The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)
The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)
The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)
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etc., Paris [1889]).<br />
[32] A dream is the beginning <strong>of</strong> wakening.<br />
[33] Is this the only function which we can attribute to dreams? I know <strong>of</strong> no other. A. Maeder, to be sure, has endeavoured to claim for the dream<br />
yet other secondary functions. He started from the just observation that many dreams contain attempts to provide solutions <strong>of</strong> conflicts, which are<br />
afterwards actually carried through. <strong>The</strong>y thus behave like preparatory practice for waking activities. He therefore drew a parallel between<br />
dreaming and the play <strong>of</strong> animals and children, which is to be conceived as a training <strong>of</strong> the inherited instincts, and a preparation for their later<br />
serious activity, thus setting up a fonction ludique for the dream. A little while before Maeder, Alfred Adler likewise emphasized the function <strong>of</strong><br />
thinking ahead in the dream. (An analysis which I published in 1905 contained a dream which may be conceived as a resolution-dream, which<br />
was repeated night after night until it was realized.)<br />
[34] General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, p. 534 below.<br />
[35] This material has since been provided in abundance by the literature <strong>of</strong> psycho-analysis.<br />
[36] <strong>The</strong> emphasis [on 'parties'] is my own, though the meaning is plain enough without it.<br />
[37] I did not dare admit it, but I continually felt tinglings and overexcitements <strong>of</strong> the parts; at the end, it wearied me so much that several times I<br />
thought to throw myself from the dormitory window.<br />
[38] I will not do it again.<br />
[39] Albert never did that.<br />
[40] <strong>The</strong> italics ['very marked cerebral anaemia.'] are mine.<br />
[41] We put this case in the file <strong>of</strong> apyretic delirias <strong>of</strong> inanition, for it is to cerebral anaemia that we attach this particular state.<br />
[42] Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment <strong>of</strong> the subject, which I have deliberately left, because to fill them up would, on the one<br />
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<br />
have avoided stating whether I give the word suppressed a different meaning from that <strong>of</strong> the word repressed. No doubt, however, it will have<br />
become clear that the latter emphasizes more than the former the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the problem, which obviously<br />
arises, <strong>of</strong> why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the censorship even when they abandon the progressive path to consciousness, and<br />
choose the path <strong>of</strong> regression. And so with other similar omissions. I have, above all, sought to give some idea <strong>of</strong> the problems to which the<br />
further dissection <strong>of</strong> the dream-work leads, and to indicate the other themes with which these are connected. It was, however, not always easy to<br />
decide just where the pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-sexual life plays in the<br />
dream, and have avoided the interpretation <strong>of</strong> dreams <strong>of</strong> an obviously sexual content, is due to a special reason - which may not perhaps be that<br />
which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views and my neuropathological doctrines to regard the sexual life as a pudendum<br />
with which neither the physician nor the scientific investigator should concern himself. To me, the moral indignation which prompted the<br />
translator <strong>of</strong> Artemidorus <strong>of</strong> Daldis to keep from the reader's knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the Symbolism <strong>of</strong> <strong>Dreams</strong> is<br />
merely ludicrous. For my own part, what decided my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation <strong>of</strong> sexual dreams I should be<br />
bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained problems <strong>of</strong> perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason that I reserved this material for<br />
treatment elsewhere.<br />
[43] If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.<br />
[44] <strong>The</strong> dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our psycho-pathology on psychology. In a short unfinished series <strong>of</strong> articles in<br />
the Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie ("uber den psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit," 1898, and "uber<br />
Deckerinnerungen," 1899) I attempted to interpret a number <strong>of</strong> psychic manifestations from everyday life in support <strong>of</strong> the same conception.<br />
(<strong>The</strong>se and other articles on "7forgetting," "Lapses <strong>of</strong> Speech," etc., have now been published in the Psycho-pathology <strong>of</strong> Everyday Life.)<br />
[45] This conception underwent elaboration and modification when it was recognized that the essential character <strong>of</strong> a preconscious idea was its<br />
connection with the residues <strong>of</strong> verbal ideas. See <strong>The</strong> Unconscious, p. 428 below.<br />
[46] Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychologie. Lecture delivered at the Third International Psychological Congress at Munich, 1897.