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Sigmund Freud – O n D r e a m s (1901)

from Section II

One day I discovered to my great astonishment that the view of dreams which came nearest to the

truth was not the medical but the popular one, half-involved though it still was in superstition. For I

had been led to fresh conclusions on the subject of dreams by applying to them a new method of

psychological investigation which had done excellent service in the solution of phobias, obsessions

and delusions, etc. Since then, under the name of ‘psycho-analysis’, it has found acceptance by a

whole school of research workers. The numerous analogies that exist between dream-life and a great

variety of conditions of psychical illness in waking life have indeed been correctly observed by many

medical investigators. There seemed, therefore, good ground for hoping that a method of

investigation which had given satisfactory results in the case of psychopathic structures would also

be of use in throwing light upon dreams. Phobias and obsessions are as alien to normal

consciousness as dreams are to waking consciousness; their origin is as unknown to consciousness

as that of dreams. In the case of these psychopathic structures practical considerations led to an

investigation of their origin and mode of development; for experience had shown that the discovery

of the trains of thought which, concealed from consciousness, connect the pathological ideas with

the remaining contents of the mind is equivalent to a resolution of the symptoms and has as its

consequence the mastering of ideas which till then could not be inhibited. Thus psychotherapy was

the starting-point of the procedure of which I made use for the explanation of dreams. […]

I will now show what results follow if I apply this method of [psychological] investigation to

dreams. Any example of a dream should in fact be equally appropriate for the purpose; but for

particular reasons I will choose some dream of my own, one which seems obscure and meaningless

as I remember it, and one which has the advantage of brevity. A dream which I actually had last

night will perhaps meet these requirements. Its content, as I noted it down immediately after waking

up, was as follows:

Company at table or table d’hôte . . . spinach was being eaten . . . Frau E. L. was sitting beside me; she was

turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her hand

unresponsively. She then said: "But you’ve always had such beautiful eyes." . . . I then had an indistinct

picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles . . . .’

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This was the whole of the dream, or at least all that I could remember of it. It seemed to me obscure

and meaningless, but above all surprising. Frau E. L. is a person with whom I have hardly at any

time been on friendly terms, nor, so far as I know, have I ever wished to have any closer relations

with her. I have not seen her for a long time, and her name has not, I believe, been mentioned

during the last few days. The dream-process was not accompanied by affects of any kind.

Reflecting over this dream brought me no nearer to understanding it. I determined, however, to set

down without any premeditation or criticism the associations which presented themselves to my

self-observation. As I have found, it is advisable for this purpose to divide a dream-into its elements

and to find the associations attaching to each of these fragments separately. […]

By following the associations which arose from the separate elements of the dream divorced

from their context, I arrived at a number of thoughts and recollections, which I could not fail to

recognize as important products of my mental life. This material revealed by the analysis of the

dream was intimately connected with the dream’s content, yet the connection was of such a kind

that I could never have inferred the fresh material from that content. The dream was unemotional,

disconnected and unintelligible; but while I was producing the thoughts behind the dream, I was

aware of intense and well-founded affective impulses; the thoughts themselves fell at once into

logical chains, in which certain central ideas made their appearance more than once. Thus, the

contrast between ‘selfish’ and ‘unselfish’, and the elements ‘being in debt’ and ‘without paying for it’

were central ideas of this kind, not represented in the dream itself. I might draw closer together the

threads in the material revealed by the analysis, and I might then show that they converge upon a

single nodal point, but considerations of a personal and not of a scientific nature prevent my doing

so in public. I should be obliged to betray many things which had better remain my secret, for on

my way to discovering the solution of the dream all kinds of things were revealed which I was

unwilling to admit even to myself. Why then, it will be asked, have I not chosen some other dream,

whose analysis is better suited for reporting, so that I could produce more convincing evidence of

the meaning and connectedness of the material uncovered by analysis? The answer is that every

dream with which I might try to deal would lead to things equally hard to report and would impose

an equal discretion upon me. Nor should I avoid this difficulty by bringing up someone else’s dream

for analysis, unless circumstances enabled me to drop all disguise without damage to the person who

had confided in me. […]

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I should, of course, not draw such far-reaching conclusions if only a single dream-analysis

was at my disposal. If experience shows me, however, that by uncritically pursuing the associations

arising from any dream I can arrive at a similar train of thoughts, among the elements of which the

constituents of the dream re-appear and which are interconnected in a rational and intelligible

manner, then it will be safe to disregard the slight possibility that the connections observed in a first

experiment might be due to chance. I think I am justified, therefore, in adopting a terminology

which will crystallize our new discovery. In order to contrast the dream as it is retained in my

memory with the relevant material discovered by analyzing it, I shall speak of the former as the

‘manifest content of the dream’ and the latter - without, in the first instance, making any further

distinction - as the ‘latent content of the dream.’ I am now faced by two new problems which have

not hitherto been formulated. (1) What is the psychical process which has transformed the latent

content of the dream into the manifest one which is known to me from my memory? (2) What are

the motive or motives which have necessitated this transformation? I shall describe the process

which transforms the latent into the manifest content of dreams as the ‘dream-work.’ The

counterpart to this activity – one which brings about a transformation in the opposite direction – is

already known to us as the work of analysis. The remaining problems arising out of dreams –

questions as to the instigators of dreams, as to the origin of their material, as to their possible

meaning, as to the possible function of dreaming, and as to the reasons for dreams being forgotten –

all these problems will be discussed by me on the basis, not of the manifest, but of the newly

discovered latent dream-content. Since I attribute all the contradictory and incorrect views upon

dream-life which appear in the literature of the subject to ignorance of the latent content of dreams

as revealed by analysis, I shall be at the greatest pains henceforward to avoid confusing the manifest

dream with the latent dream-thoughts.

from Section III

Dreams can be divided into three categories in respect of the relation between their latent and

manifest content. In the first place, we may distinguish those dreams which make sense and are at

the same time intelligible, which, that is to say, can be inserted without further difficulty into the

context of our mental life. We have numbers of such dreams. They are for the most part short

and appear to us in general to deserve little attention, since there is nothing astonishing or

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strange about them. Incidentally, their occurrence constitutes a powerful argument against the

theory according to which dreams originate from the isolated activity of separate groups of brain

cells. They give no indication of reduced or fragmentary psychical activity, but nevertheless we

never question the fact of their being dreams, and do not confuse them with the products of

waking life. A second group is formed by those dreams which, though they are connected in

themselves and have a clear sense, nevertheless have a bewildering effect, because we cannot see

how to fit that sense into our mental life. Such would be the case if we were to dream, for

instance, that a relative of whom we were fond had died of the plague, when we had no reason

for expecting, fearing or assuming any such thing; we should ask in astonishment: ‘How did I

get hold of such an idea?’ The third group, finally, contains those dreams which are without

either sense or intelligibility, which seem disconnected, confused, and meaningless. The preponderant

majority of the products of our dreaming exhibit these characteristics, which are the basis of the

low opinion in which dreams are held and of the medical theory that they are the outcome of a

restricted mental activity. The most evident signs of incoherence are seldom absent, especially in

dream-compositions of any considerable length and complexity.

The contrast between the manifest and latent content of dreams is clearly of significance

only for dreams of the second and more particularly of the third category. It is there that we are

faced by riddles which only disappear after we have replaced the manifest dream by the latent

thoughts behind it; and it was on a specimen of the last category – a confused and unintelligible

dream – that the analysis which I have just recorded was carried out. Contrary to our

expectation, however, we came up against motives which prevented us from becoming fully

acquainted with the latent dream-thoughts. A repetition of similar experiences may lead us to

suspect that there is an intimate and regular relation between the unintelligible and confused nature of dreams

and the difficulty of reporting the thoughts behind them. […]

f r o m Section VI

It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or

recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream-content, unless we understand the reason for their

distortion. Nevertheless, the dream-thoughts are also submitted to another and milder sort of

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transformation, which leads to our discovering a new achievement on the part of the dream-

work – one, however, which is easily intelligible. The dream-thoughts which we first come

across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are

expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but

are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images

resembling those of poetic speech. There is no difficulty in accounting for the constraint

imposed upon the form in which the dream-thoughts are expressed. The manifest content of

dreams consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the dream-thoughts must

accordingly be submitted in the first place to a treatment which will make them suitable for a

representation of this kind. If we imagine ourselves faced by the problem of representing the

arguments in a political leading article or the speeches of counsel before a court of law in a series

of pictures, we shall easily understand the modifications which must necessarily be carried out

by the dream-work owing to considerations of representability in the content of the dream.

The psychical material of the dream-thoughts habitually includes recollections of

impressive experiences – not infrequently dating back to early childhood – which are thus

themselves perceived as a rule as situations having a visual subject matter. Wherever the

possibility arises, this portion of the dream-thoughts exercises a determining influence upon the

form taken by the content of the dream; it constitutes, as it were, a nucleus of crystallization,

attracting the material of the dream-thoughts to itself and thus affecting their distribution. The

situation in a dream is often nothing other than a modified repetition, complicated by

interpolations, of an impressive experience of this kind; on the other hand, faithful and

straightforward reproductions of real scenes only rarely appear in dreams.

The content of dreams, however, does not consist entirely of situations, but also includes

disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and even bits of unmodified thoughts. It may

therefore perhaps be of interest to enumerate very briefly the modes of representation available

to the dream-work for reproducing the dream-thoughts in the peculiar form of expression

necessary in dreams.

The dream-thoughts which we arrive at by means of analysis reveal themselves as a

psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure. Its portions stand in the most

manifold logical relations to one another: they represent foreground and background,

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conditions, digressions and illustrations, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. Each train

of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart. This material lacks

none of the characteristics that are familiar to us from our waking thinking. If now all of this is

to be turned into a dream, the psychical material will be submitted to a pressure which will

condense it greatly, to an internal fragmentation and displacement which will, as it were, create

new surfaces, and to a selective operation in favor of those portions of it which are the most

appropriate for the construction of situations. If we take into account the genesis of the

material, a process of this sort deserves to be described as a ‘regression.’ In the course of this

transformation, however, the logical links which have hitherto held the psychical material

together are lost. It is only, as it were, the substantive content of the dream-thoughts that the

dream-work takes over and manipulates. The restoration of the connections which the dream-

work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the work of analysis. […]

f r o m Section VIII

Having been made acquainted with the dream-work by the foregoing discussion, we shall no

doubt be inclined to pronounce it a quite peculiar psychical process, the like of which, so far as

we are aware, does not exist elsewhere. It is as though we were carrying over on to the dream-

work all the astonishment which used formerly to be aroused in us by its product, the dream. In

fact, however, the dream-work is only the first to be discovered of a whole series of psychical

processes, responsible for of hysterical symptoms, of phobias, obsessions and delusions.

Condensation and, above all, displacement are invariable characteristics of these other processes

as well. Modification into a pictorial form, on the other hand, remains a peculiarity of the dream-

work. If this explanation places dreams in a single series alongside the structures produced by

psychical illness, this makes it all the more important for us to discover the essential determining

conditions of such processes as those of dream-formation. We shall probably be surprised to

hear that neither the state of sleep nor illness is among these indispensable conditions. A whole

number of the phenomena of the everyday life of healthy people - such as forgetting, slips of the

tongue, bungled actions and a particular class of errors - owe their origin to a psychical

mechanism analogous to that of dreams and of the other members of the series.

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The heart of the problem lies in displacement, which is by far the most striking of the

special achievements of the dream-work. If we enter deeply into the subject, we come to realize

that the essential determining condition of displacement is a purely psychological one:

something in the nature of a motive. One comes upon its track if one takes into consideration

certain experiences which one cannot escape in analysing dreams. In analysing my specimen

dream I was obliged to break off my report of the dream-thoughts, because, as I confessed,

there were some among them which I should prefer to conceal from strangers and which I

could not communicate to other people without doing serious mischief in important directions.

I added that nothing would be gained if I were to choose another dream instead of that

particular one with a view to reporting its analysis: I should come upon dream-thoughts which

required to be kept secret in the case of every dream with an obscure or confused content. If,

however, I were to continue the analysis on my own account, without any reference to other

people (whom, indeed, an experience so personal as my dream cannot possibly have been

intended to reach), I should eventually arrive at thoughts which would surprise me, whose

presence in me I was unaware of, which were not only alien but also disagreeable to me, and which

I should therefore feel inclined to dispute energetically, although the chain of thoughts running

through the analysis insisted upon them remorselessly. There is only one way of accounting for

this state of affairs, which is of quite universal occurrence; and that is to suppose that these

thoughts really were present in my mind, and in possession of a certain amount of psychical

intensity or energy, but that they were in a peculiar psychological situation, as a consequence of

which they could not become conscious to me. (I describe this particular condition as one of

‘repression.’) We cannot help concluding, then, that there is a causal connection between the

obscurity of the dream-content and the state of repression (in admissibility to consciousness) of

certain of the dream-thoughts, and that the dream had to be obscure so as not to betray the

proscribed dream-thoughts. Thus we are led to the concept of a ‘dream-distortion’, which is the

product of the dream-work and serves the purpose of dissimulation, that is, of disguise. […]

Section X

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Hitherto philosophers have had no occasion to concern themselves with a psychology of

repression. We may therefore be permitted to make a first approach to this hitherto unknown

topic by constructing a pictorial image of the course of events in dream-formation. It is true that

the schematic picture we have arrived at - not only from the study of dreams - is a fairly

complicated one; but we cannot manage with anything simpler. Our hypothesis is that in our

mental apparatus there are two thought-constructing agencies, of which the second enjoys the

privilege of having free access to consciousness for its products whereas the activity of the first

is in itself unconscious and can only reach consciousness by way of the second. On the frontier

between the two agencies, where the first passes over to the second, there is a censorship, which

only allows what is agreeable to it to pass through and holds back everything else. According to

our definition, then, what is rejected by the censorship is in a state of repression. Under certain

conditions, of which the state of sleep is one, the relation between the strength of the two

agencies is modified in such a way that what is repressed can no longer be held back. In the state

of sleep this probably occurs owing to a relaxation of the censorship; when this happens it

becomes possible for what has hitherto been repressed to make a path for itself to

consciousness. Since, however, the censorship is never completely eliminated but merely

reduced, the repressed material must submit to certain alterations which mitigate its offensive

features. What becomes conscious in such cases is a compromise between the intentions of one

agency and the demands of the other. Repression - relaxation of the censorship - the formation of a

compromise, this is the fundamental pattern for the generation not only of dreams but of many

other psychopathological structures; and in the latter cases too we may observe that the

formation of compromises is accompanied by processes of condensation and displacement and

by the employment of superficial associations, which we have become familiar with in the

dream-work.

We have no reason to disguise the fact that in the hypothesis which we have set up in

order to explain the dream-work a part is played by what might be described as a ‘ daemonic’

element. We have gathered an impression that the formation of obscure dreams occurs as though

one person who was dependent upon a second person had to make a remark which was bound

to be disagreeable in the ears of this second one; and it is on the basis of this simile that we have

arrived at the concepts of dream-distortion and censorship, and have endeavored to translate

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our impression into a psychological theory which is no doubt crude but is at least lucid.

Whatever it may be with which a further investigation of the subject may enable us to identify

our first and second agencies, we may safely expect to find a confirmation of some correlate of

our hypothesis that the second agency controls access to consciousness and can bar the first

agency from such access.

When the state of sleep is over, the censorship quickly recovers its full strength; and it

can now wipe out all that was won from it during the period of its weakness. This must be one

part at least of the explanation of the forgetting of dreams, as is shown by an observation which

has been confirmed on countless occasions. It not infrequently happens that during the

narration of a dream or during its analysis a fragment of the dream-content which had seemed

to be forgotten re-emerges. This fragment which has been rescued from oblivion invariably

affords us the best and most direct access to the meaning of the dream. And that, in all

probability, must have been the only reason for its having been forgotten, that is, for its having

been once more suppressed. […]

f r o m Section XII

No one who accepts the view that the censorship is the chief reason for dream-distortion will be

surprised to learn from the results of dream-interpretation that most of the dreams of adults are

traced back by analysis to erotic wishes. This assertion is not aimed at dreams with an undisguised

sexual content, which are no doubt familiar to all dreamers from their own experience and are as

a rule the only ones to be described as ‘sexual dreams.’ Even dreams of this latter kind offer

enough surprises in their choice of the people whom they make into sexual objects, in their

disregard of all the limitations which the dreamer imposes in his waking life upon his sexual

desires, and by their many strange details, hinting at what are commonly known as ‘perversions.’

A great many other dreams, however, which show no sign of being erotic in their manifest

content, are revealed by the work of interpretation in analysis as sexual wish- fulfillments; and,

on the other hand, analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from the activity

of waking life as ‘residues of the previous day’ only find their way to representation in dreams

through the assistance of repressed erotic wishes.

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There is no theoretical necessity why this should be so; but to explain the fact it may be

pointed out that no other group of instincts has been submitted to such far-reaching

suppression by the demands of cultural education, while at the same time the sexual instincts are

also the ones which, in most people, find it easiest to escape from the control of the highest

mental agencies. Since we have become acquainted with infantile sexuality: which is often so

unobtrusive in its manifestations and is always overlooked and misunderstood, we are justified

in saying that almost every civilized man retains the infantile forms of sexual life in some respect

or other. We can thus understand how it is that repressed infantile sexual wishes provide the

most frequent and strongest motive-forces for the construction of dreams.

There is only one method by which a dream which expresses erotic wishes can succeed

in appearing innocently non-sexual in its manifest content. The material of the sexual ideas must

not be represented as such, but must be replaced in the content of the dream by hints, allusions

and similar forms of indirect representation. But, unlike other forms of indirect representation,

that which is employed in dreams must not be immediately intelligible. […]

f r o m Section XIII

I have laid it down as the task of dream-interpretation to replace the dream by the latent dream-

thoughts, that is, to unravel what the dream-work has woven. In so doing I have raised a number of

new psychological problems dealing with the mechanism of this dream-work itself, as well as with

the nature and conditions of what is described as repression; on the other hand I have asserted the

existence of the dream-thoughts – a copious store of psychical structures of the highest order, which

is characterized by all the signs of normal intellectual functioning, but is nevertheless withdrawn

from consciousness till it emerges in distorted form in the dream-content. I cannot but assume that

thoughts of this kind are present in everyone, since almost everyone, including the most normal

people, is capable of dreaming. The unconscious material of the dream-thoughts and its relation to

consciousness and to repression raise further questions of significance to psychology, the answers to

which must no doubt be postponed until analysis has clarified the origin of other psychopathological

structures, such as hysterical symptoms and obsessional ideas.