means without significance and challenges interpretation. Dif-
ferent dreams of the same night often have the same meaning,
and testify to an increasing effort to control a stimulus of
growing urgency. In a single dream a particularly troublesome
element may be represented by "duplicates," that is, by numer-
ous symbols.

By continually comparing dream thought with the manifest
dream that replaces it, we learn all sorts of things for which
we were not prepared, as for instance, the fact that even the
nonsense and absurdity of the dream have meaning. Yes, on
this point the opposition between the medical and psycho-
analytic conception of the dream reaches a climax not previously
achieved. According to the former, the dream is senseless be-
cause the dreaming psychic activity has lost all power of critical
judgment; according to our theory, on the other hand, the
dream becomes senseless, whenever a critical judgment, contained
in the dream thought, wishes to express the opinion: "It is
nonsense." The dream which you all know, about the visit to
the theatre (three tickets 1 Fl. 50 Kr.) is a good example of this.
The opinion expressed here is: "It was nonsense to marry so
early."

In the same way, we discover in interpretation what is the
significance of the doubts and uncertainties so often expressed
by the dreamer as to whether a certain element really occurred
in the dream ; whether it was this or something else. As a rule
these doubts and uncertainties correspond to nothing in the



148 Introduction to Psychoanalysis

latent dream thought; they are occasioned throughout by the
working of the dream censor and are equivalent to an unsuc-
cessful attempt at suppression.

One of the most surprising discoveries is the manner in which
the dream-work deals with those things which are opposed to one
another in the latent dream. We already know that agreements
in the latent material are expressed in the manifest dream
by condensations. Now oppositions are treated in exactly the
same way as agreements and are, with special preference, ex-
pressed by the same manifest element. An element in a manifest
dream, capable of having an opposite, may therefore represent
itself as well as its opposite, or may do both simultaneously;
only the context can determine which translation is to be
chosen. It must follow from this that the particle "no" cannot
be represented in the dream, at least not unambiguously.

The development of languages furnishes us with a welcome
analogy for this surprising behavior on the part of the dream
work. Many scholars who do research work in languages have
maintained that in the oldest languages opposites such as
strong, weak ; light, dark ; big, little were expressed by the same
root word. (The Contradictory Sense of Primitive Words.)'
In old Egyptian, ken originally meant both strong and weak.
In conversation, misunderstanding in the use of such ambiguous
words was avoided by the tone of voice and by accompanying
gestures, in writing by the addition of so-called determinatives,
that is, by a picture that was itself not meant to be expressed.
Accordingly, if ken meant strong, the picture of an erect little
man was placed after the alphabetical signs, if ken, weak, was
meant, the picture of a cowering man followed. Only later,
by slight modifications of the original word, were two designa-
tions developed for the opposites which it denoted. In this way,
from ken meaning both strong and weak, there was derived a
ken, strong, and a ken, weak. It is said that not only the most
primitive languages in their last developmental stage, but also
the more recent ones, even the living tongues of to-day have
retained abundant remains of this primitive opposite meaning.
Let me give you a few illustrations of this taken from 0. Abel
(1884).

In Latin there are still such words of double meaning :

altus high, deep, and sacer, sacred, accursed.



The Dream- Work 149

As examples of modifications of the same root, I cite :

clamare to scream, clam quiet, still, secret ;

siccus dry, succus juice.

And from the German :

Stimme voice, stumm dumb.

The comparison of related tongues yields a wealth of examples :

English: lock; German: Loch hole, Lucke gap.

English : cleave; German : kleben to stick, to adhere.

The English without, is to-day used to mean ''not with"; that
"with" had the connotation of deprivation as well as that of
apportioning, is apparent from the compounds: withdraw,
withhold. The German wieder, again, closely resembles this.

Another peculiarity of dream-work finds it prototype in the
development of language. It occurred in ancient Egyptian as
well as in other later languages that the sequence of sounds of
the words was transposed to denote the same fundamental idea.
The following are examples from English and German :

Topf pot; boat tub; hurry Ruhe (rest, quiet).

Balken (beam) Eloben (mallet) club.

From the Latin and the German :

capere (to seize) packen (to seize, to grasp).

Inversions such as occur here in the single word are effected
in a very different way by the dream-work. We already know
the inversion of the sense, substitution by the opposite. Besides
there are inversions of situations, of relations between two
people, and so in dreams we are in a sort of topsy-turvy
world. In a dream it is frequently the rabbit that shoots
the hunter. Further inversion occurs in the sequence of events,
so that in the dream the cause is placed after the effect. It is
like a performance in a third-rate theatre, where the hero falls
before the shot which kills him is fired from the wings. Or
there are dreams in which the whole sequence of the elements
is inverted, so that in the interpretation one must take the last
first, and the first last, in order to obtain a meaning. You will
recall from our study of dream symbolism that to go or fall into
the water means the same as to come out of it, namely, to give
birth to, or to be born, and that mounting stairs or a ladder
means the same as going down. The advantage that dream dis-
tortions may gain from such freedom of representation, is un-
mistakable.



150 Introduction to Psychoanalysis

These features of the dream-work may be called archaic. They
are connected with ancient systems of expression, ancient lan-
guages and literatures, and involve the same difficulties which
we shall deal with later in a critical connection.

Now for some other aspects of the matter. In the dream-work
it is plainly a question of translating the latent thoughts, ex-
pressed in words, into psychic images, in the main, of a visual
kind. Now our thoughts were developed from such psychic
images ; their first material and the steps which led up to them
were psychic impressions, or to be more exact, the memory images
of these psychic impressions. Only later were words attached to
these and then combined into thoughts. The dream-work there-
fore puts the thoughts through a regressive treatment, that is,
one that retraces the steps in their development. In this re-
gression, all that has been added to the thoughts as a new
contribution in the course of the development of the memory
pictures must fall away.

This, then, is the dream-work. In view of the processes that
we have discovered about it, our interest in the manifest dream
was forced into the background. I shall, however, devote a few
remarks to the latter, since it is after all the only thing that is
positively known to us.

It is natural that the manifest dream should lose its import-
ance for us. It must be a matter of indifference to us whether
it is well composed or resolved into a series of disconnected single
images. Even when its exterior seems to be significant, we know
that it has been developed by means of dream distortion and may
have as little organic connection with the inner content of the
dream as the facade of an Italian church has with its structure
and ground plan. At other times this facade of the dream, too,
has its significance, in that it reproduces with little or no dis-
tortion an important part of the latent dream thought. But
we cannot know this before we have put the dream through a
process of interpretation and reached a decision as to what
amount of distortion has taken place. A similar doubt pre-
vails when two elements in the dream seem to have been brought
into close relations to one another. This may be a valuable hint,
suggesting that we may join together those manifest thoughts
which correspond to the elements in the latent dream; yet at



The Dream- Work 151

Diner times we are convinced that what belongs together in
thought has been torn apart in the dream.

As a general rule we must refrain from trying to explain one
part of the manifest dream by another, as if the dream were
coherently conceived and pragmatically represented. At the
most it is comparable to a Breccian stone, produced by the
fusion of various minerals in such a way that the markings it
shows are entirely different from those of the original mineral
constituents. There is actually a part of the dream-work, the
so-called secondary treatment, whose function it is to develop
something unified, something approximately coherent from the
final products of the dream-work. In so doing the material is
often arranged in an entirely misleading sense and insertions
are made wherever it seems necessary.

On the other hand, we must not over-estimate the dream-
work, nor attribute too much to it. The processes which we have
enumerated tell the full tale of its functioning; beyond con-
densing, displacing, representing plastically, and then subject-
ing the whole to a secondary treatment, it can do nothing.
Whatever of judgment, of criticism, of surprise, and of deduc-
tion are to be found in the dream are not products of the
dream-work and are only very seldom signs of afterthoughts
about the dream, but are generally parts of the latent dream
thought, which have passed over into the manifest dream, more
or less modified and adapted to the context. In the matter of
composing speeches, the dream-work can also do nothing. Ex-
cept for a few examples, the speeches in the dream are imitations
and combinations of speeches heard or made by oneself during
the day, and which have been introduced into the latent thought,
either as material or as stimuli for the dream. Neither can the
dream pose problems ; when these are found in the dream, they
are in the main combinations of numbers, semblances of examples
that are quite absurd or merely copies of problems in the latent
dream thought. Under these conditions it is not surprising
that the interest which has attached itself to the dream-work
is soon deflected from it to the latent dream thoughts which
are revealed in more or less distorted form in the manifest
dream. It is not justifiable, however, to have this change go
so far that in a theoretical consideration one regularly substitutes
the latent dream thought for the dream itself, and maintains



152 Introduction to Psychoanalysis

of the latter what can hold only for the former. It is odd that
the results of psychoanalysis should be misused for such an
exchange. "Dream" can mean nothing but the result of the
dream-work, that is, the form into which the latent dream
thoughts have been translated by the dream-work.

Dream-work is a process of a very peculiar sort, the like of
which has hitherto not been discovered in psychic life. These
condensations, displacements, regressive translations of thoughts
into pictures, are new discoveries which richly repay our efforts
in the field of psychoanalysis. You will realize from the parallel
to the dream-work, what connections psychoanalytic studies
will reveal with other fields, especially with the development of
speech and thought. You can only surmise the further sig-
nificance of these connections when you hear that the mechanism
of the dream structure is the model for the origin of neurotic
symptoms.

I know too that we cannot as yet estimate the entire con-
tribution that this work has made to psychology. We shall only
indicate the new proofs that have been given of the existence
of unconscious psychic acts for such are the latent dream
thoughts and the unexpectedly wide approach to the under-
standing of the unconscious psychic life that dream interpreta-
tion opens up to us.

The time has probably come, however, to illustrate separately,
by various little examples of dreams, the connected facts for
which you have been prepared.



TWELFTH LECTURE

THE DREAM

Analysis of Sample Dreams

I HOPE you will not be disappointed if I again lay before
you excerpts from dream analyses instead of inviting you
to participate in the interpretation of a beautiful long
dream. You will say that after so much preparation you
ought to have this right, and that after the successful interpreta-
tion of so many thousands of dreams it should long ago have be-
come possible to assemble a collection of excellent dream samples
with which we could demonstrate all our assertions concerning
dream-work and dream thoughts. Yes, but the difficulties which
stand in the way of the fulfillment of your wish are too many.

First of all, I must confess to you that no one practices dream
interpretation as his main occupation. When does one interpret
dreams? Occasionally one can occupy himself with the dream
of some friend, without any special purpose, or else he may
work with his own dreams for a time in order to school himself
in psychoanalytic method; most often, however, one deals with
the dreams of nervous individuals who are undergoing analytic
treatment. These latter dreams are excellent material, and in no
way inferior to those of normal persons, but one is forced by the
technique of the treatment to subordinate dream analysis to
therapeutic aims and to pass over a large number of dreams
after having derived something from them that is of use in the
treatment. Many dreams we meet with during the treatment
are, as a matter of fact, impossible of complete analysis. Since
they spring from the total mass of psychic material which is
still unknown to us, their understanding becomes possible only
after the completion of the cure. Besides, to tell you such
dreams would necessitate the disclosure of all the secrets con-
cerning a neurosis. That will not do for us, since we have taken
the dream as preparation for the study of the neuroses.

153



154 Introduction to Psychoanalysis

I know you would gladly leave this material, and would prefer
to hear the dreams of healthy persons, or your own dreams
explained. But that is impossible because of the content of
these dreams. One can expose neither himself, nor another
whose confidence he has won, so inconsiderately as would result
from a thorough interpretation of his dreams which, as you
already know, refer to the most intimate things of his person-
ality, In addition to this difficulty, caused by the nature of
the material, there is another that must be considered when
communicating a dream. You know the dream seems strange
even to the dreamer himself, let alone to one who does not know
the dreamer. Our literature is not poor in good and detailed
dream analyses. I myself have published some in connection
with case histories. Perhaps the best example of a dream inter-
pretation is the one published by 0. Rank, being two related
dreams of a young girl, covering about two pages of print, the
analysis covering seventy-six pages. I would need about a
whole semester in order to take you through such a task. If
we select a longer or more markedly distorted dream, we have
to make so many explanations, we must make use of so many-
free associations and recollections, must go into so many by-
paths, that a lecture on the subject would be entirely unsatis-
factory and inconclusive. So I must ask you to be content
with what is more easily obtained, with the recital of small bits
of dreams of neurotic persons, in which we may be able to
recognize this or that isolated fact. Dream symbols are the
most easily demonstrable, and after them, certain peculiarities
of regressive dream representations. 1 I shall tell you why I
considered each of the following dreams worthy of communica-
tion.

1. A dream, consisting of only two brief pictures: "The
dreamer's uncle is smoking a cigarette, although it is Saturday.
A woman caresses him as though he were her child."

In commenting on the first picture, the dreamer (a Jew)
remarks that his uncle is a pious man who never did, and never
would do, anything so sinful as smoking on the Sabbath. As to
the woman of the second picture, he has no free associations
other than his mother. These two pictures or thoughts should

1 This highly technical concept is explained in The Interpretation of
Preams, Chap. VII, Sec. (b) pp. 422 et seq.



Analysis of Sample Dreams 155

obviously be brought into connection with each other, but how ?
Since he expressly rules out the reality of his uncle's action,
then it is natural to interpolate an "if." "// my uncle, that
pious man, should smoke a cigarette on Saturday, then I could
also permit my mother's caresses." This obviously means that
the mother's caresses are prohibited, in the same manner as is
smoking on Saturday, to a pious Jew. You will recall, I told
you that all relations between the dream thoughts disappear in
the dream-work, that these relations are broken up into their
raw material, and that it is the task of interpretation to re-
interpolate the omitted connections.

2. Through my publications on dreams I have become, in
certain respects, the public consultant on matters pertaining to
dreams, and for many years I have been receiving communica-
tions from the most varied sources, in which dreams are related
to me or presented to me for my judgment. I am of course
grateful to all those persons who include with the story of the
dream, enough material to make an interpretation possible, or
who give such an interpretation themselves. It is in this cate-
gory that the following dream belongs, the dream of a Munich
physician in the year 1910. I select it because It goes to show
how impossible of understanding a dream generally is before the
dreamer has given us what information he has about it. I sus-
pect that at bottom you consider the ideal dream interpretation
that in which one simply inserts the meaning of the symbols,
and would like to lay aside the technique of free association to
the dream elements. I wish to disabuse your minds of this
harmful error.

"On July 13, 1910, toward morning, I dreamed that I was
bicycling down a street in Tubingen, when a brown Dachshund
tore after me and caught me by the heel. A bit further on I get
off, seat myself on a step, and begin to beat the beast, which has
clenched its teeth tight. (I feel no discomfort from the biting
or the whole scene.} Two elderly ladies are sitting opposite me
and watching me with grins on their faces. Then I wake up
and, as so often happens to me, the whole dream becomes per-
fectly clear to me in this moment of transition to the waking
state.' 9

Symbols are of little use in this case. The dreamer, however,
informs us, ' ' I lately fell in love with a girl, just from seeing her



156 Introduction to Psychoanalysis

on the street, but had no means of becoming acquainted with her.
The most pleasant means might have been the Dachshund, since
I am a great lover of animals, and also felt that the girl was in
sympathy with this characteristic." He also adds that he re-
peatedly interfered in the fights of scuffling dogs with great
dexterity and frequently to the great amazement of the spec-
tators. Thus we learn that the girl, who pleased him, was always
accompanied by this particular dog. This girl, however, was
disregarded in the manifest dream, and there remained only
the dog which he associates with her. Perhaps the elderly ladies
who simpered at him took the place of the girl. The remainder
of what he tells us is not enough to explain this point. Riding
a bicycle in the dream is a direct repetition of the remembered
situation. He had never met the girl with the dog except when
he was on his bicycle.

3. When anyone has lost a loved one, he produces dreams of
a special sort for a long time afterward, dreams in which the
knowledge of death enters into the most remarkable compro-
mises with the desire to have the deceased alive again. At one
time the deceased is dead and yet continues to live on because
he does not know that he is dead, and would die completely only
if he knew it; at another time he is half dead and half alive,
and each of these conditions has its particular signs. One cannot
simply label these dreams nonsense, for to come to life again is
no more impossible in the dream than, for example, it is in the
fairy story, in which it occurs as a very frequent fate. As far
as I have been able to analyze such dreams, I have always found
them to be capable of a sensible solution, but that the pious wish
to recall the deceased to life goes about expressing itself by the
oddest methods. Let me tell you such a dream, which seems
queer and senseless enough, and analysis of which will show
you many of the points for which you have been prepared by
our theoretical discussions. The dream is that of a man who
had lost his father many years previously.

"Father is dead, but has been exhumed and looks badly. He
goes on living, and the dreamer does everything to prevent him
from noticing that fact." Then the dream goes on to other
things, apparently irrelevant.

The father is dead, that we know. That he was exhumed is
not really true, nor is the truth of the rest of the dream im-



Analysis of Sample Dreams 157

portant. But the dreamer tells us that when he came back
from his father's funeral, one of his teeth began to ache. He
wanted to treat this tooth according to the Jewish precept, ''If
thy tooth offend thee, pluck it out," and betook himself to the
dentist. But the latter said, "One does not simply pull a tooth
out, one must have patience with it. I shall inject something to
kill the nerve. Come again in three days and then I will take
it out."

"This 'taking it out','' says the dreamer suddenly, "is the
exhuming. ' '

Is the dreamer right? It does not correspond exactly, only
approximately, for the tooth is not taken out, but something that
has died off is taken out of it. But after our other experiences
we are probably safe in believing that the dream work is capable
of such inaccuracies. It appears that the dreamer condensed,
fused into one, his dead father and the tooth that was killed
but retained. No wonder then, that in the manifest dream some-
thing senseless results, for it is impossible for everything that is
said of the tooth to fit the father. What is it that serves as
something intermediate between tooth and father and makes
this condensation possible?

This interpretation must be correct, however, for the dreamer
says that he is acquainted with the saying that when one dreams
of losing a tooth it means that one is going to lose a member
of his family.

"We know that this popular interpretation is incorrect, or at
least is correct only in a scurrilous sense. For that reason it is
all the more surprising to find this theme thus touched upon in
the background of other portions of the dream content.

Without any further urging, the dreamer now begins to tell
of his father's illness and death as well as of his relations with
him. The father was sick a long time, and his care and treat-
ment cost him, the son, much money. And yet it was never too
much for him, he never grew impatient, never wished it might
end soon. He boasts of his true Jewish piety toward his father,
of rigid adherence to the Jewish precepts. But are you not
struck by a contradiction in the thoughts of the dream? He
had identified tooth with father. As to the tooth he wanted to
follow the Jewish precept that carries out its own judgment,
"pull it out if it causes pain and annoyance." He had also been



158 Introduction to Psychoanalysis

anxious to follow the precept of the law with regard to his
father, which in this case, however, tells him to disregard trouble
and expense, to take all the burdens upon himself and to let no
hostile intent arise toward the object which causes the pain.
Would not the agreement be far more compelling if he had
really developed feelings toward his father similar to those about
his sick tooth ; that is, had he wished that a speedy death should
put an end to that superfluous, painful and expensive existence ?

I do not doubt that this was really his attitude toward his