The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

can meet only when both acknowledge that unconscious psychic processes is the appropriate and justified expression for all established fact. The
physician cannot but reject, with a shrug of his shoulders, the assertion that consciousness is the indispensable quality of the psychic; if his
respect for the utterances of the philosophers is still great enough, he may perhaps assume that he and they do not deal with the same thing and do
not pursue the same science. For a single intelligent observation of the psychic life of a neurotic, a single analysis of a dream, must force upon
him the unshakable conviction that the most complicated and the most accurate operations of thought, to which the name of psychic occurrences
can surely not be refused, may take place without arousing consciousness.[47] The physician, it is true, does not learn of these unconscious
processes until they have produced an effect on consciousness which admits of communication or observation. But this effect on consciousness
may show a psychic character which differs completely from the unconscious process, so that internal perception cannot possibly recognize in the
first a substitute for the second. The physician must reserve himself the right to penetrate, by a Process of deduction, from the effect on
consciousness to the unconscious psychic process; he learns in this way that the effect on consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the
unconscious process, and that the latter has not become conscious as such, and has, moreover, existed and operated without in any way betraying
itself to consciousness. -
Du Prel says: "The problem: what is the psyche, manifestly requires a preliminary examination as to whether consciousness and psyche are
identical. But it is just this preliminary question which is answered in the negative by the dream, which shows that the concept of the psyche
extends beyond that of consciousness, much as the gravitational force of a star extends beyond its sphere of luminosity" (Philos. d. Mystik, p. 47).
"It is a truth which cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the concepts of consciousness and of the psyche are not co-extensive" (p. 306).
A return from the over-estimation of the property of consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine insight into the course of
psychic events. As Lipps has said, the unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle
which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can stop
at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full psychic function. The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as
much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as is the
external world by the reports of our sense-organs.
We get rid of a series of dream-problems which have claimed much attention from earlier writers on the subject when the old antithesis between
conscious life and dream-life is discarded, and the unconscious psychic assigned to its proper place. Thus, many of the achievements which are a
matter for wonder in a dream are now no longer to be attributed to dreaming, but to unconscious thinking, which is active also during the day. If
the dream seems to make play with a symbolical representation of the body, as Scherner has said, we know that this is the work of certain
unconscious phantasies, which are probably under the sway of sexual impulses and find expression not only in dreams, but also in hysterical
phobias and other symptoms. If the dream continues and completes mental work begun during the day, and even brings valuable new ideas to
light, we have only to strip off the dream-disguise from this, as the contribution of the dream-work, and a mark of the assistance of dark powers in
the depths of the psyche (cf. the devil in Tartini's sonata-dream). The intellectual achievement as such belongs to the same psychic forces as are
responsible for all such achievements during the day. We are probably much too inclined to over-estimate the conscious character even of
intellectual and artistic production. From the reports of certain writers who have been highly productive, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, we learn,
rather, that the most essential and original part of their creations came to them in the form of inspirations, and offered itself to their awareness in
an almost completed state. In other cases, where there is a concerted effort of all the psychic forces, there is nothing strange in the fact that
conscious activity, too, lends its aid. But it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity to hide from us all other activities wherever it
participates.
It hardly seems worth while to take up the historical significance of dreams as a separate theme. Where, for instance, a leader has been impelled
by a dream to engage in a bold undertaking, the success of which has had the effect of changing history, a new problem arises only so long as the
dream is regarded as a mysterious power and contrasted with other more familiar psychic forces. The problem disappears as soon as we regard the
dream as a form of expression for impulses to which a resistance was attached during the day, whilst at night they were able to draw
reinforcement from deep-lying sources of excitation.[48] But the great respect with which the ancient peoples regarded dreams is based on a just
piece of psychological divination. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul, to the demonic power
which furnishes the dream-wish, and which we have found again in our unconscious.
It is not without purpose that I use the expression in our unconscious, for what we so call does not coincide with the unconscious of the
philosophers, nor with the unconscious of Lipps. As they use the term, it merely means the opposite of the conscious. That there exist not only
conscious but also unconscious psychic processes is the opinion at issue, which is so hotly contested and so energetically defended. Lipps
enunciates the more comprehensive doctrine that everything psychic exists as unconscious, but that some of it may exist also as conscious. But it
is not to prove this doctrine that we have adduced the phenomena of dreams and hysterical symptom-formation; the observation of normal life
alone suffices to establish its correctness beyond a doubt. The novel fact that we have learned from the analysis of psycho-pathological
formations, and indeed from the first member of the group, from dreams, is that the unconscious - and hence all that is psychic - occurs as a
function of two separate systems, and that as such it occurs even in normal psychic life. There are consequently two kinds of unconscious, which
have not as yet been distinguished by psychologists. Both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the first, which we call
Ucs, is likewise incapable of consciousness; whereas the second we call Pcs because its excitations, after the observance of certain rules, are
capable of reaching consciousness; perhaps not before they have again undergone censorship, but nevertheless regardless of the Ucs system. The