The Interpretation Of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900) PREFACE

etc., Paris [1889]).
[32] A dream is the beginning of wakening.
[33] Is this the only function which we can attribute to dreams? I know of no other. A. Maeder, to be sure, has endeavoured to claim for the dream
yet other secondary functions. He started from the just observation that many dreams contain attempts to provide solutions of conflicts, which are
afterwards actually carried through. They thus behave like preparatory practice for waking activities. He therefore drew a parallel between
dreaming and the play of animals and children, which is to be conceived as a training of the inherited instincts, and a preparation for their later
serious activity, thus setting up a fonction ludique for the dream. A little while before Maeder, Alfred Adler likewise emphasized the function of
thinking ahead in the dream. (An analysis which I published in 1905 contained a dream which may be conceived as a resolution-dream, which
was repeated night after night until it was realized.)
[34] General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, p. 534 below.
[35] This material has since been provided in abundance by the literature of psycho-analysis.
[36] The emphasis [on 'parties'] is my own, though the meaning is plain enough without it.
[37] I did not dare admit it, but I continually felt tinglings and overexcitements of the parts; at the end, it wearied me so much that several times I
thought to throw myself from the dormitory window.
[38] I will not do it again.
[39] Albert never did that.
[40] The italics ['very marked cerebral anaemia.'] are mine.
[41] We put this case in the file of apyretic delirias of inanition, for it is to cerebral anaemia that we attach this particular state.
[42] Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment of the subject, which I have deliberately left, because to fill them up would, on the one
hand, require excessive labour, and, on the other hand, I should have to depend on material which is foreign to the dream. Thus, for example, I
have avoided stating whether I give the word suppressed a different meaning from that of the word repressed. No doubt, however, it will have
become clear that the latter emphasizes more than the former the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the problem, which obviously
arises, of why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the censorship even when they abandon the progressive path to consciousness, and
choose the path of regression. And so with other similar omissions. I have, above all, sought to give some idea of the problems to which the
further dissection of the dream-work leads, and to indicate the other themes with which these are connected. It was, however, not always easy to
decide just where the pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-sexual life plays in the
dream, and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an obviously sexual content, is due to a special reason - which may not perhaps be that
which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views and my neuropathological doctrines to regard the sexual life as a pudendum
with which neither the physician nor the scientific investigator should concern himself. To me, the moral indignation which prompted the
translator of Artemidorus of Daldis to keep from the reader's knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the Symbolism of Dreams is
merely ludicrous. For my own part, what decided my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation of sexual dreams I should be
bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained problems of perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason that I reserved this material for
treatment elsewhere.
[43] If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.
[44] The dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our psycho-pathology on psychology. In a short unfinished series of articles in
the Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie ("uber den psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit," 1898, and "uber
Deckerinnerungen," 1899) I attempted to interpret a number of psychic manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception.
(These and other articles on "7forgetting," "Lapses of Speech," etc., have now been published in the Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life.)
[45] This conception underwent elaboration and modification when it was recognized that the essential character of a preconscious idea was its
connection with the residues of verbal ideas. See The Unconscious, p. 428 below.
[46] Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychologie. Lecture delivered at the Third International Psychological Congress at Munich, 1897.