to attribute too great significance to stimuli of this sort; they think that they have given a satisfactory explanation of all dreams when they say that the dream is nothing but the sum of such psychophysic reactions, set free by nerve stimuli of this character. On the other hand, Freud rightly says that the dream does not admit these bodily stimuli as such to consciousness, but disguises and alters them in particular ways ”

“ It is Freud's valuable service to have succeeded in making it possible to discover the whole of the hidden formal peculiarities of the articulation of the dream, with which the dream attempts to present logical relations. Logical relations between two dream elements with respect to the dreamthoughts which are hidden behind them, are presented in the simplest case by temporal, spatial proximity, or by a fusion of the features of the dream. ”

“ My patients, for example, who at the beginning of the analysis declared that they had usually no dreams, gradually accustomed themselves by continual weakening of the inner psychic resistance against the censorship to remember all their dreams. But if in the course of the analysis one strikes a very resistant, pain-toned complex, dreams apparently cease naturally they are only forgotten, repressed, because of their unpleasant content. ”

“ We saw how greatly the analysis of a neurotic may be accelerated by a successful dream analysis. The dream censorship, which is only half awake, often allows to penetrate to the dream consciousness thought-complexes, which in waking life could not be brought to consciousness by free association. ”

“ The great part played in such dreams by cruelties inflicted or suffered must find its explanation in the sadistic idea which children have of the sex-relationship, as Freud has so beautifully shown in his "infantile sexual theories." [2] All the cruel acts of such dreams appear in analysis as sexual events transformed into deeds of violence. Sexually unsatisfied women, for example, very commonly dream of thieves breaking in, of attacks by robbers or wild beasts ”

“ The function of the censorship is to secure the repose of con- sciousness and to keep at a distance all psychic creations which would cause pain or disturb rest. And like the censor of political absolutism, who sometimes works at night, the psychic censorship is kept in activity during sleep, though its red pen- ciling is not so strongly in evidence as in waking life. ”

“ If, accordingly, we find psychoanalysis objection- able for this reason, we are really degrading the description of the unconscious facts of human mentality by our action in regarding them as obscene. ”

“ We may be concerned on the one hand with a dreamphantasy, that is, with the reproduction of fancies which have grown up in the waking life, articles read in books or journals, fragments of romances or bits of conversation spoken or heard by the person himself. A deeper and more general explanation for the apparently logical articulation of many dreams is, however, the fact that the rationalizing tendency of mental activity, which seeks to arrange senseless material into logical' trains of thought, does not rest at night. ”