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Title: Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of
Vienna

Author: Sigmund Freud

Author of introduction, etc.: Ernest Jones

Translator: Joan Riviere

Release date: April 7, 2025 [eBook #75810]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: G. Allen & Unwin, 1922

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS ***

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INTRODUCTORY LECTURES
ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

SCHWIND, “THE PRISONER’S DREAM.”

See p. 113 for analysis.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
A COURSE OF TWENTY-EIGHT LECTURES DELIVERED

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

BY

PROF. SIGM. FREUD, M.D., LL.D.
Vienna

AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION
BY
JOAN RIVIERE
WITH A PREFACE
BY
ERNEST JONES, M.D.
President of the International Psycho-Analytical Association

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

First Published in Great Britain in 1922

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

Among the many difficulties confronting those who wish to acquire a
knowledge of psycho-analysis, not the least has been the absence of a
suitable text-book with which they could begin their studies. They have
hitherto had their choice among three classes of book, against each of which
some objection could be urged from the point of view of the beginner. They
could pick their way through the heterogeneous collection of papers, such
as those published by Freud, Brill, Ferenczi, and myself, which were not
arranged on any coherent plan and were also for the greater part addressed
to those already having some knowledge of the subject. Or they could
struggle with more systematic volumes, such as those by Hitschmann and
Barbara Low, which suffer from condensation because of the difficulty of
having to compress so much into a small space. Or, finally, it might be their
fate to come across one of the numerous books, which need not be
mentioned by name, that purport to give an adequate account of psycho-
analysis, but whose authors have neglected the necessary preliminary of
acquiring a proper knowledge of the subject themselves. The gap in the
literature of psycho-analysis has now been filled by the writer most
competent of all to do it—namely, Professor Freud himself, and the world
of clinical psychology must be grateful to him for the effort it must have
cost to write such a book in the midst of his other multitudinous duties. In
the future we can unhesitatingly deal with the question so often asked, and
say: This is the book with which to begin a study of psycho-analysis.
Even here, however, the reader should be warned that it is necessary to
add a few modifications to the statement that the present volume is a
complete text-book of psycho-analysis. The circumstances of its inception
forbid its being so regarded. The book consists of three separate courses of
lectures delivered at the University of Vienna in two winter sessions, 1915–

1917. The first two of these presuppose absolutely no knowledge of the
subject, and the style in which they were delivered constitute them an ideal
introduction to the subject. But in the third year Professor Freud, doubtless
assuming that those of his audience who had pursued their studies so far
would by then have widened their reading otherwise, decided to treat them
no longer as mere beginners, and so felt himself free to deal more
technically with the more difficult subject-matter of the third course—the
psycho-analysis of neurotic affections. The result is that the second half of
the book is of a much more advanced nature than the first, a fact which, it is
true, has the advantage that the author was able here and there to
communicate some of his latest conclusions on obscure points. Every
student of psycho-analysis, therefore, however advanced, will be able to
learn much from this volume.
One must also remark that the book does not convey an adequate
impression of the extensive bearing that psycho-analysis has on other
humanistic studies than those here dealt with. Apart from a few hints
scattered here and there, there is little indication of the extent to which
psycho-analysis has already been applied, to sociology, to the study of
racial development, and above all, to the psychology of the normal man.
The book is definitely confined to its three topics of psychopathology of
everyday life, dreams, and neuroses, these having been chosen as
constituting the most suitable subject-matter with which to effect the
author’s purpose—namely, to introduce students to psycho-analysis.
An American translation of the book has already appeared, but, apart
from its deficiencies of style, it contained so many serious falsities in
translation—a passage, for instance, to the effect that delusions cannot be
influenced is translated in such a way as to commit Professor Freud, of all
people, to the statement that obsessions cannot be cured—that it was
decided to issue a fresh translation. This has been carried out with
scrupulous care by Mrs. Riviere, aided by drafts carried out by Miss Cecil
M. Baines of the eleven lectures in Part II. I have compared the whole book
with the original, and have discussed doubtful and difficult points with
Professor Freud and Mrs. Riviere. Mrs. Riviere’s English translation will be
its own recommendation: I can give the reader the assurance that it is a
faithful and exact rendering.
ERNEST JONES.

December 1921.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Preface 5

PART I

LECTURE
1. Introduction 11
2. The Psychology of Errors 19
3. The Psychology of Errors (continuation) 31
4. The Psychology of Errors (conclusion) 47

PART II

DREAMS

5. Difficulties and Preliminary Approach to the Subject 67
6. Preliminary Hypotheses and Technique of Interpretation 82
7. Manifest Content and Latent Thoughts 94
8. Children’s Dreams 105
9. The Dream-Censorship 114
10. Symbolism in Dreams 125
11. The Dream-Work 143
12. Examples of Dreams and Analysis of Them 155
13. Archaic and Infantile Features in Dreams 168
14. Wish-Fulfilment 180
15. Doubtful Points and Critical Observations 193

PART III

GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES

16. Psycho-Analysis and Psychiatry 207
17. The Meaning of Symptoms 218
18. Fixation upon Traumata: The Unconscious 231
19. Resistance and Repression 242
20. The Sexual Life of Man 255
21. Development of the Libido and Sexual Organizations 269

22. Aspects of Development and Regression. Ætiology 285
23. The Paths of Symptom-Formation 300
24. Ordinary Nervousness 316
25. Anxiety 328
26. The Theory of the Libido: Narcissism 344
27. Transference 360
28. The Analytic Therapy 375
Index 389

PART I

FIRST LECTURE
INTRODUCTION

I do not know what knowledge any of you may already have of
psycho-analysis, either from reading or from hearsay. But having regard to
the title of my lectures—Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis—I am
bound to proceed as though you knew nothing of the subject and needed
instruction, even in its first elements.
One thing, at least, I may presuppose that you know—namely, that
psycho-analysis is a method of medical treatment for those suffering from
nervous disorders; and I can give you at once an illustration of the way in
which psycho-analytic procedure differs from, and often even reverses,
what is customary in other branches of medicine. Usually, when we
introduce a patient to a new form of treatment we minimize its difficulties
and give him confident assurances of its success. This is, in my opinion,
perfectly justifiable, for we thereby increase the probability of success. But
when we undertake to treat a neurotic psycho-analytically we proceed
otherwise. We explain to him the difficulties of the method, its long
duration, the trials and sacrifices which will be required of him; and, as to
the result, we tell him that we can make no definite promises, that success
depends upon his own endeavours, upon his understanding, his adaptability
and his perseverance. We have, of course, good reasons, into which you will
perhaps gain some insight later on, for adopting this apparently perverse
attitude.
Now forgive me if I begin by treating you in the same way as I do my
neurotic patients, for I shall positively advise you against coming to hear
me a second time. And with this intention I shall explain to you how of
necessity you can obtain from me only an incomplete knowledge of psycho-
analysis and also what difficulties stand in the way of your forming an
independent judgement on the subject. For I shall show you how the whole
trend of your training and your accustomed modes of thought must
inevitably have made you hostile to psycho-analysis, and also how much

you would have to overcome in your own minds in order to master this
instinctive opposition. I naturally cannot foretell what degree of
understanding of psycho-analysis you may gain from my lectures, but I can
at least assure you that by attending them you will not have learnt how to
conduct a psycho-analytic investigation, nor how to carry out a psycho-
analytic treatment. And further, if anyone of you should feel dissatisfied
with a merely cursory acquaintance with psycho-analysis and should wish
to form a permanent connection with it, I shall not merely discourage him,
but I shall actually warn him against it. For as things are at the present time,
not only would the choice of such a career put an end to all chances of
academic success, but, upon taking up work as a practitioner, such a man
would find himself in a community which misunderstood his aims and
intentions, regarded him with suspicion and hostility, and let loose upon
him all the latent evil impulses harboured within it. Perhaps you can infer
from the accompaniments of the war now raging in Europe what a countless
host that is to reckon with.
However, there are always some people to whom the possibility of a
new addition to knowledge will prove an attraction strong enough to
survive all such inconveniences. If there are any such among you who will
appear at my second lecture in spite of my words of warning, they will be
welcome. But all of you have a right to know what these inherent
difficulties of psycho-analysis are to which I have alluded.
First of all, there is the problem of the teaching and exposition of the
subject. In your medical studies you have been accustomed to use your
eyes. You see the anatomical specimen, the precipitate of the chemical
reaction, the contraction of the muscle as the result of the stimulation of its
nerves. Later you come into contact with the patients; you learn the
symptoms of disease by the evidence of your senses; the results of
pathological processes can be demonstrated to you, and in many cases even
the exciting cause of them in an isolated form. On the surgical side you are
witnesses of the measures by which the patient is helped, and are permitted
to attempt them yourselves. Even in psychiatry, demonstration of patients,
of their altered expression, speech and behaviour, yields a series of
observations which leave a deep impression on your minds. Thus a teacher
of medicine acts for the most part as an exponent and guide, leading you as
it were through a museum, while you gain in this way a direct relationship

to what is displayed to you and believe yourselves to have been convinced
by your own experience of the existence of the new facts.
But in psycho-analysis, unfortunately, all this is different. In psycho-
analytic treatment nothing happens but an exchange of words between the
patient and the physician. The patient talks, tells of his past experiences and
present impressions, complains, and expresses his wishes and his emotions.
The physician listens, attempts to direct the patient’s thought-processes,
reminds him, forces his attention in certain directions, gives him
explanations and observes the reactions of understanding or denial thus
evoked. The patient’s unenlightened relatives—people of a kind to be
impressed only by something visible and tangible, preferably by the sort of
‘action’ that may be seen at a cinema—never omit to express their doubts of
how “mere talk can possibly cure anybody.” Their reasoning is of course as
illogical as it is inconsistent. For they are the same people who are always
convinced that the sufferings of neurotics are purely “in their own
imagination.” Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same
thing, and even to-day words retain much of their magical power. By words
one of us can give to another the greatest happiness or bring about utter
despair; by words the teacher imparts his knowledge to the student; by
words the orator sweeps his audience with him and determines its
judgements and decisions. Words call forth emotions and are universally the
means by which we influence our fellow-creatures. Therefore let us not
despise the use of words in psycho-therapy and let us be content if we may
overhear the words which pass between the analyst and the patient.
But even that is impossible. The dialogue which constitutes the
analysis will admit of no audience; the process cannot be demonstrated.
One could, of course, exhibit a neurasthenic or hysterical patient to students
at a psychiatric lecture. He would relate his case and his symptoms, but
nothing more. He will make the communications necessary to the analysis
only under the conditions of a special affective relationship to the
physician; in the presence of a single person to whom he was indifferent he
would become mute. For these communications relate to all his most
private thoughts and feelings, all that which as a socially independent
person he must hide from others, all that which, being foreign to his own
conception of himself, he tries to conceal even from himself.

It is impossible, therefore, for you to be actually present during a
psycho-analytic treatment; you can only be told about it, and can learn
psycho-analysis, in the strictest sense of the word, only by hearsay. This
tuition at second hand, so to say, puts you in a very unusual and difficult
position as regards forming your own judgement on the subject, which will
therefore largely depend on the reliance you can place on your informant.
Now imagine for a moment that you were present at a lecture in
history instead of in psychiatry, and that the lecturer was dealing with the
life and conquests of Alexander the Great. What reason would you have to
believe what he told you? The situation would appear at first sight even
more unsatisfactory than in the case of psycho-analysis, for the professor of
history had no more part in Alexander’s campaigns than you yourselves; the
psycho-analyst at least informs you of matters in which he himself has
played a part. But then we come to the question of what evidence there is to
support the historian. He can refer you to the accounts of early writers who
were either contemporaries or who lived not long after the events in
question, such as Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, and others; he can lay before
you reproductions of the preserved coins and statues of the king, and pass
round a photograph of the mosaic at Pompeii representing the battle at
Issus. Yet, strictly speaking, all these documents only prove that the
existence of Alexander and the reality of his deeds were already believed in
by former generations of men, and your criticism might begin anew at this
point. And then you would find that not everything reported of Alexander is
worthy of belief or sufficiently authenticated in detail, but I can hardly
suppose that you would leave the lecture-room in doubt altogether as to the
reality of Alexander the Great. Your conclusions would be principally
determined by two considerations: first, that the lecturer could have no
conceivable motive for attempting to persuade you of something which he
did not himself believe to be true, and secondly, that all the available
authorities agree more or less in their accounts of the facts. In questioning
the accuracy of the early writers you would apply these tests again, the
possible motives of the authors and the agreement to be found between
them. The result of such tests would certainly be convincing in the case of
Alexander, probably less so in regard to figures like Moses and Nimrod.
Later on you will perceive clearly enough what doubts can be raised against
the credibility of an exponent of psycho-analysis.

Now you will have a right to ask the question: If no objective evidence
for psycho-analysis exists, and no possibility of demonstrating the process,
how is it possible to study it at all or to convince oneself of its truth? The
study of it is indeed not an easy matter, nor are there many people who have
thoroughly learned it; still, there is, of course, some way of learning it.
Psycho-Analysis is learnt first of all on oneself, through the study of one’s
own personality. This is not exactly what is meant by introspection, but it
may be so described for want of a better word. There is a whole series of
very common and well-known mental phenomena which can be taken as
material for self-analysis when one has acquired some knowledge of the
method. In this way one may obtain the required conviction of the reality of
the processes which psycho-analysis describes, and of the truth of its
conceptions, although progress on these lines is not without its limitations.
One gets much further by submitting oneself to analysis by a skilled
analyst, undergoing the working of the analysis in one’s own person and
using the opportunity to observe the finer details of the technique which the
analyst employs. This, eminently the best way, is of course only practicable
for individuals and cannot be used in a class of students.
The second difficulty you will find in connection with psycho-analysis
is not, on the other hand, inherent in it, but is one for which I must hold you
yourselves responsible, at least in so far as your medical studies have
influenced you. Your training will have induced in you an attitude of mind
very far removed from the psycho-analytical one. You have been trained to
establish the functions and disturbances of the organism on an anatomical
basis, to explain them in terms of chemistry and physics, and to regard them
from a biological point of view; but no part of your interest has ever been
directed to the mental aspects of life, in which, after all, the development of
the marvellously complicated organism culminates. For this reason a
psychological attitude of mind is still foreign to you, and you are
accustomed to regard it with suspicion, to deny it a scientific status, and to
leave it to the general public, poets, mystics, and philosophers. Now this
limitation in you is undoubtedly detrimental to your medical efficiency; for
on meeting a patient it is the mental aspects with which one first comes into
contact, as in most human relationships, and I am afraid you will pay the
penalty of having to yield a part of the curative influence at which you aim
to the quacks, mystics, and faith-healers whom you despise.

I quite acknowledge that there is an excuse for this defect in your
previous training. There is no auxiliary philosophical science that might be
of service to you in your profession. Neither speculative philosophy nor
descriptive psychology, nor even the so-called experimental psychology
which is studied in connection with the physiology of the sense-organs, as
they are taught in the schools, can tell you anything useful of the relations
existing between mind and body, or can give you a key to comprehension of
a possible disorder of the mental functions. It is true that the psychiatric
branch of medicine occupies itself with describing the different forms of
recognizable mental disturbances and grouping them in clinical pictures,
but in their best moments psychiatrists themselves are doubtful whether
their purely descriptive formulations deserve to be called science. The
origin, mechanism, and interrelation of the symptoms which make up these
clinical pictures are undiscovered: either they cannot be correlated with any
demonstrable changes in the brain, or only with such changes as in no way
explain them. These mental disturbances are open to therapeutic influence
only when they can be identified as secondary effects of some organic
disease.
This is the lacuna which psycho-analysis is striving to fill. It hopes to
provide psychiatry with the missing psychological foundation, to discover
the common ground on which a correlation of bodily and mental disorder
becomes comprehensible. To this end it must dissociate itself from every
foreign preconception, whether anatomical, chemical, or physiological, and
must work throughout with conceptions of a purely psychological order,
and for this very reason I fear that it will appear strange to you at first.
For the next difficulty I shall not hold you, your training or your
mental attitude, responsible. There are two tenets of psycho-analysis which
offend the whole world and excite its resentment; the one conflicts with
intellectual, the other with moral and æsthetic, prejudices. Let us not
underestimate these prejudices; they are powerful things, residues of
valuable, even necessary, stages in human evolution. They are maintained
by emotional forces, and the fight against them is a hard one.
The first of these displeasing propositions of psycho-analysis is this:
that mental processes are essentially unconscious, and that those which are
conscious are merely isolated acts and parts of the whole psychic entity.
Now I must ask you to remember that, on the contrary, we are accustomed

to identify the mental with the conscious. Consciousness appears to us as
positively the characteristic that defines mental life, and we regard
psychology as the study of the content of consciousness. This even appears
so evident that any contradiction of it seems obvious nonsense to us, and
yet it is impossible for psycho-analysis to avoid this contradiction, or to
accept the identity between the conscious and the psychic. The psycho-
analytical definition of the mind is that it comprises processes of the nature
of feeling, thinking, and wishing, and it maintains that there are such things
as unconscious thinking and unconscious wishing. But in doing so psycho-
analysis has forfeited at the outset the sympathy of the sober and
scientifically-minded, and incurred the suspicion of being a fantastic cult
occupied with dark and unfathomable mysteries.[1] You yourselves must
find it difficult to understand why I should stigmatize an abstract
proposition, such as “The psychic is the conscious,” as a prejudice; nor can
you guess yet what evolutionary process could have led to the denial of the
unconscious, if it does indeed exist, nor what advantage could have been
achieved by this denial. It seems like an empty wrangle over words to argue
whether mental life is to be regarded as co-extensive with consciousness or
whether it may be said to stretch beyond this limit, and yet I can assure you
that the acceptance of unconscious mental processes represents a decisive
step towards a new orientation in the world and in science.
As little can you suspect how close is the connection between this first
bold step on the part of psycho-analysis and the second to which I am now
coming. For this next proposition, which we put forward as one of the
discoveries of psycho-analysis, consists in the assertion that impulses,
which can only be described as sexual in both the narrower and the wider
sense, play a peculiarly large part, never before sufficiently appreciated, in
the causation of nervous and mental disorders. Nay, more, that these sexual
impulses have contributed invaluably to the highest cultural, artistic, and
social achievements of the human mind.
In my opinion, it is the aversion from this conclusion of psycho-
analytic investigation that is the most significant source of the opposition it
has encountered. Are you curious to know how we ourselves account for
this? We believe that civilization has been built up, under the pressure of the
struggle for existence, by sacrifices in gratification of the primitive
impulses, and that it is to a great extent for ever being re-created, as each
individual, successively joining the community, repeats the sacrifice of his

instinctive pleasures for the common good. The sexual are amongst the
most important of the instinctive forces thus utilized: they are in this way
sublimated, that is to say, their energy is turned aside from its sexual goal
and diverted towards other ends, no longer sexual and socially more
valuable. But the structure thus built up is insecure, for the sexual impulses
are with difficulty controlled; in each individual who takes up his part in the
work of civilization there is a danger that a rebellion of the sexual impulses
may occur, against this diversion of their energy. Society can conceive of no
more powerful menace to its culture than would arise from the liberation of
the sexual impulses and a return of them to their original goal. Therefore
society dislikes this sensitive place in its development being touched upon;
that the power of the sexual instinct should be recognized, and the
significance of the individual’s sexual life revealed, is very far from its
interests; with a view to discipline it has rather taken the course of diverting
attention away from this whole field. For this reason, the revelations of
psycho-analysis are not tolerated by it, and it would greatly prefer to brand
them as æsthetically offensive, morally reprehensible, or dangerous. But
since such objections are not valid arguments against conclusions which
claim to represent the objective results of scientific investigation, the
opposition must be translated into intellectual terms before it can be
expressed. It is a characteristic of human nature to be inclined to regard
anything which is disagreeable as untrue, and then without much difficulty
to find arguments against it. So society pronounces the unacceptable to be
untrue, disputes the results of psycho-analysis with logical and concrete
arguments, arising, however, in affective sources, and clings to them with
all the strength of prejudice against every attempt at refutation.
But we, on the other hand, claim to have yielded to no tendency in
propounding this objectionable theory. Our intention has been solely to give
recognition to the facts as we found them in the course of painstaking
researches. And we now claim the right to reject unconditionally any such
introduction of practical considerations into the field of scientific
investigation, even before we have determined whether the apprehension
which attempts to force these considerations upon us is justified or not.
These, now, are some of the difficulties which confront you at the
outset when you begin to take an interest in psycho-analysis. It is probably
more than enough for a beginning. If you can overcome their discouraging
effect, we will proceed further.

SECOND LECTURE
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS

We shall now begin, not with postulates, but with an investigation. For
this purpose we shall select certain phenomena which are very frequent,
very familiar and much overlooked, and which have nothing to do with
illness, since they may be observed in every healthy person. I refer to the
errors that everyone commits: as when anyone wishes to say a certain thing
but uses the wrong word (‘slip of the tongue’);[2] or when the same sort of
mistake is made in writing (‘slip of the pen’),[3] in which case one may or
may not notice it; or when anyone reads in print or writing something other
than what is actually before him (‘misreading’);[4] or when anyone mis-
hears[5] what is said to him, naturally when there is no question of any
disease of the auditory sense-organ. Another series of such phenomena are
those based on forgetting[6] something temporarily, though not permanently;
as, for instance, when anyone cannot think of a name which he knows quite
well and is always able to recognize whenever he sees it; or when anyone
forgets to carry out some intention, which he afterwards remembers, and
has therefore forgotten only for a certain time. This element of
transitoriness is lacking in a third class, of which mislaying[7] things so that
they cannot be found is an example. This is a kind of forgetfulness which
we regard differently from the usual kind; one is amazed or annoyed at it,
instead of finding it comprehensible. Allied to this are certain mistakes, in
which the temporary element is again noticeable, as when one believes
something for a time which both before and afterwards one knows to be
untrue, and a number of similar manifestations which we know under
various names.
Some inner relation between all these kinds of occurrences is indicated
in German, by the use of the prefix “ver” which is common to all the words
designating them.[8] These words almost all refer to acts of an unimportant
kind, generally temporary and without much significance in life. It is only
rarely that anything of the kind, such as the loss of some object, attains any

practical importance. For this reason little attention is paid to such
happenings and they arouse little feeling.
I am now going to ask you to consider these phenomena. But you will
object, with annoyance: “There are so many tremendous puzzles both in the
wide world and in the narrower life of the soul, so many mysteries in the
field of mental disorder which demand and deserve explanation, that it
really seems frivolous to waste labour and interest on these trifles. If you
could explain to us how it is possible for anyone with sound sight and
hearing, in broad daylight, to see and hear things which do not exist, or how
anyone can suddenly believe that his nearest and dearest are persecuting
him, or can justify with the most ingenious arguments a delusion which
would seem nonsensical to any child, then we might be willing to take
psycho-analysis seriously. But if psycho-analysis cannot occupy us with
anything more interesting than the question why a speaker uses a wrong
word or why a Hausfrau mislays her keys and similar trivialities, then we
shall find something better to do with our time and our interest.”
My reply is: Patience! Your criticism is not on the right track. It is true
that psycho-analysis cannot boast that it has never occupied itself with
trifles. On the contrary, the material of its observations is usually those
commonplace occurrences which have been cast aside as all too
insignificant by other sciences, the refuse, so to speak, of the phenomenal
world. But in your criticism are you not confounding the magnitude of a
problem with the conspicuous nature of its manifestations? Is it not
possible, under certain conditions and at certain times, for very important
things to betray themselves in very slight indications? I could easily cite
many instances of this. What slight signs, for instance, convey to the young
men in my audience that they have gained a lady’s favour? Do they expect
an explicit declaration, a passionate embrace, or are they not content with a
glance which is almost imperceptible to others, a fleeting gesture, a
handshake prolonged by a second? Or suppose you are a detective engaged
in the investigation of a murder, do you actually expect to find that the
murderer will leave his photograph with name and address on the scene of
the crime? Are you not perforce content with slighter and less certain traces
of the person you seek? So let us not undervalue small signs: perhaps from
them it may be possible to come upon the tracks of greater things. Besides,
I think as you do that the larger problems of the world and of science have
the first claim on our interest. But on the whole it avails little to form a

definite resolution to devote oneself to the investigation of this or that great
problem. One is then often at a loss how to set about the next step. In
scientific work it is more profitable to take up whatever lies before one
whenever a path towards its exploration presents itself. And then, if one
carries it through thoroughly, without prejudice or pre-conceptions, one
may, with good fortune and by virtue of the interrelationship linking each
thing to every other (hence, also, the small to the great), find, even in the
course of such humble labour, a road to the study of the great problems.
It is from this point of view that I hope to enlist your interest in
considering the apparently trivial errors made by normal people. I propose
now that we question someone who has no knowledge of psycho-analysis
as to how he explains these occurrences.
His first answer is sure to be: “Oh, they are not worth any explanation;
they are little accidents.” What does the man mean by this? Does he mean
to maintain that there are any occurrences so small that they fail to come
within the causal sequence of things, that they might as well be other than
they are? Anyone thus breaking away from the determination of natural
phenomena, at any single point, has thrown over the whole scientific
outlook on the world (Weltanschauung). One may point out to him how
much more consistent is the religious outlook on the world, which
emphatically assures us that “not one sparrow shall fall to the ground”
except God wills it. I think our friend would not be willing to follow his
first answer to its logical conclusion; he would give way and say that if he
were to study these things he would soon find some explanation of them. It
must be a matter of slight functional disturbances, of inaccuracies of mental
performance, the conditions of which could be discovered. A man who
otherwise speaks correctly may make a slip of the tongue, (1) when he is
tired or unwell, (2) when he is excited, or (3) when his attention is
concentrated on something else. It is easy to confirm this. Slips of the
tongue do indeed occur most frequently when one is tired, or has a
headache, or feels an attack of migraine coming on. Forgetting proper
names very often occurs in these circumstances; many people are habitually
warned of the onset of an attack of migraine by the inability to recall proper
names. In excitement, too, one mixes up words or even things, one
performs actions erroneously[9]; and the forgetting of intentions, as well as a
number of other undesigned acts, comes to the fore when one is distracted,
in other words, when the attention is concentrated on other things. A

familiar instance of such distraction is the professor in Fliegende Blätter
who forgets his umbrella and takes the wrong hat, because he is thinking of
the problems which are to be the subject of his next book. We all know
from our own experience how one can forget to carry out intentions or
promises when something has happened in the interval that absorbs one
very deeply.
This seems so entirely comprehensible and also irrefutable. It is
perhaps not very interesting or not so much so as we expected. Let us look
at this explanation of errors more closely. The various conditions which
have been cited as necessary for the occurrence of these phenomena are not
all similar in kind. Illness and disorders of the circulation afford a
physiological basis for an affection of the normal functions; excitement,
tiredness, and distraction are conditions of a different kind which could be
described as psycho-physiological. These last could easily be converted into
a theory. Fatigue, as well as distraction, and perhaps also general
excitement, cause a dissipation of the attention from which it may follow
that the act in question has insufficient attention devoted to it. It can then
very easily be disturbed and inexactly performed. Slight illness or a change
in the distribution of blood in the central organ of the nervous system can
have the same effect, by these conditions affecting the determining factor,
the distribution of attention, in a similar way. In all cases it would be a
question of the effects of a disturbance of the attention from organic or
psychical causes.
But all this doesn’t seem to promise much of interest for a psycho-
analytic investigation. We might feel tempted to give up the topic. To be
sure, a closer inspection of the facts shows that they are not all in accord
with the ‘attention’ theory of errors of this sort, or at least that not
everything can be directly deduced from it. We find that such errors and
such forgetfulness also take place when people are not fatigued or excited,
but are in every way in their normal condition; unless, just because of the
errors, we were subsequently to attribute to them a condition of excitement
which they themselves did not acknowledge. Nor can the matter be quite so
simple as that the successful performance of an act will be ensured by an
intensification of attention, or endangered by a diminution of it. For a great
number of actions may be carried out in a purely automatic way with very
little attention and yet quite successfully. In walking, a man may perhaps
scarcely know where he is going but keep to the right road and stop at his

destination without having gone astray. At least, this is what usually
happens. A practised pianist strikes the right notes without thinking of them.
He may of course also make an occasional mistake, but if automatic playing
increased the danger of errors the virtuoso, whose constant practice has
made his playing entirely automatic, would be the most exposed to this
danger. Yet we see, on the contrary, that many acts are most successfully
carried out when they are not the objects of particularly concentrated
attention, and that mistakes may occur just on occasions when one is most
eager to be accurate, that is, when a distraction of the necessary attention is
most certainly not present. One could then say that this is the effect of the
‘excitement,’ but we do not understand why the excitement does not rather
intensify the concentration on the end so much desired. So that if in an
important speech anyone says the opposite of what he intends, it can hardly
be explained according to the psycho-physiological or the attention theory.
There are also many other minor features in connection with these
errors which we do not understand and which are not rendered more
comprehensible by these explanations. For instance, when one has
temporarily forgotten a name one is annoyed, one is determined to recall it
and cannot desist from the attempt. Why is it that despite this annoyance the
person so often cannot succeed, as he wishes, in directing his attention to
the word which, as he says, is “on the tip of his tongue,” and which he
instantly recognizes when it is supplied to him? Or, to take another
example, there are cases in which the errors multiply, link themselves
together or act as substitutes for one another. The first time, one forgets an
appointment; the next time, after having made a special resolution not to
forget it, one discovers that one has made a mistake in the day or hour. Or
one tries by devious ways to remember a forgotten word, and in the course
of so doing loses track of a second name which would have been of use in
finding the first. If one then pursues the second name, a third gets lost, and
so on. It is notorious that the same thing happens with misprints, which are
of course errors on the part of the compositor. A stubborn error of this sort
is said once to have crept into a Social-Democratic newspaper, where, in the
account of a festivity, the following words were printed: “Amongst those
present was His Highness, the Clown Prince.” The next day a correction
was attempted. The paper apologized and said: “The sentence should of
course have read, ‘the Crow-Prince.’” Again, in a war-correspondent’s
account of meeting a famous general whose infirmities were pretty well

known, a reference to the general was printed as “this battle-scared
veteran.” Next day an apology appeared which read “the words of course
should have been ‘the bottle-scarred veteran!’”[10] We like to attribute these
occurrences to a devil in the type-setting machine or to some malevolent
goblin—figurative expressions which at least imply something more than a
psycho-physiological theory of the misprint.
I do not know if you are aware of the fact that slips of the tongue can
be provoked, called forth by suggestion, as it were. An anecdote will serve
to illustrate this. Once when a novice on the stage was entrusted with the
important part in The Maid of Orleans of announcing to the King: “The
Constable sends back his sword,” the principal player, during the rehearsal,
played the joke of several times repeating to the timid beginner, instead of
the text, the following: “The Komfortabel sends back his steed.”[11] At the
performance the unfortunate actor actually made his début with this
perverse announcement, though he had been amply warned against so
doing, or perhaps just because he had been.
All these little characteristics of errors are not much illuminated by the
theory of diverted attention. But that does not necessarily prove the theory
wrong. There may be something missing, a link, by the addition of which
the theory might be made completely satisfactory. But many of the errors
themselves can be considered from another aspect.
Let us select slips of the tongue, as the type of error best suited to our
purpose. We might equally well choose slips of the pen or of reading. Now
we must first remind ourselves that, so far, we have only enquired when and
under what conditions the wrong word is said, and have received an answer
on that point only. Interest may be directed elsewhere, though, and the
question raised why just this particular slip is made and no other: one can
consider the nature of the mistake. You will see that so long as this question
remains unanswered, and the effect of the mistake is not explained, the
phenomenon remains a pure accident on the psychological side, even if a
physiological explanation has been found for it. When it happens that I
make a mistake in a word I could obviously do this in an infinite number of
ways, in place of the right word substitute any one of a thousand others, or
make innumerable distortions of the right word. Now, is there anything
which forces upon me in a specific instance just this one special slip, out of

all those which are possible, or does that remain accidental and arbitrary,
and can nothing rational be found in answer to this question?
Two authors, Meringer and Mayer (a philologist and a psychiatrist) did
indeed in 1895 make an attempt to approach the problem of slips of the
tongue from this side. They collected examples and first treated them from
a purely descriptive standpoint. This of course does not yet furnish any
explanation, but it may lead the way to one. They differentiated the
distortions which the intended phrase suffered through the slip into:
interchanges (in the positions of words, syllables or letters), anticipations,
perseverations, compoundings (contaminations), and substitutions. I will
give you examples of these authors’ main categories. As an instance of an
interchange (in the position of words) someone might say “The Milo of
Venus” instead of “The Venus of Milo.” The well-known slip of the hotel-
boy who, knocking at the bishop’s door, nervously replied to the question
“Who is it?” “The Lord, my boy!” is another example of such an
interchange in the position of words.[12] In the typical Spoonerism the
position of certain letters is interchanged, as when the preacher said: “How
often do we feel a half-warmed fish within us!”[12] It is a case of anticipation
if anyone says: “The thought lies heartily...” instead of: “The thought lies
heavily on my heart.” A perseveration is illustrated by the well-known ill-
fated toast, “Gentlemen, I call upon (auf) you to (auf)
hiccough (= aufzustossen) to the health of our Chief.”
(drink) (= anzustossen)
And when a member of the House of Commons referred to another as
the “honourable member for Central Hell,” instead of “Hull,” it was a case
of perseveration; as also when a soldier said to a friend “I wish there were a
thousand of our men mortified on that hill, Bill,” instead of “fortified.” In
one case the ell sound has perseverated from the previous words “member
for Central,” and in the other the m sound in “men” has perseverated to
form “mortified.”[12] These three types of slip are not very common. You
will find those cases much more frequent in which the slip happens by a
compounding or contraction, as for example when a gentleman asks a lady
if he may insort her on her way (begleit-digen); this contraction is made up
of begleiten = to escort, and beleidigen = to insult. (And by the way, a
young man addressing a lady in this way will not have much success with
her.) A substitution takes place when a poor woman says she has an
“incurable infernal disease,”[13] or in Mrs. Malaprop’s mind when she says,

for instance, “few gentlemen know how to value the ineffectual qualities in
a woman.”[13]
The explanation which the two authors attempt to formulate as the
basis of their collection of examples is peculiarly inadequate. They hold that
the sounds and syllables of a word have different values and that the
innervation of the sounds of higher value can interfere with those of lower
value. They obviously base this conclusion on the cases of anticipation and
perseveration which are not at all frequent; in other forms of slips of the
tongue the question of such sound priorities, even if they exist, does not
enter at all; for the most frequent type of slip is that in which instead of a
certain word one says another which resembles it, and this resemblance is
considered by many people sufficient explanation of it. For instance, a
professor may say in his opening lecture, “I am not inclined (geneigt instead
of geeignet = fitted) to estimate the merits of my predecessor.” Or another
professor says, “In the case of the female genital, in spite of the tempting ...
I mean, the attempted ...” (Versuchungen instead of Versuche).
The commonest and also the most noticeable form of slip of the
tongue, however, is that of saying the exact opposite of what one meant to
say. These cases are quite outside the effect of any relations between sounds
or confusion due to similarity, and in default one may therefore turn to the
fact that opposites have a strong conceptual connection with one another
and are psychologically very closely associated. There are well-known
examples of this sort. For instance, the President of our Parliament once
opened the session with the words “Gentlemen, I declare a quorum present
and herewith declare the session closed.”
Any other common association may work in a way as insidious as the
association of opposites and may on occasion lead to results as inopportune.
So there is a story to the effect that, at a festivity in honour of the marriage
of a child of H. Helmholtz with a child of the well-known inventor and
captain of industry, W. Siemens, the famous physiologist Dubois-Reymond
was asked to speak. He concluded his doubtless brilliant speech with the
toast “Success to the new partnership, Siemens and Halske!” which was of
course the name of the old firm. The association of the two names must
have been as familiar to a resident in Berlin as “Crosse & Blackwell” to a
Londoner.

So the effect of word associations must be taken into account, as well
as that of sound-values and similarities between words. But even that is not
enough. In one type of case, before we can arrive at an adequate
explanation of the slip we must consider some phrase which had been said,
or perhaps only thought, previously. Again, that is, a case of perseveration,
as Meringer insists, but arising in a more distant source.—I must confess
that altogether I have the impression that we are further than ever from
comprehension of slips of the tongue.
However, I hope I am not mistaken in thinking that in the course of our
examination of the above examples an impression has formed itself in us
which may be of a kind to repay further attention. We were considering the
general conditions under which slips of the tongue occur and then the
influences which determine the kind of distortion effected in the slip, but so
far we have not examined at all the result of the slip itself, as an object of
interest without regard to its origin. If we bring ourselves to do this we shall
in the end have to assert courageously that in some of the examples the slip
itself makes sense. Now what does it mean when we say “it makes sense”?
Well, it means that the result of the slip may perhaps have a right to be
regarded in itself as a valid mental process following out its own purpose,
and as an expression having content and meaning. Hitherto we have only
spoken of errors, but now it appears as if the error could sometimes be quite
a proper act, except that it has intruded itself in the place of one more
expected or intended.
In certain cases the sense belonging to the slip itself appears obvious
and unmistakable. When the President in his opening speech closes the
session of Parliament, a knowledge of the circumstances under which the
slip was made inclines us to see a meaning in it. He expects no good result
from the session and would be glad to be able to disperse forthwith; there is
no difficulty in discovering the meaning, or interpreting the sense, of this
slip. Or when a lady, appearing to compliment another, says: “I am sure you
must have thrown this delightful hat together” instead of “sewn it together”
(aufgepatzt instead of aufgeputzt), no scientific theories in the world can
prevent us from seeing in her slip the thought that the hat is an amateur
production. Or when a lady who is well known for her determined character
says: “My husband asked his doctor what sort of diet ought to be provided
for him. But the doctor said he needed no special diet, he could eat and

drink whatever I choose,” the slip appears clearly as the unmistakable
expression of a consistent scheme.
Now supposing it should turn out that not only a few cases of slips of
the tongue and errors in general, but the great majority of them, have a
meaning, then the meaning of the error, to which we have hitherto paid no
attention, would become the point of greatest interest to us and would
justifiably drive all other points of view into the background. All
physiological and psycho-physiological conditions could then be ignored
and attention could be devoted to the purely psychological investigation of
the sense, that is, the meaning, the intention, in the errors. With this in view,
therefore, we shall soon consider further material.
Before undertaking this, however, I should like to invite you to follow
up another clue with me. It often happens that a poet makes use of a slip of
the tongue or some other error as a means of artistic expression. This fact in
itself proves that he thinks the error, for instance, a slip of the tongue, has a
meaning; for he constructs it intentionally. It could hardly happen that a
poet accidentally made a slip of the pen and then allowed his slip of the pen
to stand as a slip of the tongue of the character. He wishes to reveal
something by means of the slip and we may well enquire what that may be
—whether perhaps he wishes to indicate that the person in question is
distracted or overtired, or is expecting a headache. Of course we should not
exaggerate the importance of it if poets do make use of slips to express their
meaning. Slips might be in reality without meaning, accidents in the mental
world, or only occasionally have a meaning, and poets would still be
entitled to refine them by infusing sense into them for their own purposes.
However, it would not be surprising if more were to be learned from poets
about slips of the tongue than from philologists and psychiatrists.
There is an example of a slip of this kind in Schiller’s Wallenstein
(Piccolomini, Act I, Scene 5). In the foregoing scene, young Max
Piccolomini had taken up Duke Wallenstein’s cause ardently, and had been
passionately describing the blessings of peace, which he had become aware
of in the course of a journey accompanying Wallenstein’s beautiful daughter
to the camp. As he leaves the stage, his father (Octavio) and the courtier
Questenberg are plunged in consternation. The fifth scene continues:—
Questenberg. Alas! and stands it so?
Friend, do we let him go
In this delusion? let him go from us?

Not call him back at once, not
Open his eyes here and now?

Octavio (recovering himself out of deep thought).
He has now opened mine
And I see more than pleases me.

Questenberg. What is it?

Octavio. A curse upon this journey!

Questenberg. But why so? What is it?

Octavio. Come, come, friend! I must up
And follow the ill-omened clue at once
And see with mine own eyes—come with me now!

Questenberg. What now? Where go you then?

Octavio (hastily). To her, herself!

Questenberg. To ...

Octavio (corrects himself). To the Duke! Come, let us go!
Octavio meant to say: “To him, to the Duke,” but his tongue slips and
he betrays (to us, at least) by the words “to her” that he has clearly
recognized the influence at work behind the famous young warrior’s
rhapsodies in favour of peace.
A still more impressive example was found by O. Rank in
Shakespeare. It occurs in the Merchant of Venice, in the famous scene in
which the fortunate suitor makes his choice among the three caskets; and I
can perhaps not do better than read to you now Rank’s short account of it.
“A slip of the tongue which occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice (Act III, Sc. 2) is exceedingly fine in the poetic feeling it shows and
in the brilliant way in which it is applied technically. Like the slip in
Wallenstein quoted by Freud in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it
shows that the poets well understand the mechanism and meaning of such
slips and assume that the audience will also understand them. Portia, who
by her father’s wish has been bound to the choice of a husband by lot, has
so far escaped all the unwelcome suitors by the luck of fortune. Having at
last found in Bassanio the suitor to whom she is inclined, she fears that he
too will choose the wrong casket. She would like to tell him that even so he

may rest assured of her love, but she is prevented by her oath. In this inner
conflict the poet makes her say to her chosen suitor:
I pray you tarry; pause a day or two,
Before you hazard: for, in choosing wrong,
I lose your company; therefore, forbear awhile:
There’s something tells me (but it is not love)
I would not lose you ...
... I could teach you
How to choose right, but then I am forsworn;
So will I never be; so may you miss me;
But if you do you’ll make me wish a sin,
That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,
They have o’erlooked me, and divided me;
One half of me is yours, the other half yours,—
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.

Just that which she only meant to indicate subtly to him because she
should really have concealed it from him altogether, namely, that even
before the lot she was his and loved him, this the poet with exquisite
fineness of psychological feeling causes to come to expression in her slip;
and is able, by this artistic device, to relieve the unbearable uncertainty of
the lover as well as the suspense of the audience as to the issue of the
choice.”
And notice, at the end, how subtly Portia reconciles the two
declarations which are contained in the slip, how she resolves the
contradiction between them, and finally even justifies the slip.
... but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.

It has happened that other thinkers outside the field of medicine have
disclosed by an observation the meaning of some error and so anticipated
our efforts in this direction. You all know the witty satirist Lichtenberg
(1742–1799) of whom Goethe said: “Where he makes a joke, a problem lies
concealed.” And occasionally the solution of the problem is revealed in the
joke. Lichtenberg writes in his witty and satirical Notes, “He always read
‘Agamemnon’ for ‘angenommen’ (verb meaning ‘to take for granted’), so
deeply versed was he in Homer.” This really contains the whole theory of
slips in reading.

At the next lecture we will see whether we can agree with the poets in
their conception of the meaning of psychological errors.

THIRD LECTURE
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS (continuation)

At the last lecture it occurred to us to consider the error by itself alone,
apart from its relation to the intended act with which it had interfered, and
we perceived that in certain cases it seemed to betray a meaning of its own.
We said to ourselves that if this conclusion, that the error has its own
meaning, could be established on a larger scale, that meaning would soon
prove more interesting to us than the investigation of the conditions under
which errors arise.
Let us once more agree upon what we understand by the “meaning” of
a mental process. This is nothing else but the intention which it serves and
its place in a mental sequence. In most of the cases we examined we could
substitute for the word “meaning” the words “intention” and “tendency.”
Now was it only a deceptive appearance, or a poetic glorification of the
error, that led us to believe that we could see an intention in it?
Let us still keep to the examples of slips of the tongue and review a
larger number of such manifestations. We then find whole categories of
cases in which the intention, the meaning, of the slip is quite obvious,
particularly so in those instances in which the opposite of what was
intended is said. The President says in his opening speech: “I declare the
session closed.” That is surely not ambiguous. The meaning and intention
of this slip is that he wants to close the session. One might well say, “he
said so himself”; we only take him at his word. Please do not interrupt me
with the objection that this is impossible, that we know quite well that he
wished to open the session, not to close it, and that he himself whom we
have just recognized as the best judge of his intention will affirm that he
meant to open it. In doing so you forget that we agreed to consider the error
by itself; its relation to the intention which it disturbs will be discussed
later. You would be guilty of an error in logic, by which you would
conveniently dispose of the whole problem under discussion, which in
English is called “begging the question.”

In other cases, where the form of the slip is not exactly the opposite of
what is intended, a contradictory sense may still often come to expression.
“I am not inclined (geneigt) to appreciate my predecessor’s merits.”
“Inclined” is not the opposite of “in a position to” (geeignet), but it is an
open confession of a thought in sharpest contradiction to the speaker’s duty
to meet the situation gracefully.
In still other cases the slip simply adds a second meaning to the one
intended. The sentence then sounds like a contraction, an abbreviation, a
condensation of several sentences into one. Thus the determined lady who
said: “He may eat and drink whatever I choose.” That is as if she had said:
“He can eat and drink what he chooses, but what does it matter what he
chooses? It is for me to do the choosing!” Slips of the tongue often give this
impression of abbreviation; for instance, when a professor of anatomy at the
end of his lecture on the nasal cavities asks whether his class has thoroughly
understood it and, after a general reply in the affirmative, goes on to say: “I
can hardly believe that that is so, since persons who can thoroughly
understand the nasal cavities can be counted, even in a city of millions, on
one finger ... I mean, on the fingers of one hand.” The abbreviated sentence
has its own meaning: it says that there is only one person who understands
the subject.
In contrast to these types in which the slip plainly discloses its
meaning are others in which the slip of the tongue conveys nothing
intelligible, and therefore directly controverts our expectations. The mis-
pronunciation by mistake of proper names, or the enunciation of
meaningless sounds, is such a frequent occurrence that this alone would
appear to dispose at once of the question whether all errors have a meaning.
Yet closer inspection of such examples discloses the fact that it is easily
possible to understand such distortions; indeed, that the difference between
these unintelligible cases and the previous more comprehensible ones is not
so very great.
The owner of a horse, on being asked how it was, replied: “O, it may
stad—it may take another month.”[14] Asked what he really meant to say, he
answered that he was thinking it was a sad business, and the words “sad”
and “take” together gave rise to stad. (Meringer and Mayer.)
Another man was relating some objectionable incidents and went on:
“and then certain facts were refilled.”[15] He explained that he meant to say

these facts were “filthy.” “Revealed” and “filthy” together combine to form
refilled. (Meringer and Mayer.)
You will recall the case of the young man who offered to “insort” an
unknown lady. We took the liberty of resolving this word into “insult” and
“escort,” and were quite convinced of this interpretation without requiring
proof of it.[16] From these examples you can see that even these more
obscure cases can be explained as the concurrence, or interference, of two
different intentions of speech with one another; the differences arise only in
that in the first type of slip the one intention has entirely excluded the other,
as when the opposite is said; while in the second type the one intention only
succeeds in distorting or modifying the other, from which arise
combinations of a more or less senseless appearance.
We believe that we have now discovered the secret of a large number
of slips of the tongue. If we keep this clear in mind we shall be able to
comprehend still further groups hitherto entirely mysterious. Although, for
instance, in a case of distortion of a name we cannot suppose that it is
always a matter of a contest between two similar but different names, yet
the second intention is easily perceived. Distortions of names are common
enough apart from slips of the tongue; they are attempts to liken the name
to something derogatory or degrading, a common form of abuse, which
educated persons soon learn to avoid but nevertheless do not willingly give
up. It may be dressed up as a joke, although one of a very low order. To
quote one gross and ugly example of such a distortion of a name, the name
of the President of the French Republic, Poincaré, has lately been
transformed into “Schweinskarré.” It is not going much further to assume
that some such abusive intention may also be behind distortions of names
produced by a slip of the tongue. In pursuing our idea, similar explanations
suggest themselves for cases of slips where the effect is comic or absurd. In
the case of the member of parliament who referred to the “honourable
member for Central Hell,” the sober atmosphere of the House is
unexpectedly disturbed by the intrusion of a word that calls up a ludicrous
and unflattering image; we are bound to conclude from the analogy with
certain offensive and abusive expressions that an impulse has interposed
here, to this effect: “You needn’t be taken in. I don’t mean a word of this.
To hell with the fellow!” The same applies to slips of the tongue which
transform quite harmless words into obscene and indecent ones.[17]

We are familiar with this tendency in certain people intentionally to
convert harmless words into indecent ones for the sake of the amusement
obtained; it passes for wit, and in fact when one hears of a case one at once
asks whether it was intended as a joke or occurred unintentionally as a slip
of the tongue.
Well, we seem to have solved the riddle of errors with comparatively
little trouble! They are not accidents; they are serious mental acts; they have
their meaning; they arise through the concurrence—perhaps better, the
mutual interference—of two different intentions. But now I can well
understand that you want to overwhelm me with a flood of questions and
doubts, which must be answered and resolved before we can enjoy this first
result of our efforts. I certainly do not want to press any hasty conclusions
upon you. Let us coolly consider everything in turn.
What would you like to say? Whether I think that this explanation
accounts for all cases of slips of the tongue or only for a certain number?
Whether this conception can be extended to the many other types of errors,
to misreading, slips of the pen, forgetting, wrongly performed actions,
mislaying things and so on? What part the factors of fatigue, excitement,
absent-mindedness and distraction of attention play in regard to the mental
nature of errors? Besides this, it is clearly seen that of the two competing
meanings in the slip one is always manifest, but not always the other. How
is one to arrive at the latter? And if one believes that one has guessed it,
how is one to find proof that this is not merely a probability but the only
true meaning? Is there anything else you wish to ask? If not, then I myself
will continue. I will remind you that we are not really greatly concerned
with errors in themselves, but that we wished to learn from a study of them
something of value from the point of view of psycho-analysis. Therefore I
will put this question: What sort of purposes or tendencies are these which
thus interfere with other intentions, and what is the relation between the
interfering tendency and the other? Thus, as soon as we have found the
answer to the riddle, our efforts begin again.
Very well then; is this the explanation of all cases of slips of the
tongue? I am very much inclined to think so, and for this reason, because
whenever one examines an instance of it this type of solution may be found.
Still, one cannot prove that a slip of the tongue cannot come to pass without
the agency of this mechanism. It may be so: for our purposes it is a matter

of indifference, theoretically; for the conclusions which we wish to draw by
way of an introduction to psycho-analysis remain valid, even if only a small
proportion of the total incidence of slips of the tongue comes under our
explanation, and this is certainly not so. The next question, whether this
explanation extends to other forms of errors, may be answered by way of
anticipation in the affirmative. You can convince yourselves of it when we
turn to consider examples of slips of the pen, of wrongly performed acts,
and so on. I propose, however, for technical reasons that we should
postpone doing this until we have investigated the slip of the tongue itself
more thoroughly.
The question what significance those factors, which some writers have
placed in the foreground, can now have for us—such factors as disturbances
of the circulation, fatigue, excitement, distraction, disturbances of attention
—demands a more exhaustive reply if we assume the mental mechanism of
slips described above. You will notice that we do not deny these factors.
Indeed, in general it doesn’t often happen that psycho-analysis contests
anything which is maintained in other quarters; as a rule, psycho-analysis
only adds something new to what has been said; and it does certainly
happen on occasion that what has hitherto been overlooked, and is now
supplied by psycho-analysis, is the most essential part of the matter. The
influence of such physiological predispositions as arise in slight illness,
circulatory disturbances and conditions of fatigue, upon the occurrence of
slips of the tongue is to be admitted without more ado; everyday personal
experience may convince you of it. But how little is explained by this
admission! Above all, these are not necessary conditions of errors. Slips of
the tongue may just as well occur in perfect health and normal conditions.
These bodily factors, therefore, are merely contributory; they only favour
and facilitate the peculiar mental mechanism which produces slips of the
tongue. I once used an illustration for this state of things which I will repeat
here, as I know of no better. Just suppose that on some dark night I am
walking in a lonely neighbourhood and am assaulted by a rogue who seizes
my watch and money, whereupon, since I could not see the robber’s face
clearly, I make my complaint at the police-station in these words:
“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.” The police
officer might reply to me: “You seem to carry your support of the extreme
mechanistic point of view too far for the facts. Suppose we put the case
thus: Under cover of darkness and encouraged by the loneliness of the spot,

some unknown thief has made away with your valuables. It appears to me
that the essential thing to be done is to look about for the thief. Perhaps we
shall then be able to take the plunder from him again.”
Psycho-physiological factors such as excitement, absent-mindedness,
distraction of attention, obviously provide very little in the way of
explanation. They are mere phrases; they are screens, and we should not be
deterred from looking behind them. The question is rather what has here
called forth the excitement or the particular diversion of attention. The
influence of sound-values, resemblances between words, and common
associations connecting certain words, must also be recognized as
important. They facilitate the slip by pointing out a path for it to take. But if
there is a path before me does it necessarily follow that I must go along it? I
also require a motive to determining my choice and, further, some force to
propel me forward. These sound-values and word associations are,
therefore, just like the bodily conditions, the facilitating causes of slips of
the tongue, and cannot provide the real explanation of them. Consider for a
moment the enormous majority of cases in which the words I am using in
my speech are not deranged on account of sound-resemblance to other
words, intimate associations with opposite meanings, or with expressions in
common use. It yet remains to suppose, with the philosopher Wundt, that a
slip of the tongue arises when the tendency to associations gains an
ascendance over the original intention owing to bodily fatigue. This would
be quite plausible if experience did not controvert it by the fact that in a
number of cases the bodily, and in another large group the associative,
predisposing causes are absent.
Particularly interesting to me, however, is your next question, namely,
by what means the two mutually disturbing tendencies may be ascertained.
You probably do not suspect how portentous this question is. You will agree
that one of these tendencies, the one which is interfered with, is always
unmistakable; the person who commits the slip knows it and acknowledges
it. Doubt and hesitation only arise in regard to the other, what we have
called the interfering, tendency. Now we have already heard, and you will
certainly not have forgotten, that in a certain number of cases this other
tendency is equally plain. It is evident in the result of the slip if only we
have the courage to let the slip speak for itself. The President who said the
opposite of what he meant—it is clear that he wishes to open the session,
but equally clear that he would also like to close it. That is so plain that it

needs no interpreting. But in the other cases, in which the interfering
tendency merely distorts the original without itself coming to full
expression,—how can the interfering tendency be detected in the distortion?
In one group of cases by a very safe and simple method, by the same
method, that is, by which we establish the tendency that is interfered with.
We enquire of the speaker, who tells us then and there; after making the slip
he restores the word he originally intended. “O, it may stad—no, it may
take another month.” Well, the interfering tendency may be likewise
supplied by him. We say, “Now why did you first say stad?” He replies, “I
meant to say it was a sad business”; and in the other case in which “refilled”
was said, the speaker informs you that he first meant to say it was a filthy
business, but controlled himself and substituted another expression. The
discovery of the disturbing tendency is here as definitely established as that
of the disturbed tendency. It is not without intention that I have selected as
examples cases which owe neither their origin nor their explanation to me
or to any supporter of mine. Still, in both these cases, a certain intervention
was necessary in order to produce the explanation. One had to ask the
speaker why he made the slip, what explanation he could give. Without that
he might have passed it by without seeking to explain it. Being asked,
however, he gave as his answer the first idea that occurred to him. And see
now, this little intervention and the result of it constitute already a psycho-
analysis, a prototype of every psycho-analytic investigation that we may
undertake further.
Now, should I be too suspicious if I were to surmise that, at the very
moment at which psycho-analysis begins to dawn upon you, a resistance to
it instantly raises itself within your mind? Are you not eager to object that
information supplied by the person enquired of, who committed the slip, is
not completely reliable evidence. He naturally wishes, you think, to meet
your request to explain his slip, and so he says the first thing that he can
think of, if it will do at all. There is no proof that that is actually how the
slip arose. It may have been so, but it may just as well have been otherwise.
Something else also might have occurred to him that would have met the
case as well or even better.
It is remarkable how little respect you have, in your hearts, for a
mental fact! Imagine that someone had undertaken a chemical analysis of a
certain substance and had ascertained that one ingredient of it is of a certain

weight, so and so many milligrams. From this weight, thus arrived at,
certain conclusions may be drawn. Do you think now it would ever occur to
a chemist to discredit these conclusions on the ground that the isolated
substance might as well have had some other weight? Everyone recognizes
the fact that it actually had this weight and no other, and builds further
conclusions confidently on that fact. But when it is a question of a mental
fact, that it was such an idea and no other that occurred to the person when
questioned, you will not accept that as valid, but say that something else
might as well have occurred to him! The truth is that you have an illusion of
a psychic freedom within you which you do not want to give up. I regret to
say that on this point I find myself in sharpest opposition to your views.
Now you will break off here only to take up your resistance at another
point. You will continue: “We understand that it lies in the peculiar
technique of psycho-analysis to bring the person analysed to give the
solution of its problems. Let us take another example, that in which the
after-dinner speaker calls upon the company to hiccough to the health of
their guest. The interfering tendency is, you say, in this case to ridicule; this
it is which opposes the intention to do honour. But this is a mere
interpretation on your part, based on observations made independently of
the slip. If in this case you were to question the perpetrator of the slip he
would not confirm your view that he intended an insult; on the contrary, he
would vehemently deny it. Why do you not abandon your undemonstrable
interpretation in the face of this flat denial?”
Yes, this time you have lighted upon something formidable. I can
picture to myself that unknown speaker; he is probably an assistant of the
guest of honour, perhaps already a junior lecturer himself, a young man
with the brightest prospects. I will press him and ask whether he is sure he
did not perceive some feeling in himself antagonistic to the demand that he
should pay honour to his chief. A nice fuss there is! He becomes impatient
and suddenly bursts out at me: “Look here, enough of this cross-
examination, or I’ll make myself disagreeable! You will ruin my career with
your suspicions. I simply said “aufstossen” instead of “anstossen,” because
I’d already said “auf” twice before it. It’s the thing that Meringer calls a
perseveration, and there’s nothing else to be read into it. Do you understand
me? That’s enough.” H’m, this is a startling reaction, a truly energetic
repudiation. I see that there is nothing more to be done with the young man,
but I think to myself that he betrays a strong personal interest in making out

that his slip has no meaning. You will perhaps agree too that he has no right
to become so uncivil over a purely theoretical investigation, but after all,
you will think, he must know what he wanted to say and what not.
O, so he must? That is perhaps still open to question.
Now you think you have me in a trap. “So that is your technique,” I
hear you say. “When the person who commits a slip gives an explanation
which fits your views then you declare him to be the final authority on the
subject. He says so himself! But if what he says does not suit your book,
then you suddenly assert that what he says does not count, one need not
believe it.”
Certainly that is so. But I can give you another instance of a similarly
monstrous procedure. When an accused man confesses to a deed the judge
believes him, but when he denies it the judge does not believe him. Were it
otherwise the law could not be administered, and in spite of occasional
miscarriages you will admit that the system, on the whole, works well.
“Well, but are you a judge, and is the person who commits a slip to be
accused before you? Is a slip of the tongue a crime?”
Perhaps we need not reject even this comparison. But see now to what
deep-seated differences our attempt to investigate the apparently harmless
problems of errors has brought us, differences which at this stage we do not
know in the least how to reconcile. I suggest that we should make a
temporary compromise on the basis of the analogy with the judge and the
prisoner. You shall grant me that the meaning of an error admits of no doubt
when the subject of the analysis acknowledges it himself. I, in turn, will
admit that a direct proof for the suspected meaning cannot be obtained if the
subject refuses us the information, and, of course, this applies also when the
subject is not present to give us the information. As also in legal
proceedings, we are then thrown back upon indications in order to form a
decision, the truth of which is sometimes more and sometimes less
probable. At law, for practical reasons, guilt has to be declared also on
circumstantial evidence. There is no such necessity here; but neither are we
bound to refrain from considering such evidence. It is a mistake to believe
that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and
it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who
feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious
catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its

catechism has but few apodictic precepts; it consists mainly of statements
which it has developed to varying degrees of probability. The capacity to be
content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on
constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark
of the scientific habit of mind.
But where shall we find a starting-point for our interpretations, and the
indications for our proof, in cases where the subject under analysis says
nothing to explain the meaning of the error? From various sources. First, by
analogy with similar phenomena not produced by error, as when we
maintain that the distortion of a name by mistake has the same intention to
ridicule behind it as intentional distortion of names. And then, from the
mental situation in which the error arose, from our knowledge of the
character of the person who commits it, and of the feelings active in him
before the error, to which it may be a response. As a rule what happens is
that we find the meaning of the error according to general principles; and
this, to begin with, is only a conjecture, a tentative solution, proof being
discovered later by an examination of the mental situation. Sometimes it is
necessary to await further developments, which have been, so to speak,
foreshadowed by the error, before we can find confirmation of our
conjecture.
I cannot easily give you evidence of this if I have to limit myself to the
field of slips of the tongue, although even here I have a few good examples.
The young man who offered to “insort” the lady is in fact very shy; the lady
whose husband may eat and drink what she likes I know to be one of those
managing women who rule the household with a rod of iron. Or take the
following case: At a general meeting of a club a young member made a
violent attack in a speech, in the course of which he spoke of the officers of
the society as “Lenders of the Committee,” which appears to be a substitute
for Members of the Committee.[18] We should conjecture that against his
attack some interfering tendency was active which was itself in some way
connected with the idea of lending. As a matter of fact an informant tells us
that the speaker is in constant money difficulties and was actually
attempting to raise money at the time. So the interfering tendency really is
to be translated into the thought: “Be more moderate in your opposition:
these are the people whom you want to lend you money.”

If I diverge into the field of other kinds of errors I can give you a wide
selection of examples of such circumstantial evidence.
If anyone forgets an otherwise familiar proper name and has difficulty
in retaining it in his memory—even with an effort—it is not hard to guess
that he has something against the owner of the name and does not like to
think of him; consider in the light of this the following notes on the mental
situation in which an error of this kind was made.
A Mr. Y. fell in love with a lady, who did not return the feeling and
shortly after married a Mr. X. Although Mr. Y. had already known Mr. X.
for some time, and even had business relations with him, he forgets his
name over and over again, so that he frequently has to ask someone the
man’s name when it is necessary to write to him.[19] Obviously Mr. Y. wants
to obliterate all knowledge of his fortunate rival. “Never thought of shall he
be.”
Another example: a lady inquires of a doctor about a common
acquaintance, calling her by her maiden name. She has forgotten the
married name. She admits that she strongly objected to the marriage and
dislikes the husband intensely.[20]
Later we shall have much to say in other connections in regard to the
forgetting of names; at the moment we are chiefly interested in the ‘mental
situation’ in which the lapse of memory occurs.
The forgetting of resolutions can in general be referred to an opposing
current of feeling which is against carrying out the intention. It is not only
we psycho-analysts who hold this view, however; it is the ordinary attitude
of everyone in their daily affairs, which they only deny in theory. The
protégé whose patron apologizes for having forgotten his request is not
pacified by such an apology. He thinks immediately: “It’s evidently nothing
to him; he promised, but he doesn’t mean to do it.” Forgetting is therefore
criticized even in life, in certain connections, and the difference between the
popular and the psycho-analytic conception of these errors seems to be
dispelled. Imagine a hostess receiving a guest with the words: “What, is it
to-day you were coming? I quite forgot that I had asked you for to-day”; or
a young man confessing to his beloved that he had forgotten all about the
appointment they had arranged on the last occasion. He will never admit it;
he will rather invent on the spur of the moment the most wildly improbable
hindrances which prevented his coming and made it impossible for him to

communicate with her from that day to this. We all know that in military
service the excuse of having forgotten is worthless and saves no one from
punishment; the system is recognized as justifiable. Here everyone is
suddenly agreed that a certain mistake has a meaning and what that
meaning is. Why are they not consistent enough to extend their insight to
other errors and then openly acknowledge it? There is naturally also an
answer to this.
If the meaning of forgetting resolutions is so little open to doubt in the
minds of people in general you will be the less surprised to find that writers
employ such mistakes in a similar sense. Those of you who have seen or
read Shaw’s Cæsar and Cleopatra will recall that Cæsar, when departing in
the last scene, is pursued by the feeling that there was something else he
intended to do which he had now forgotten. At last it turns out what it is: to
say farewell to Cleopatra. By this small device the author attempts to
ascribe to the great Cæsar a feeling of superiority which he did not possess
and to which he did not at all aspire. You can learn from historical sources
that Cæsar arranged for Cleopatra to follow him to Rome and that she was
living there with her little Cæsarion when Cæsar was murdered, whereupon
she fled the city.
The cases of forgetting resolutions are as a rule so clear that they are of
little use for our purpose, which is to discover in the mental situation
indications of the meaning of the error. Let us turn, therefore, to a
particularly ambiguous and obscure form of error, that of losing and
mislaying objects. It will certainly seem incredible to you that the person
himself could have any purpose in losing things, which is often such a
painful accident. But there are innumerable instances of this kind: A young
man loses a pencil to which he was much attached. A few days before he
had had a letter from his brother-in-law which concluded with these words:
“I have neither time nor inclination at present to encourage you in your
frivolity and idleness.”[21] Now the pencil was a present from this brother-
in-law. Had it not been for this coincidence we could not of course have
maintained that the loss involved any intention to get rid of the gift. Similar
cases are very numerous. One loses objects when one has quarrelled with
the giver and no longer wants to be reminded of him, or again, when one
has tired of them and wants an excuse to provide oneself with something
different and better. Dropping, breaking, and destroying things of course
serves a similar purpose in regard to the object. Can it be considered

accidental when, just before his birthday, a child loses and damages his
possessions, for instance, his watch and his schoolbag?
Anyone who has experienced often enough the annoyance of not being
able to find something which he has himself put away will certainly be
unwilling to believe that he could have had any intention in so doing. And
yet cases are not at all rare in which the circumstances attendant on the act
of mislaying point to a tendency to put the object aside temporarily or
permanently. Perhaps the best example of this kind is the following.
A young man told me this story: “A few years ago there were
misunderstandings between me and my wife; I thought her too cold, and
though I willingly acknowledged her excellent qualities we lived together
without affection. One day, on coming in from a walk, she brought me a
book which she had bought me because she thought it would interest me. I
thanked her for her little attention, promised to read the book, put it among
my things and never could find it again. Months passed by and occasionally
I thought of this derelict book and tried in vain to find it. About six months
later my dear mother, who lived some distance away, fell ill. My wife left
our house to go and nurse her mother-in-law, who became seriously ill,
giving my wife an opportunity of showing her best qualities. One evening I
came home full of enthusiasm and gratitude towards my wife. I walked up
to my writing desk and opened a certain drawer in it, without a definite
intention but with a kind of somnambulistic sureness, and there before me
lay the lost book which I had so often looked for.”
With the disappearance of the motive the inability to find the mislaid
object also came to an end.
I could multiply this collection of examples indefinitely; but I will not
do so now. In my Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life (first published in
1901) you will find plenty of examples for the study of errors.[22] All these
examples demonstrate the same thing over and over again; they make it
probable to you that mistakes have a meaning and they show you how the
meaning can be guessed or confirmed from the attendant circumstances. I
restrict myself rather to-day, because our intention here was limited to
studying these phenomena with a view to obtaining an introduction to
psycho-analysis. There are only two groups of occurrences into which I
must still go, the accumulated and combined errors, and the confirmation of
our interpretations by subsequent events.

Accumulated and combined errors are certainly the finest flowers of
the species. If we were only concerned to prove that errors had a meaning,
we should have limited ourselves to them at the outset, for the meaning in
them is unmistakable, even to the dullest intelligence, and strong enough to
impress the most critical judgement. The repetition of the occurrences
betrays a persistence which is hardly ever an attribute of chance, but which
fits well with the idea of design. Further, the exchanging of one kind of
mistake for another shows us what is the most important and essential
element in the error; and that is, not its form, or the means of which it
makes use, but the tendency which makes use of it and can achieve its end
in the most various ways. Thus I will give you a case of repeated forgetting:
Ernest Jones relates that he once allowed a letter to lie on his writing desk
for several days for some unknown reason. At last he decided to post it, but
received it back from the dead-letter office, for he had forgotten to address
it. After he had addressed it he took it to post but this time without a stamp.
At this point he finally had to admit to himself his objection to sending the
letter at all.
In another case, taking up a thing by mistake is combined with
mislaying it. A lady travelled to Rome with her brother-in-law, a famous
artist. The visitor was much fêted by the Germans living in Rome and
received, among other things, a present of an antique gold medal. The lady
was vexed because her brother-in-law did not appreciate the fine specimen
highly enough. After her sister had arrived she returned home and
discovered, upon unpacking, that she had brought the medal with her—how,
she did not know. She wrote at once to her brother-in-law telling him that
she would send the stolen property back to him the next day. But the next
day the medal was so cleverly mislaid that it could not be discovered and
could not be returned, and then it began to dawn upon the lady what her
“absent-mindedness” had meant, namely, that she wanted to keep the work
of art for herself.[23]
I have already given you an example of a combination of forgetfulness
with an error, in the case in which someone forgets an appointment, and a
second time, with the firm intention of not forgetting it again, appears at an
hour which is not the appointed one. A quite analogous case was told me
from his own experience by a friend who pursues literary as well as
scientific interests. He said: “Some years ago I accepted election to the
Council of a certain literary society because I hoped that the society might

at some time be useful to me in getting a play of mine produced; and,
although not much interested, I attended the meetings regularly every
Friday. A few months ago I received an assurance that my play would be
produced at a theatre in F. and since then it has invariably happened that I
forget to attend the meetings of the society. When I read your writings on
this subject, I reproached myself with my meanness in staying away now
that these people can no longer be of use to me and determined on no
account to forget on the following Friday. I kept reminding myself of my
resolution until I carried it out and stood at the door of the meeting-room.
To my amazement it was closed and the meeting was already over! I had
made a mistake in the day of the week and it was then Saturday!”
It would be tempting to collect more of these examples, but I will pass
on and, instead, let you glance at those cases in which interpretation has to
wait for confirmation in the future.
The main condition in these cases is, as we might expect, that the
mental situation at the time is unknown or cannot be ascertained. At the
moment, therefore, our interpretation is no more than a supposition to
which we ourselves would not ascribe too much weight. Later, however,
something happens which shows us how well justified our previous
interpretation was. I was once the guest of a young married couple and
heard the young wife laughingly describe her latest experience, how the day
after the return from the honeymoon she had called for her sister and gone
shopping with her as in former times, while her husband went to his
business. Suddenly she noticed a man on the other side of the street and,
nudging her sister, said, “Look, there goes Mr. K.” She had forgotten that
this man had been her husband for some weeks. A shudder went over me as
I heard the story, but I dared not draw the inference. Several years later the
little incident came back to my mind after this marriage had come to a most
unhappy end.
Maeder tells a story of a lady who had forgotten to try on her wedding-
dress the day before the wedding, to the despair of the dressmaker, and
remembered it only late in the evening. He connects it with the fact that
soon after the marriage she was divorced by her husband. I know a woman
now divorced from her husband who, in managing her money-affairs,
frequently signed documents with her maiden name, many years before she
really resumed it. I know of other women who lost their wedding-rings on

the honeymoon and know, too, that the course of the marriage lent meaning
to this accident. And now one striking example more, with a better ending.
It is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage never took place
because he forgot the hour of the ceremony and went to the laboratory
instead of to the church. He was wise enough to let the matter rest with one
attempt, and died unmarried at a ripe age.
Perhaps the idea has also come to you that in these examples mistakes
seem to have replaced the omens or portents of the ancients. And indeed,
certain kinds of portents were nothing but errors, for instance, when anyone
stumbled or fell down. It is true that another group of omens bore the
character of objective events rather than of subjective acts. But you would
not believe how difficult it is sometimes to decide whether a specific
instance belongs to the first category or to the second. The act knows so
often how to disguise itself as a passive experience.
Everyone of us who can look back over a fairly long experience of life
would probably say that he might have spared himself many
disappointments and painful surprises, if he had had the courage and
resolution to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he noticed in his
intercourse with others, and to regard them as signs of tendencies still in the
background. For the most part one does not dare to do this; one has an
impression that one would become superstitious again by a circuitous
scientific path. And then, not all omens come true, and our theories will
show you how it is that they need not all come true.

FOURTH LECTURE
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS (conclusion)

That errors have a meaning we may certainly set down as established
by our efforts up to this point, and may take this conclusion as a basis for
our further investigations. Let me once more emphasize the fact that we do
not maintain—and for our purposes do not need to maintain—that every
single mistake which occurs has a meaning, although I think that probable.
It is enough for us to prove that such a meaning is relatively frequent in the
various forms of errors. In this respect, by the way, the various forms show
certain differences. Some cases of slips of the tongue, slips of the pen, and
so on, may be the effect of a purely physiological cause, though I cannot
believe this possible of those errors which depend upon forgetfulness
(forgetting of names or intentions, mislaying, and so on); losing possessions
is in all probability to be recognized as unintentional in some cases;
altogether our conceptions are only to a certain extent applicable to the
mistakes which occur in daily life. These limitations should be borne in
mind by you when we proceed on the assumption that errors are mental acts
arising from the mutual interference of two intentions.
This is the first result of our psycho-analysis. Hitherto psychology has
known nothing of such interferences or of the possibility that they could
occasion manifestations of this kind. We have widened the domain of
mental phenomena to a very considerable extent and have won for
psychology phenomena which were never before accredited to it.
Let us dwell for a moment on the proposition that errors are “mental
acts.” Does this mean any more than our former statement, that they have a
meaning? I do not think so; on the contrary, it is a more indefinite statement
and one more open to misunderstanding. Everything that can be observed in
mental life will be designated at one time or another as a mental
phenomenon. It depends, however, whether the particular mental
phenomenon is directly due to bodily, organic or material agencies, in
which case it does not fall to psychology for investigation; or whether it

arose directly from other mental processes, behind which at some point the
succession of organic agencies then begins. We have in mind the latter state
of things when we describe a phenomenon as a mental process, and it is
therefore more expedient to put our statement in this form: The
phenomenon has meaning; and by meaning we understand significance,
intention, tendency and a position in a sequence of mental concatenations.
There is another group of occurrences which is very closely related to
errors but for which this name is not suitable. We call them ‘accidental’ and
symptomatic acts. They also appear to be unmotivated, insignificant and
unimportant but, in addition to this, they have very clearly the feature of
superfluity. They are, on the one hand, distinguishable from errors by the
absence of any second intention to which they are opposed and which they
disturb; on the other hand, they merge without any definite line of
demarcation into the gestures and movements which we regard as
expressions of the emotions. To this class of accidental performances
belong all those apparently purposeless acts which we carry out, as though
in play, with clothing, parts of the body, objects within reach; also the
omission of such acts; and again the tunes which we hum to ourselves. I
maintain that all such performances have meaning and are explicable in the
same way as are errors, that they are slight indications of other more
important mental processes, and are genuine mental acts. I propose,
however, not to linger over this further extension of the field of mental
phenomena, but to return to the errors; for by a consideration of them
problems of importance in the enquiry into psycho-analysis can be worked
out much more clearly.
Undoubtedly, the most interesting questions which we formulated
while considering errors, and have not yet answered, are the following: We
said that errors result from the mutual interference of two different
intentions, of which one may be called the intention interfered with, and the
other the interfering tendency. The intentions interfered with give rise to no
further questions, but concerning the others we wish to know, first, what
kind of intentions these are that arise as disturbers of others, and secondly,
what are the relations between the interfering tendencies and those which
suffer the interference?
Allow me to take slips of the tongue again as representative of the
whole series, and to answer the second question before the first.

The interfering tendency in the slip of the tongue may be connected in
meaning with the intention interfered with, in which case the former
contains a contradiction of the latter, or corrects, or supplements it. Or, in
other more obscure and more interesting cases, the interfering tendency
may have no connection whatever in meaning with the intention interfered
with.
Evidence for the first of these two relationships can be found without
difficulty in the examples already studied and in others similar to them. In
almost all cases of slips of the tongue where the opposite of what is meant
is said the interfering tendency expresses the opposite meaning to that of
the intention interfered with, and the slip is the expression of the conflict
between two incompatible impulses. “I declare the meeting open, but would
prefer to have closed it” is the meaning of the President’s slip. A political
paper which had been accused of corruption defends itself in an article
meant to culminate with the words: “Our readers will testify that we have
always laboured for the public benefit in the most disinterested manner.”
But the editor entrusted with the composition of the defence wrote “in the
most interested manner.” That is to say, he thinks, “I have to write this stuff,
but I know better.” A representative of the people, urging that the Kaiser
should be told the truth “rückhaltslos” (unreservedly), hears an inner voice
terrified at his boldness, and by a slip of the tongue transforms rückhaltslos
into “rückgratslos” (without backbone, ineffectually).
In the examples already given, which produce an impression of
contraction and abbreviation, the process represents a correction, addition,
or continuation, in which a second tendency manifests itself alongside the
first. “Things were then revealed, but better say it straight out, they were
filthy, therefore,—things were then refilled.” “The people who understand
this subject may be counted on the fingers of one hand, but no, there is
really only one person who understands it, very well then,—can be counted
on one finger.” Or, “my husband can eat and drink what he likes, but, you
know, I don’t permit him to like this and that; so then,—he may eat and
drink what I like.” In all these cases the slip arises from the content of the
intention interfered with, or is directly connected with it.
The other kind of relationship between the two interfering tendencies
seems strange. If the interfering tendency has nothing to do with the content
of the one interfered with, whence comes it then, and how does it happen to

make itself manifest just at that point? Observation, which alone can supply
the answer to this, shows that the interfering tendency proceeds from a train
of thought which has occupied the person shortly before and then reveals
itself in this way as an after-effect, irrespective of whether or not it has
already been expressed in speech. It is really therefore to be described as a
perseveration, though not necessarily a perseveration of spoken words. An
associative connection between the interfering tendency and that interfered
with is not lacking here either, though it is not found in the content but is
artificially established, sometimes with considerable “forcing” of the
connections.
Here is a simple example of this which I observed myself. Once in the
beautiful Dolomites I met two Viennese ladies who were starting for a
walking-tour. I accompanied them part of the way and we discussed the
pleasures, but also the trials, of this way of life. One of the ladies admitted
that spending the day like this entailed much discomfort. “It certainly is
very unpleasant to tramp all day in the sun till one’s blouse ... and things are
soaked through.” In this sentence she had to overcome a slight hesitation at
one point. Then she continued: “But then, when one gets nach Hose and can
change....” (Hose means drawers: the lady meant to say nach Hause which
means home). We did not analyse this slip, but I am sure you will easily
understand it. The lady’s intention had been to enumerate a more complete
list of her clothes, “blouse, chemise and drawers.” From motives of
propriety, mention of the drawers (Hose) was omitted; but in the next
sentence, the content of which is quite independent, the unuttered word
came to light as a distortion of the word it resembled in sound, home
(Hause).
Now we can turn at last to the main question which has been so long
postponed, namely, what kind of tendencies these are which bring
themselves to expression in this unusual way by interfering with other
intentions. They are evidently very various, yet our aim is to find some
element common to them all. If we examine a series of examples for this
purpose we shall soon find that they fall into three groups. To the first group
belong the cases in which the interfering tendency is known to the speaker
and, moreover, was felt by him before the slip. Thus, in the case of the slip
“refilled,” the speaker not only admitted that he had criticized the events in
question as “filthy,” but further, that he had had the intention, which he
subsequently reversed, of expressing this opinion in words. A second group

is formed by other cases in which the interfering tendency is likewise
recognized by the speaker as his own, but he is not aware that it was active
in him before the slip. He therefore accepts our interpretation, but remains
to some extent surprised by it. Examples of this attitude are probably more
easily found in other errors than in slips of the tongue. In the third group the
interpretation of the interfering tendency is energetically repudiated by the
speaker; not only does he dispute that it was active in him before the slip,
but he will maintain that it is altogether entirely alien to him. Recall the
case about hiccoughing and the positively discourteous rebuff which I
brought upon myself by detecting the interfering tendency. You know that
in our attitude towards these cases you and I are still far from an agreement.
I should make nothing of the after-dinner speaker’s denial and hold fast to
my interpretation unwaveringly, while you, I imagine, are still impressed by
his vehemence and are wondering whether one should not forego the
interpretation of such errors and let them pass for purely physiological acts,
as in the days before analysis. I can imagine what it is that alarms you. My
interpretation includes the assumption that tendencies of which a speaker
knows nothing can express themselves through him and that I can deduce
them from various indications. You hesitate before a conclusion so novel
and so pregnant with consequences. I understand that, and admit that up to a
point you are justified. But let one thing be clear: if you intend to carry to
its logical conclusion the conception of errors which has been confirmed by
so many examples, you must decide to make this startling assumption. If
you cannot do this, you will have to abandon again the understanding of
errors which you had only just begun to obtain.
Let us pause a moment on that which unites the three groups and is
common to the three mechanisms of a slip of the tongue. Fortunately this
common element is unmistakable. In the first two groups the interfering
tendency is admitted by the speaker; in the first, there is the additional fact
that it showed itself immediately before the slip. But in both cases it has
been forced back.[24] The speaker had determined not to convert the idea
into speech and then it happens that he makes a slip of the tongue; that is to
say, the tendency which is debarred from expression asserts itself against
his will and gains utterance, either by altering the expression of the
intention permitted by him, or by mingling with it, or actually by setting
itself in place of it. This then is the mechanism of a slip of the tongue.

For my own part I can bring the process in the third group also into
perfect harmony with the mechanism here described. I need only assume
that these three groups are differentiated by the varying degrees to which
the forcing back of an intention is effective. In the first group, the intention
is present and makes itself perceptible before the words are spoken; not
until then does it suffer the rejection for which it indemnifies itself in the
slip. In the second group the rejection reaches further back; the intention is
no longer perceptible even before the speech. It is remarkable that this does
not hinder it in the least from being the active cause of the slip! But this
state of things simplifies the explanation of the process in the third group. I
shall be bold enough to assume that a tendency can still express itself by an
error though it has been debarred from expression for a long time, perhaps
for a very long time, has not made itself perceptible at all, and can therefore
be directly repudiated by the speaker. But leaving aside the problem of the
third group, you must conclude from the other cases that a suppression
(Unterdrückung) of a previous intention to say something is the
indispensable condition for the occurrence of a slip of the tongue.
We may now claim to have made further progress in the understanding
of errors. We not only know them to be mental phenomena in which
meaning and purpose are recognizable, not only know that they arise from
the mutual interference of two different intentions, but in addition we know
that, for one of these intentions to be able to express itself by interfering
with another, it must itself have been subject to some hindrance against its
operation. It must first be itself interfered with, before it can interfere with
others. Naturally this does not give us a complete explanation of the
phenomena which we call errors. We see at once further questions arising,
and in general we suspect that as we progress towards comprehension the
more numerous will be the occasions for new questions. We might ask, for
instance, why the matter does not proceed much more simply. If the
intention to restrain a certain tendency instead of carrying it into effect is
present in the mind, then this restraint ought to succeed, so that nothing
whatever of the tendency gains expression, or else it might fail so that the
restrained tendency achieves full expression. But errors are compromise-
formations; they express part-success and part-failure for each of the two
intentions; the threatened intention is neither entirely suppressed nor, apart
from some instances, does it force itself through intact. We can imagine that
special conditions must be present for the occurrence of such interference

(or compromise)-formations, but we cannot even conjecture of what kind
they may be. Nor do I think that we could discover these unknown
circumstances by penetrating further into the study of errors. It will be
necessary first to examine thoroughly yet other obscure fields of mental
life: only the analogies to be met with there can give us courage to form
those assumptions which are requisite for a more searching elucidation of
errors. And one other point! To work from slight indications, as we
constantly do in this field, is not without its dangers. There is a mental
disorder called combinatory paranoia in which the practice of utilizing such
small indications is carried beyond all limits, and I naturally do not contend
that the conclusions which are built up on such a basis are throughout
correct. Only by the breadth of our observations, by the accumulation of
similar impressions from the most varied forms of mental life, can we guard
against this danger.
So now we will leave the analysis of errors. But there is one thing
more which I might impress upon you: to keep in mind, as a model, the
method by which we have studied these phenomena. You can perceive from
these examples what the aim of our psychology is. Our purpose is not
merely to describe and classify the phenomena, but to conceive them as
brought about by the play of forces in the mind, as expressions of
tendencies striving towards a goal, which work together or against one
another. We are endeavouring to attain a dynamic conception of mental
phenomena. In this conception, the trends we merely infer are more
prominent than the phenomena we perceive.
So we will probe no further into errors; but we may still take a fleeting
glimpse over the breadth of this whole field, in the course of which we shall
both meet with things already known and come upon the tracks of others
that are new. In so doing, we will keep to the division into three groups of
slips of the tongue, made at the beginning of our study, together with the
co-ordinate forms of slips of the pen, misreading, mis-hearing; of forgetting
with its subdivisions according to the object forgotten (proper names,
foreign words, resolutions, impressions); and of mislaying, mistaking, and
losing, objects. Mistakes, in so far as they concern us, are to be grouped
partly under the head of forgetting, partly under acts erroneously performed
(picking up the wrong objects, etc.).

We have already treated slips of the tongue in great detail, yet there is
still something to add. There are certain small affective manifestations
related to slips of the tongue which are not entirely without interest. No one
likes to think he has made a slip of the tongue; one often fails to hear it
when made by oneself, but never when made by someone else. Slips of the
tongue are in a certain sense infectious; it is not at all easy to speak of them
without making them oneself. It is not hard to detect the motivation of even
the most trifling forms of them, although these do not throw any particular
light on hidden mental processes. If, for instance, anyone pronounces a long
vowel as a short one, in consequence of a disturbance over the word, no
matter how motivated, he will as a result soon after lengthen a short vowel
and commit a new slip in compensation for the first. The same thing occurs
if anyone pronounces a diphthong indistinctly and carelessly, for instance,
“ew” or “oy” as “i”; he tries to correct it by changing a subsequent “i” into
“ew” or “oy.” Some consideration relating to the hearer seems to be behind
this behaviour, as though he were not to be allowed to think that the speaker
is indifferent how he treats his mother-tongue. The second, compensating
distortion actually has the purpose of drawing the hearer’s attention to the
first and assuring him that it has not escaped the speaker either. The most
frequent, insignificant, and simple forms of slips consist in contractions and
anticipations in inconspicuous parts of the speech. In a long sentence, for
instance, slips of the tongue would be of the kind in which the last word
intended influences the sound of an earlier word. This gives an impression
of a certain impatience to be done with the sentence, and in general it points
to a certain resistance against the communication of this sentence, or the
speech altogether. From this we come to border-line cases, in which the
differences between the psycho-analytical and the ordinary physiological
conception of slips of the tongue become merged. We assume that in these
cases a disturbing tendency is opposing the intended speech; but it can only
betray its presence and not what its own purpose is. The interference which
it causes follows some sound-influence or associative connection and may
be regarded as a distraction of attention away from the intended speech. But
neither in this distraction of attention, nor in the associative tendency which
has been activated, lies the essence of the occurrence; the essence lies rather
in the hint the occurrence gives of the presence of some other intention
interfering with the intended speech, the nature of which cannot in this case

be discovered from its effects, as is possible in all the more pronounced
cases of slips of the tongue.
Slips of the pen, to which I now turn, are so like slips of the tongue in
their mechanism that no new points of view are to be expected from them.
Perhaps a small addition to our knowledge from this group will content us.
Those very common little slips of the pen, contractions, anticipations of
later words, particularly of the last words, point to a general distaste for
writing and to an impatience to be done; more pronounced effects in slips of
the pen allow the nature and intention of the interference to be recognized.
In general, if one finds a slip of the pen in a letter one knows that the
writer’s mind was not working smoothly at the moment; what was the
matter one cannot always establish. Slips of the pen are frequently as little
noticed by those who make them as slips of the tongue. The following
observation is striking in this connection. There are, of course, some
persons who have the habit of always re-reading every letter they write
before sending it. Others do not do this; but if the latter make an exception
and re-read a letter they then always have an opportunity of finding and
correcting a striking slip of the pen. How is this to be explained? It almost
looks as if such people knew that they had made a slip in writing the letter.
Are we really to believe that this is so?
There is an interesting problem connected with the practical
significance of slips of the pen. You may recall the case of the murderer H.
who managed, by asserting himself to be a bacteriologist, to obtain cultures
of highly dangerous disease-germs from scientific institutions, but used
them for the purpose of doing away in this most modern fashion with
people connected with him. This man once complained to the authorities of
one of these institutions about the ineffectiveness of the cultures sent him,
but committed a slip of the pen and, instead of the words “in my
experiments on mice and guinea-pigs (Mäusen und Meerschweinchen)”, the
words “in my experiments on people (Menschen)” were plainly legible.
This slip even attracted the attention of the doctors at the institute but, so far
as I know, they drew no conclusion from it. Now, what do you think?
Would it not have been better if the doctors had taken the slip of the pen as
a confession and started an investigation so that the murderer’s proceedings
might have been arrested in time? In this case, does not ignorance of our
conception of errors result in neglect which, in actuality, may be very
important? Well, I know that such a slip of the pen would certainly rouse

great suspicion in me; but there is an important objection against regarding
it as a confession. The matter is not so simple. The slip of the pen is
certainly an indication but, alone, it would not have justified an enquiry. It
does indeed betray that the man is occupied with the thought of infecting
human beings; but it does not show with certainty whether this thought is a
definite plan to do harm or a mere phantasy of no practical importance. It is
even possible that a person making such a slip will deny, with the soundest
subjective justification, the existence of such a phantasy in himself, and will
reject the idea as a thing utterly alien to him. Later, when we come to
consider the difference between psychical reality and material reality you
will be better able to appreciate these possibilities. But this again is a case
in which an error was found subsequently to have unsuspected significance.
Misreading brings us to a mental situation which is clearly different
from that of slips of the tongue or the pen. One of the two conflicting
tendencies is here replaced by a sensory excitation and is perhaps therefore
less tenacious. What one is reading is not a product of one’s own mind, as is
that which one is going to write. In the large majority of cases, therefore,
misreading consists in complete substitution. A different word is substituted
for the word to be read, without there necessarily being any connection in
the content between the text and the effect of the mistake, and usually by
means of a resemblance between the words. Lichtenberg’s example of this,
“Agamemnon” instead of “angenommen,” is the best of this group. To
discover the interfering tendency which causes the mistake one may put
aside the original text altogether; the analytic investigation may begin with
two questions: What is the first idea occurring in free association to the
effect of the misreading (the substitute), and in what circumstances did the
misreading occur? Occasionally a knowledge of the latter is sufficient in
itself to explain the misreading, as, for instance, when someone wandering
about a strange town, driven by urgent needs, reads the word “Closethaus”
on a large sign on the first storey. He has just time to wonder that the board
has been fixed at that height when he discovers that the word on it is
actually “Corsethaus.” In other cases where there is a lack of connection in
content between the text and the slip a thorough analysis is necessary,
which cannot be accomplished without practice in psycho-analytic
technique and confidence in it. But it is not usually so difficult to come by
the explanation of a case of misreading. In the example “Agamemnon,” the
substituted word betrays without further difficulty the line of thought from

which the disturbance arose. In this time of war, for instance, it is very
common for one to read everywhere names of towns, generals, and military
expressions, which are continually in one’s ears, wherever one sees a word
at all resembling them. Whatever interests and occupies the mind takes the
place of what is alien and as yet uninteresting. The shadows of thoughts in
the mind dim the new perceptions.
Another kind of misreading is possible, in which the text itself arouses
the disturbing tendency, whereupon it is usually changed into its opposite.
Someone is required to read something which he dislikes, and analysis
convinces him that a strong wish to reject what is read is responsible for the
alteration.
In the first-mentioned, more frequent cases of misreading two factors
to which we ascribed great importance in the mechanism of errors are
inconspicuous; these are, the conflict between two tendencies and the
forcing back of one of them which compensates itself by producing the
error. Not that anything contradictory of this occurs in misreading, but
nevertheless the importunity of the train of thought tending to the mistake is
far more conspicuous than the restraint which it may have previously
undergone. Just these two factors are most clearly observable in the
different situations in which errors occur through forgetfulness.
The forgetting of resolutions has positively but one meaning; the
interpretation of it, as we have heard, is not denied even by the layman. The
tendency interfering with the resolution is always an opposing one, an
unwillingness, concerning which it only remains to enquire why it does not
come to expression in a different and less disguised form; for the existence
of this opposing tendency is beyond doubt. Sometimes it is possible, too, to
infer something of the motives which necessitate the concealment of this
antipathy; one sees that it would certainly have been condemned if it
declared its opposition openly, whereas by craft, in the error, it always
achieves its end. When an important change in the mental situation occurs
between the formation of the resolution and its execution, in consequence
of which the execution would no longer be required, then if it were
forgotten the occurrence could no longer come within the category of
errors. There would be nothing to wonder at in the error, for one recognizes
that it would have been superfluous to remember the resolution; it had been
either permanently or temporarily cancelled. Forgetting to carry out a

resolution can only be called an error when there is no reason to believe that
any such cancellation has occurred.
Cases of forgetting to carry out resolutions are usually so uniform and
transparent, that they are of no interest for our researches. There are two
points, nevertheless, at which something new can be learnt by studying this
type of error. We have said that forgetting and not executing a resolution
indicates an antagonistic tendency in opposition to it. This is certainly true,
but our own investigations show that this ‘counter-will’ may be of two
kinds, either immediate or mediate. What is meant by the latter is best
explained by one or two examples. When the patron forgets to say a good
word for his protégé to some third person, it may happen because he is
actually not much interested in the protégé and therefore has no great
inclination to do it. This, in any case, will be the protégé’s view of the
patron’s omission. But the matter may be more complicated. The antipathy
against executing the resolution may come from some other source in the
patron and be directed to some other point. It need have nothing at all to do
with the protégé, but is perhaps directed against the third person to whom
the recommendation was to be made. Here again, you see, what objections
there are against applying our interpretations practically. In spite of having
correctly interpreted the error, the protégé is in danger of becoming too
suspicious and of doing his patron a grave injustice. Again, if someone
forgets an appointment which he had promised and was resolved to attend,
the commonest cause is certainly a direct disinclination to meet the other
person. But analysis might produce evidence that the interfering tendency
was concerned, not with the person, but with the place of meeting, which
was avoided on account of some painful memory associated with it. Or if
one forgets to post a letter the opposing tendency may be concerned with
the contents of the letter; but this does not exclude the possibility that the
letter in itself is harmless and becomes the subject of a counter-tendency
only because something in it reminds the writer of another letter, written
previously, which did in fact afford a direct basis for antipathy. It may then
be said that the antipathy has been transferred from the earlier letter, where
it was justified, to the present one where it actually has no object. So you
see that restraint and caution must be exercised in applying our quite well-
founded interpretations; that which is psychologically equivalent may in
actuality have many meanings.

That such things should be must seem very strange to you. Perhaps
you will be inclined to assume that the “indirect” counter-will is enough to
characterize the incident as pathological. But I can assure you that it is also
found within the boundaries of health and normality. And further, do not
misunderstand me; this is in no sense a confession on my part that our
analytic interpretations are not to be relied on. I have said that forgetting to
execute a plan may bear many meanings, but this is so only in those cases
where no analysis is undertaken and which we have to interpret according
to our general principles. If an analysis of the person in the case is carried
out it can always be established with sufficient certainty whether the
antipathy is a direct one, or what its source is otherwise.
The following is a second point: when we find proof in a large
majority of cases that the forgetting of an intention proceeds from a
counter-will, we gain courage to extend this solution to another group of
cases in which the person analysed does not confirm, but denies, the
presence of the counter-will inferred by us. Take as an example of this such
exceedingly frequent occurrences as forgetting to return borrowed books or
to pay bills or debts. We will be so bold as to suggest, to the person in
question, that there is an intention in his mind of keeping the books and not
paying the debts, whereupon he will deny this intention but will not be able
to give us any other explanation of his conduct. We then insist that he has
this intention but is not aware of it; it is enough for us, though, that it
betrays itself by the effect of the forgetting. He may then repeat that he had
merely forgotten about it. You will recognize the situation as one in which
we have already been placed once before. If we intend to carry through, to
their logical conclusions, the interpretations of errors which have been
proved justified in so many cases, we shall be unavoidably impelled to the
assumption that tendencies exist in human beings which can effect results
without their knowing of them. With this, however, we place ourselves in
opposition to all views prevailing in life and in psychology.
Forgetting proper names, and foreign names and words, can be traced
in the same way to a counter-tendency aiming either directly or indirectly
against the name in question. I have already given you several examples of
such direct antipathy. Indirect causation is particularly frequent here and
careful analysis is generally required to elucidate it. Thus, for instance, in
the present time of war which forces us to forego so many of our former
pleasures, our ability to recall proper names suffers severely by connections

of the most far-fetched kind. It happened to me lately to be unable to
remember the name of the harmless Moravian town of Bisenz; and analysis
showed that I was guilty of no direct antagonism in the matter, but that the
resemblance to the name of the Palazzo Bisenzi in Orvieto, where I had
spent many happy times in the past, was responsible. As a motive of the
tendency opposing the recollection of this name, we here for the first time
encounter a principle which will later on reveal itself to be of quite
prodigious importance in the causation of neurotic symptoms: namely, the
aversion on the part of memory against recalling anything connected with
painful feelings that would revive the pain if it were recalled. In this
tendency towards avoidance of pain from recollection or other mental
processes, this flight of the mind from that which is unpleasant, we may
perceive the ultimate purpose at work behind not merely the forgetting of
names, but also many other errors, omissions, and mistakes.
The forgetting of names seems, however, to be especially facilitated
psycho-physiologically, and therefore does occur on occasions where the
intervention of an unpleasantness-motive cannot be established. When
anyone has a tendency to forget names, it can be confirmed by analytic
investigation that names escape, not merely because he does not like them
or because they remind him of something disagreeable, but also because the
particular name belongs to some other chain of associations of a more
intimate nature. The name is anchored there, as it were, and is refused to the
other associations activated at the moment. If you recall the devices of
memory systems you will realize with some surprise that the same
associations which are there artificially introduced, in order to save names
from being forgotten, are also responsible for their being forgotten. The
most conspicuous example of this is afforded by proper names of persons,
which naturally possess quite different values for different people. For
instance, take a first name, such as Theodore. For some of you it will have
no particular significance; for others it will be the name of father, brother,
friend, or your own name. Analytic experience will show you that the
former among you will be in no danger of forgetting that some stranger
bears this name; whereas the latter will be continually inclined to grudge to
strangers a name which to them seems reserved for an intimate relationship.
Now let us assume that this inhibition due to associations may coincide
with the operation of the “pain”-principle, and in addition with an indirect
mechanism; you will then be able to form a commensurate idea of the

complexity, in causation, of such temporary forgetting of names. An
adequate analysis that does justice to the facts will, however, completely
disclose all these complications.
The forgetting of impressions and experiences shows the working of
the tendency to ward off from memory that which is unpleasant much more
clearly and invariably than the forgetting of names. It does not of course
belong in its entirety to the category of errors, but only in so far as it
appears to us remarkable and unjustified, judged by the standard of general
experience; as, for instance, where recent or important impressions are
forgotten, or where one memory is forgotten out of an otherwise well-
remembered sequence. How and why we have the capacity of forgetting in
general, particularly how we are able to forget experiences which have
certainly left the deepest impression on us, such as the events of our
childhood, is quite a different problem, in which the defence against painful
associations plays a certain part but is far from explaining everything. That
unwelcome impressions are easily forgotten is an indubitable fact. Various
psychologists have remarked it; and the great Darwin was so well aware of
it that he made a golden rule for himself of writing down with particular
care observations which seemed unfavourable to his theory, having become
convinced that just these would be inclined to slip out of recollection.
Those who bear for the first time of this principle of defence against
unpleasant memory by forgetfulness seldom fail to raise the objection that,
on the contrary, in their experience it is just that which is painful which it is
hard to forget, since it always comes back to mind to torture the person
against his will—as, for example, the recollection of grievances or
humiliations. This fact is quite correct, but the objection is not sound. It is
important to begin early to reckon with the fact that the mind is an arena, a
sort of tumbling-ground, for the struggles of antagonistic impulses; or, to
express it in non-dynamic terms, that the mind is made up of contradictions
and pairs of opposites. Evidence of one particular tendency does not in the
least preclude its opposite; there is room for both of them. The material
questions are: How do these opposites stand to one another and what effects
proceed from one of them and what from the other?
Losing and mislaying objects is of especial interest on account of the
numerous meanings it may have, and the multiplicity of the tendencies in
the service of which these errors may be employed. What is common to all

the cases is the wish to lose something; what varies in them is the reason for
the wish and the aim of it. One loses something if it has become damaged;
if one has an impulse to replace it with a better; if one has ceased to care for
it; if it came from someone with whom unpleasantness has arisen; or if it
was acquired in circumstances that one no longer wishes to think of. Letting
things fall, spoiling, or breaking things, serves the same tendency. In social
life it is said that unwelcome and illegitimate children are found to be far
more often weakly than those conceived in happier circumstances. This
result does not imply that the crude methods of the so-called baby-farmer
have been employed; some degree of carelessness in the supervision of the
child should be quite enough. The preservation, or otherwise, of objects
may well follow the same lines as that of children.
Then too it may happen that a thing will become destined to be lost
without its having shed any of its value—that is, when there is an impulse
to sacrifice something to fate in order to avert some other dreaded loss.
According to the findings of analysis, such conjurings of fate are still very
common among us, so that our losses are often voluntary sacrifices. Losing
may equally well serve the impulses of spite or of self-punishment; in short,
the more remote forms of motivation behind the impulse to do away with
something by losing cannot easily be exhausted.
Mistaking of objects, or erroneous performance of actions, like other
errors, is often made use of to fulfil a wish which should be denied; the
intention masquerades as a lucky chance. Thus, as once happened to one of
our friends, one has to take a train, most unwillingly, in order to pay a visit
in the suburbs and then, in changing trains at a connection, one gets by
mistake into one which is returning to town; or, on a journey one would
greatly like to make a halt at some stopping-place, which cannot be done
owing to fixed engagements elsewhere, whereupon one mistakes or misses
the connection, so that the desired delay is forced upon one. Or, as
happened to one of my patients whom I had forbidden to telephone to the
lady he was in love with, he “by mistake” and “thoughtlessly” gave the
wrong number when he meant to telephone to me, so that he was suddenly
connected with her. The following account by an engineer is a pretty
example of the conditions under which damage to material objects may be
done, and also demonstrates the practical significance of directly faulty
actions.

“Some time ago I worked with several colleagues in the laboratory of a
High School on a series of complicated experiments in elasticity, a piece of
work we had undertaken voluntarily; it was beginning to take up more time,
however, than we had anticipated. One day, as I went into the laboratory
with my friend F., he remarked how annoying it was to him to lose so much
time to-day as he had so much to do at home; I could not help agreeing with
him and said half-jokingly, referring to an occasion the week before: ‘Let us
hope the machine will break down again so that we can stop work and go
home early.’ In arranging the work it happened that F. was given the
regulation of the valve of the press; that is to say, he was, by cautiously
opening the valve, to let the liquid pressure out of the accumulator slowly
into the cylinder of the hydraulic press. The man who was conducting the
experiment stood by the pressure gauge, and, when the right pressure was
reached, called out loudly, ‘Stop.’ At this command F. seized the valve and
turned with all his might—to the left! (All valves without exception close to
the right.) Thereby the whole pressure in the accumulator suddenly came
into the press, a strain for which the connecting-pipes are not designed, so
that one of them instantly burst—quite a harmless accident, but one which
forced us, nevertheless, to cease work for the day and go home. It is
characteristic, by the way, that not long after, when we were discussing the
affair, my friend F. had no recollection whatever of my remark, which I
recalled with certainty.”
So with this in mind you may begin to suspect that it is not always a
mere chance which makes the hands of your servants such dangerous
enemies to your household effects. And you may also raise the question
whether it is always an accident when one injures oneself or exposes
oneself to danger—ideas which you may put to the test by analysis when
you have an opportunity.
This is far from being all that could be said about errors. There is still
much to be enquired into and discussed. But I shall be satisfied if you have
been shaken somewhat in your previous beliefs by our investigations, so far
as they have gone, and if you have gained a certain readiness to accept new
ones. For the rest, I must be content to leave you with certain problems still
unsolved. We cannot prove all our principles by the study of errors, nor are
we indeed by any means solely dependent on this material. The great value
of errors for our purpose lies in this, that they are such common
occurrences, may easily be observed in oneself, and are not at all contingent

upon illness. I should like to mention one more of your unanswered
questions before concluding: “If, as we see from so many examples, people
come so close to understanding errors and so often act as if they perceived
their meaning, how is it possible that they should so generally consider
them accidental, senseless, and meaningless, and so energetically oppose
the psycho-analytic explanation of them?”
You are right: this is indeed striking and requires an explanation. But I
will not give it to you; I will rather guide you slowly towards the
connections by which the explanation will be forced upon you without any
aid from me.

PART II
DREAMS

FIFTH LECTURE
DIFFICULTIES AND PRELIMINARY APPROACH TO THE
SUBJECT

One day the discovery was made that the symptoms of disease in
certain nervous patients have meaning.[25] It was upon this discovery that the
psycho-analytic method of treatment was based. In this treatment it
happened that patients in speaking of their symptoms also mentioned their
dreams, whereupon the suspicion arose that these dreams too had meaning.
However, we will not pursue this historical path, but will strike off in
the opposite direction. Our aim is to demonstrate the meaning of dreams, in
preparation for the study of the neuroses. There are good grounds for this
reversal of procedure, since the study of dreams is not merely the best
preparation for that of the neuroses, but a dream is itself a neurotic
symptom and, moreover, one which possesses for us the incalculable
advantage of occurring in all healthy people. Indeed, if all human beings
were healthy and would only dream, we could gather almost all the
knowledge from their dreams which we have gained from studying the
neuroses.
So dreams become the object of psycho-analytic research—another of
these ordinary, under-rated occurrences, apparently of no practical value,
like “errors,” and sharing with them the characteristic of occurring in
healthy persons. But in other respects the conditions of work are rather less
favourable. Errors had only been neglected by science, people had not
troubled their heads much about them, but at least it was no disgrace to
occupy oneself with them. True, people said, there are things more
important but still something may possibly come of it. To occupy oneself
with dreams, however, is not merely unpractical and superfluous, but
positively scandalous: it carries with it the taint of the unscientific and
arouses the suspicion of personal leanings towards mysticism. The idea of a
medical student troubling himself about dreams when there is so much in

neuropathology and psychiatry itself that is more serious, tumours as large
as apples compressing the organ of the mind, hæmorrhages, chronic
inflammatory conditions in which the alterations in the tissues can be
demonstrated under the microscope! No, dreams are far too unworthy and
trivial to be objects of scientific research.
There is yet another factor involved which, in itself, sets at defiance all
the requirements of exact investigation. In investigating dreams even the
object of research, the dream itself, is indefinite. A delusion, for example,
presents clear and definite outlines. “I am the Emperor of China,” says your
patient plainly. But a dream? For the most part it cannot be related at all.
When a man tells a dream, has he any guarantee that he has told it correctly,
and not perhaps altered it in the telling or been forced to invent part of it on
account of the vagueness of his recollection? Most dreams cannot be
remembered at all and are forgotten except for some tiny fragments. And is
a scientific psychology or a method of treatment for the sick to be founded
upon material such as this?
A certain element of exaggeration in a criticism may arouse our
suspicions. The arguments brought against the dream as an object of
scientific research are clearly extreme. We have met with the objection of
triviality already in “errors,” and have told ourselves that great things may
be revealed even by small indications. As to the indistinctness of dreams,
that is a characteristic like any other—we cannot dictate to things their
characteristics; besides, there are also dreams which are clear and well
defined. Further, there are other objects of psychiatric investigation which
suffer in the same way from the quality of indefiniteness, e.g. the obsessive
ideas of many cases, with which nevertheless many psychiatrists of repute
and standing have occupied themselves. I will recall the last case of the
kind which came before me in medical practice. The patient, a woman,
presented her case in these words: “I have a certain feeling, as if I had
injured, or had meant to injure, some living creature—perhaps a child—no,
no, a dog rather, as if perhaps I had pushed it off a bridge—or done
something else.” Any disadvantage resulting from the uncertain recollection
of dreams may be remedied by deciding that exactly what the dreamer tells
is to count as the dream, and by ignoring all that he may have forgotten or
altered in the process of recollection. Finally, one cannot maintain in so
sweeping a fashion that dreams are unimportant things. We know from our
own experience that the mood in which we awake from a dream may last

throughout the day, and cases have been observed by medical men in which
mental disorder began with a dream, the delusion which had its source in
this dream persisting; further, it is told of historical persons that impulses to
momentous deeds sprang from their dreams. We may therefore ask: what is
the real cause of the disdain in which dreams are held in scientific circles?
In my opinion it is the reaction from the overestimation of them in earlier
times. It is well known that it is no easy matter to reconstruct the past, but
we may assume with certainty (you will forgive my jest) that as early as
three thousand years ago and more our ancestors dreamt in the same way as
we do. So far as we know, all ancient peoples attached great significance to
dreams and regarded them as of practical value; they obtained from them
auguries of the future and looked for portents in them. For the Greeks and
other Orientals, it was at times as unthinkable to undertake a campaign
without a dream-interpreter as it would be to-day without air-scouts for
intelligence. When Alexander the Great set out on his campaign of conquest
the most famous interpreters of dreams were in his following. The city of
Tyre, still at that time on an island, offered so stout a resistance to the king
that he entertained the idea of abandoning the siege; then one night he
dreamed of a satyr dancing in triumph, and when he related this dream to
his interpreters they informed him that it foretold his victory over the city;
he gave the order to attack and took Tyre by storm. Among the Etruscans
and Romans other methods of foretelling the future were employed, but
during the whole of the Græco-Roman period the interpretation of dreams
was practised and held in high esteem. Of the literature on this subject the
principal work at any rate has come down to us, namely, the book of
Artemidorus of Daldis, who is said to have lived at the time of the Emperor
Hadrian. How it happened that the art of dream-interpretation declined later
and dreams fell into disrepute, I cannot tell you. The progress of learning
cannot have had very much to do with it, for in the darkness of the middle
ages things far more absurd than the ancient practice of the interpretation of
dreams were faithfully retained. The fact remains that the interest in dreams
gradually sank to the level of superstition and could hold its own only
amongst the uneducated. In our day, there survive, as a final degradation of
the art of dream-interpretation, the attempts to find out from dreams
numbers destined to draw prizes in games of chance. On the other hand,
exact science of the present day has repeatedly concerned itself with the
dream, but always with the sole object of illustrating physiological theories.

By medical men, naturally, a dream was never regarded as a mental process
but as the mental expression of physical stimuli. Binz in 1876 pronounced
the dream to be “a physical process, always useless and in many cases
actually morbid, a process above which the conception of the world-soul
and of immortality stands as high as does the blue sky above the most low-
lying, weed-grown stretch of sand.” Maury compares dreams with the
spasmodic jerkings of St. Vitus’ dance, contrasted with the co-ordinated
movements of the normal human being; in an old comparison a parallel is
drawn between the content of a dream and the sounds which would be
produced if “someone ignorant of music let his ten fingers wander over the
keys of an instrument.”
‘Interpretation’ means discovering a hidden meaning, but there can be
no question of attempting this while such an attitude is maintained towards
the dream-performance. Look up the description of dreams given in the
writings of Wundt, Jodl and other recent philosophers: they are content with
the bare enumeration of the divergences of the dream-life from waking
thought with a view to depreciating the dreams; they emphasize the lack of
connection in the associations, the suspended exercise of the critical faculty,
the elimination of all knowledge, and other indications of diminished
functioning. The single valuable contribution to our knowledge about
dreams for which we are indebted to exact science relates to the influence
upon the dream-content of physical stimuli operating during sleep. We have
the work of a Norwegian author who died recently—J. Mourly Vold—two
large volumes on experimental investigation of dreams (translated into
German in 1910 and 1912), which are concerned almost entirely with the
results obtained by change in the position of the limbs. These investigations
have been held up to us as models of exact research in the subject of
dreams. Now can you imagine what would be the comment of exact science
on learning that we intend to try to find out the meaning of dreams? The
comment that has perhaps been made already! However, we will not allow
ourselves to be appalled at the thought. If it was possible for errors to have
an underlying meaning, it is possible that dreams have one too; and errors
have, in very many cases, a meaning which has eluded the researches of
exact science. Let us adopt the assumption of the ancients and of simple
folk, and follow in the footsteps of the dream-interpreters of old.
First of all, we must take our bearings in this enterprise, and make a
survey of the field of dreams. What exactly is a dream? It is difficult to

define it in a single phrase. Yet we need not seek after a definition, when all
we need is to refer to something familiar to everyone. Still we ought to pick
out the essential features in dreams. How are we to discover these features?
The boundaries of the region we are entering comprise such vast
differences, differences whichever way we turn. That which we can show to
be common to all dreams is probably what is essential.
Well then—the first common characteristic of all dreams would be that
we are asleep at the time. Obviously, the dream is the life of the mind
during sleep, a life bearing certain resemblances to our waking life and, at
the same time, differing from it widely. That, indeed, was Aristotle’s
definition. Perhaps dream and sleep stand in yet closer relationship to each
other. We can be waked by a dream; we often have a dream when we wake
spontaneously or when we are forcibly roused from sleep. Dreams seem
thus to be an intermediate condition between sleeping and waking. Hence,
our attention is directed to sleep itself: what then is sleep?
That is a physiological or biological problem concerning which much
is still in dispute. We can come to no decisive answer, but I think we may
attempt to define one psychological characteristic of sleep. Sleep is a
condition in which I refuse to have anything to do with the outer world and
have withdrawn my interest from it. I go to sleep by retreating from the
outside world and warding off the stimuli proceeding from it. Again, when I
am tired by that world I go to sleep. I say to it as I fall asleep: “Leave me in
peace, for I want to sleep.” The child says just the opposite: “I won’t go to
sleep yet; I’m not tired, I want more things to happen to me!” Thus the
biological object of sleep seems to be recuperation, its psychological
characteristic the suspension of interest in the outer world. Our relationship
with the world which we entered so unwillingly seems to be endurable only
with intermission; hence we withdraw again periodically into the condition
prior to our entrance into the world: that is to say, into intra-uterine
existence. At any rate, we try to bring about quite similar conditions—
warmth, darkness and absence of stimulus—characteristic of that state.
Some of us still roll ourselves tightly up into a ball resembling the intra-
uterine position. It looks as if we grown-ups do not belong wholly to the
world, but only by two-thirds; one-third of us has never yet been born at all.
Every time we wake in the morning it is as if we were newly born. We do,
in fact, speak of the condition of waking from sleep in these very words: we
feel “as if we were newly born,”—and in this we are probably quite

mistaken in our idea of the general sensations of the new-born infant; it may
be assumed on the contrary that it feels extremely uncomfortable. Again, in
speaking of birth we speak of “seeing the light of day.”
If this is the nature of sleep, then dreams do not come into its scheme
at all, but seem rather to be an unwelcome supplement to it; and we do
indeed believe that dreamless sleep is the best, the only proper sleep. There
should be no mental activity during sleep; if any such activity bestirs itself,
then in so far have we failed to reach the true pre-natal condition of peace;
we have not been able to avoid altogether some remnants of mental activity,
and the act of dreaming would represent these remnants. In that event it
really does seem that dreams do not need to have meaning. With errors it
was different, for they were at least activities manifested in waking life; but
if I sleep and have altogether suspended mental activity, with the exception
of certain remnants which I have not been able to suppress, there is no
necessity whatever that they should have any meaning. In fact, I cannot
even make use of any such meaning, seeing that the rest of my mind is
asleep. It can really then be a matter of spasmodic reactions only, of such
mental phenomena only as have their origin in physical stimulation. Hence,
dreams must be remnants of the mental activity of waking life disturbing
sleep, and we might as well make up our minds forthwith to abandon a
theme so unsuited to the purposes of psycho-analysis.
Superfluous as dreams may be, however, they do exist nevertheless,
and we can try to account for their existence to ourselves. Why does not
mental life go off to sleep? Probably because there is something that will
not leave the mind in peace; stimuli are acting upon it and to these it is
bound to react. Dreams therefore are the mode of reaction of the mind to
stimuli acting upon it during sleep. We note here a possibility of access to
comprehension of dreams. We can now endeavour to find out, in various
dreams, what are the stimuli seeking to disturb sleep, the reaction to which
takes the form of dreams. By doing this we should have worked out the first
characteristic common to all dreams.
Is there any other common characteristic? Yes, there is another,
unmistakable, and yet much harder to lay hold of and describe. The
character of mental processes during sleep is quite different from that of
waking processes. In dreams we go through many experiences, which we
fully believe in, whereas in reality we are perhaps only experiencing the

single disturbing stimulus. For the most part our experiences take the form
of visual images; there may be feeling as well, thoughts, too, mixed up with
them, and the other senses may be drawn in; but for the most part dreams
consist of visual images. Part of the difficulty of reciting a dream comes
from the fact that we have to translate these images into words. “I could
draw it,” the dreamer often says to us, “but I do not know how to put it into
words.” Now this is not exactly a diminution in the mental capacity, as seen
in a contrast between a feeble-minded person and a man of genius. The
difference is rather a qualitative one, but it is difficult to say precisely
wherein it lies. G. T. Fechner once suggested that the stage whereon the
drama of the dream (within the mind) is played out is other than that of the
life of waking ideas. That is a saying which we really do not understand,
nor do we know what it is meant to convey to us, but it does actually
reproduce the impression of strangeness which most dreams make upon us.
Again, the comparison of the act of dreaming with the performances of an
unskilled hand in music breaks down here, for the piano will certainly
respond with the same notes, though not with melodies, to a chance touch
on its keys. We will keep this second common characteristic of dreams
carefully in view, even though we may not understand it.
Are there any other qualities common to all dreams? I can think of
none, but can see differences only, whichever way I look, differences too in
every respect—in apparent duration, definiteness, the part played by affects,
persistence in the mind, and so forth. This is really not what we should
naturally expect in the case of a compulsive attempt, at once meagre and
convulsive, to ward off a stimulus. As regards the length of dreams, some
are very short, containing only one image, or very few, or a single thought,
possibly even a single word; others are peculiarly rich in content, enact
entire romances and seem to last a very long time. There are dreams as
distinct as actual experiences, so distinct that for some time after waking we
do not realize that they were dreams at all; others, which are ineffably faint,
shadowy and blurred; in one and the same dream, even, there may be some
parts of extraordinary vividness alternating with others so indistinct as to be
almost wholly elusive. Again, dreams may be quite consistent or at any rate
coherent, or even witty or fantastically beautiful; others again are confused,
apparently imbecile, absurd or often absolutely mad. There are dreams
which leave us quite cold, others in which every affect makes itself felt,
pain to the point of tears, terror so intense as to wake us, amazement,

delight, and so on. Most dreams are forgotten soon after waking; or they
persist throughout the day, the recollection becoming fainter and more
imperfect as the day goes on; others remain so vivid (as, for example, the
dreams of childhood) that thirty years later we remember them as clearly as
though they were part of a recent experience. Dreams, like people, may
make their appearance once and never come back; or the same person may
dream the same thing repeatedly, either in the same form or with slight
alterations. In short, these scraps of mental activity at night-time have at
command an immense repertory, can in fact create everything that by day
the mind is capable of—only, it is never the same.
One might attempt to account for these diversities in dreams by
assuming that they correspond to different intermediate states between
sleeping and waking, different levels of imperfect sleep. Very well; but then
in proportion as the mind approached the waking state there should be not
merely an increase in the value, content, and distinctness of the dream-
performance, but also a growing perception that it is a dream; and it ought
not to happen that side by side with a clear and sensible element in the
dream there is one which is nonsensical or indistinct, followed again by a
good piece of work. It is certain that the mind could not vary its depth of
sleep so rapidly as that. This explanation therefore does not help; there is in
fact no short cut to an answer.
For the present we will leave the ‘meaning’ of the dream out of
question, and try instead, by starting from the common element in dreams,
to clear a path to a better understanding of their nature. From the
relationship of dreams to sleep we have drawn the conclusion that dreams
are the reaction to a stimulus disturbing sleep. As we have heard, this is also
the single point at which exact experimental psychology can come to our
aid; it affords proof of the fact that stimuli brought to bear during sleep
make their appearance in dreams. Many investigations have been made on
these lines, culminating in those of Mourly Vold whom I mentioned earlier;
we have all, too, been in a position to confirm their results by occasional
observations of our own. I will choose some of the earlier experiments to
tell you. Maury had tests of this kind carried out upon himself. Whilst
dreaming, he was made to smell some eau de Cologne, whereupon he
dreamt he was in Cairo, in the shop of Johann Maria Farina, and this was
followed by further crazy adventures. Again, someone gave his neck a
gentle pinch, and he dreamt of the application of a blister and of a doctor

who had treated him when he was a child. Again, they let a drop of water
fall on his forehead and he was immediately in Italy, perspiring freely and
drinking the white wine of Orvieto.
The striking feature about these dreams produced under experimental
conditions will perhaps become still clearer to us in another series of
“stimulus”-dreams. These are three dreams of which we have an account by
a clever observer, Hildebrandt, and all three are reactions to the sound of an
alarum-clock:
“I am going for a walk on a spring morning, and I saunter through
fields just beginning to grow green, till I come to a neighbouring village,
where I see the inhabitants in holiday attire making their way in large
numbers to the church, their hymn-books in their hands. Of course! it is
Sunday and the morning service is just about to begin. I decide to take part
in it, but first as I am rather overheated I think I will cool down in the
churchyard which surrounds the church. Whilst reading some of the
epitaphs there I hear the bell-ringer go up into the tower, where I now
notice, high up, the little village bell which will give the signal for the
beginning of the service. For some time yet it remains motionless, then it
begins to swing, and suddenly the strokes ring out, clear and piercing—so
clear and piercing that they put an end to my sleep. But the sound of the bell
comes from the alarum-clock.”
Here is another combination of images. “It is a bright winter day, and
the roads are deep in snow. I have promised to take part in a sleighing
expedition, but I have to wait a long time before I am told that the sleigh is
at the door. Now follow the preparations for getting in, the fur rug is spread
out and the foot-muff fetched and finally I am in my place. But there is still
a delay while the horses wait for the signal to start. Then the reins are jerked
and the little bells, shaken violently, begin their familiar janizary music, so
loudly that in a moment the web of the dream is rent. Again it is nothing but
the shrill sound of the alarum-clock.”
Now for the third example! “I see a kitchen-maid with dozens of piled-
up plates going along the passage to the dining-room. It seems to me that
the pyramid of china in her arms is in danger of overbalancing. I call out a
warning: ‘Take care, your whole load will fall to the ground.’ Of course I
receive the usual answer: that they are accustomed to carrying china in that
way, and so on; meanwhile I follow her as she goes with anxious looks. I

thought so—the next thing is a stumble on the threshold, the crockery falls,
crashing and clattering in a hundred pieces on the ground. But—I soon
become aware that that interminably prolonged sound is no real crash, but a
regular ringing—and this ringing is due merely to the alarum-clock, as I
realize at last on awakening.”
These dreams are very pretty, perfectly sensible, and by no means so
incoherent as dreams usually are. We have no quarrel with them on those
grounds. The thing common to them all is that in each case the situation
arises from a noise, which the dreamer on waking recognizes as that of the
alarum-clock. Hence we see here how a dream is produced, but we find out
something more. In the dream there is no recognition of the clock, which
does not even appear in it, but for the noise of the clock another noise is
substituted; the stimulus which disturbs sleep is interpreted, but interpreted
differently in each instance. Now why is this? There is no answer; it appears
to be mere caprice. But to understand the dream we should be able to
account for its choice of just this noise and no other to interpret the stimulus
given by the alarum-clock. In analogous fashion we must object to Maury’s
experiments that, although it is clear that the stimulus brought to bear on the
sleeper does appear in the dream, yet his experiments don’t explain why it
appears exactly in that form, which is one that does not seem explicable by
the nature of the stimulus disturbing sleep. And further, in Maury’s
experiments there was mostly a mass of other dream-material attached to
the direct result of the stimulus, for example, the crazy adventures in the
eau de Cologne dream, for which we are at a loss to account.
Now will you reflect that the class of dreams which wake one up
affords the best opportunity for establishing the influence of external
disturbing stimuli. In most other cases it will be more difficult. We do not
wake up out of all dreams, and if in the morning we remember a dream of
the night before, how are we to assign it to a disturbing stimulus operating
perhaps during the night? I once succeeded in subsequently establishing the
occurrence of a sound-stimulus of this sort, but only, of course, because of
peculiar circumstances. I woke up one morning at a place in the Tyrolese
mountains knowing that I had dreamt that the Pope was dead. I could not
explain the dream to myself, but later my wife asked me: “Did you hear
quite early this morning the dreadful noise of bells breaking out in all the
churches and chapels?” No, I had heard nothing, my sleep is too sound, but
thanks to her telling me this I understood my dream. How often may such

causes of stimulus as this induce dreams in the sleeper without his ever
hearing of them afterwards? Possibly very often: and possibly not. If we can
get no information of any stimulus we cannot be convinced on the point.
And apart from this we have given up trying to arrive at an estimation of the
sleep-disturbing external stimuli, since we know that they only explain a
fragment of the dream and not the whole dream-reaction.
We need not on that account give up this theory altogether; there is still
another possible way of following it out. Obviously it is a matter of
indifference what disturbs sleep and causes the mind to dream. If it cannot
always be something external acting as a stimulus to one of the senses, it is
possible that, instead, a stimulus operates from the internal organs—a so-
called somatic stimulus. This supposition lies very close, and moreover it
corresponds to the view popularly held with regard to the origin of dreams,
for it is a common saying that they come from the stomach. Unfortunately,
here again we must suppose that in very many cases information respecting
a somatic stimulus operating during the night would no longer be
forthcoming after waking, so that it would be incapable of proof. But we
will not overlook the fact that many trustworthy experiences support the
idea that dreams may be derived from somatic stimuli; on the whole it is
indubitable that the condition of the internal organs can influence dreams.
The relation of the content of many dreams to distention of the bladder or to
a condition of excitation of the sex-organs is so plain that it cannot be
mistaken. From these obvious cases we pass to others, in which, to judge by
the content of the dream, we are at least justified in suspecting that some
such somatic stimuli have been at work, since there is something in this
content which can be regarded as elaboration, representation, or
interpretation of these stimuli. Scherner, the investigator of dreams (1861),
emphatically supported the view which traces the origin of dreams to
organic stimuli, and contributed some excellent examples towards it. For
instance, he sees in a dream “two rows of beautiful boys, with fair hair and
delicate complexions, confronting each other pugnaciously, joining in
combat, seizing hold of one another, and again letting go their hold, only to
take up the former position and go through the whole process again”; his
interpretation of the two rows of boys as the teeth is in itself plausible and
seems to receive full confirmation when after this scene the dreamer “pulls
a long tooth from his jaw.” Again, the interpretation of “long, narrow,
winding passages” as being suggested by a stimulus originating in the

intestine seems sound and corroborates Scherner’s assertion that dreams
primarily endeavour to represent, by like objects, the organ from which the
stimulus proceeds.
We must therefore be prepared to admit that internal stimuli can play
the same rôle in dreams as external ones. Unfortunately, evaluation of this
factor is open to the same objections. In a great number of instances the
attribution of dreams to somatic stimuli must remain uncertain or incapable
of proof; not all dreams, but only a certain number of them, rouse the
suspicion that stimuli from internal organs have something to do with their
origin; and lastly, the internal somatic stimulus will suffice no more than the
external sensory stimulus to explain any other part of the dream than the
direct reaction to it. The origin of all the rest of the dream remains obscure.
Now, however, let us direct our attention to a certain peculiarity of the
dream-life which appears when we study the operation of these stimuli. The
dream does not merely reproduce the stimulus, but elaborates it, plays upon
it, fits it into a context, or replaces it by something else. This is a side of the
dream-work which is bound to be of interest to us because possibly it may
lead us nearer to the true nature of dreams. The scope of a man’s production
is not necessarily limited to the circumstance which immediately gives rise
to it. For instance, Shakespeare’s Macbeth was written as an occasional
drama on the accession of the king who first united in his person the crowns
of the three kingdoms. But does this historical occasion cover the whole
content of the drama, or explain its grandeur and its mystery? Perhaps in the
same way the external and internal stimuli operating upon the sleeper are
merely the occasion of the dream and afford us no insight into its true
nature.
The other element common to all dreams, their peculiarity in mental
life, is on the one hand very difficult to grasp and on the other seems to
afford no clue for further inquiry. Our experiences in dreams for the most
part take the form of visual images. Can these be explained by the stimuli?
Is it really the stimulus that we experience? If so, why is the experience
visual, when it can only be in the very rarest instance that any stimulus has
operated upon our eyesight? Or, can it be shown that when we dream of
speech any conversation or sounds resembling conversation reached our
ears during sleep? I venture to discard such a possibility without any
hesitation whatever.

If we cannot get any further with the common characteristics of
dreams as a starting-point, let us try beginning with their differences.
Dreams are often meaningless, confused, and absurd, yet there are some
which are sensible, sober, and reasonable. Let us see whether these latter
sensible dreams can help to elucidate those which are meaningless. I will
tell you the latest reasonable dream which was told to me, the dream of a
young man: “I went for a walk in the Kärntnerstrasse and there I met Mr.
X.; after accompanying him for a short time I went into a restaurant. Two
ladies and a gentleman came and sat down at my table. At first I was
annoyed and refused to look at them, but presently I glanced across at them
and found that they were quite nice.” The dreamer’s comment on this was
that the evening before he had actually been walking in the Kärntnerstrasse,
which is the way he usually goes, and that he had met Mr. X. there. The
other part of the dream was not a direct reminiscence, but only bore a
certain resemblance to an occurrence of some time previously. Or here we
have another prosaic dream, that of a lady. “Her husband says to her: ‘Don’t
you think we ought to have the piano tuned?’ and she replies: ‘It is not
worth it, for the hammers need fresh leather anyhow.’” This dream repeats a
conversation which took place in almost the same words between herself
and her husband the day before the dream. What then do we learn from
these two prosaic dreams? Merely that there occur in them recollections of
daily life or of matters connected with it. Even that would be something if it
could be asserted of all dreams without exception. But that is out of the
question; this characteristic too belongs only to a minority of dreams. In
most dreams we find no connection with the day before, and no light is
thrown from this quarter upon meaningless and absurd dreams. All we
know is that we have met with a new problem. Not only do we want to
know what a dream is saying, but if as in our examples that is quite plain,
we want to know further from what cause and to what end we repeat in
dreams this which is known to us and has recently happened to us.
I think you would be as tired as I of continuing the kind of attempts we
have made up to this point. It only shows that all the interest in the world
will not help us with a problem unless we have also an idea of some path to
adopt in order to arrive at a solution. Till now we have not found this path.
Experimental psychology has contributed nothing but some (certainly very
valuable) information about the significance of stimuli in the production of
dreams. Of philosophy we have nothing to expect, unless it be a lofty

repetition of the reproach that our object is intellectually contemptible;
while from the occult sciences we surely do not choose to borrow. History
and the verdict of the people tell us that dreams are full of meaning and
importance, and of prophetic significance; but that is hard to accept and
certainly does not lend itself to proof. So then our first endeavours are
completely baffled.
But unexpectedly there comes a hint from a direction in which we
have not hitherto looked. Colloquial speech, which is certainly no matter of
chance but the deposit, as it were, of ancient knowledge—a thing which
must not indeed be made too much of—our speech, I say, recognizes the
existence of something to which, strangely enough, it gives the name of
“day-dreams.” Day-dreams are phantasies (products of phantasy); they are
very common phenomena, are observable in healthy as well as in sick
persons, and they also can easily be studied by the subject himself. The
most striking thing about these ‘phantastic’ creations is that they have
received the name of “day-dreams,” for they have nothing in common with
the two universal characteristics of dreams. Their name contradicts any
relationship to the condition of sleep and, as regards the second universal
characteristic, no experience or hallucination takes place in them, we
simply imagine something; we recognize that they are the work of phantasy,
that we are not seeing but thinking. These day-dreams appear before
puberty, often indeed in late childhood, and persist until maturity is reached
when they are either given up or retained as long as life lasts. The content of
these phantasies is dictated by a very transparent motivation. They are
scenes and events which gratify either the egoistic cravings of ambition or
thirst for power, or the erotic desires of the subject. In young men,
ambitious phantasies predominate; in women, whose ambition centres on
success in love, erotic phantasies; but the erotic requirement can often
enough in men too be detected in the background, all their heroic deeds and
successes are really only intended to win the admiration and favour of
women. In other respects these day-dreams show great diversity and their
fate varies. All of them are either given up after a short time and replaced
by a new one, or retained, spun out into long stories, and adapted to
changing circumstances in life. They march with the times, receiving as it
were “date-stamps” upon them which show the influence of new situations.
They form the raw material of poetic production; for the writer by
transforming, disguising, or curtailing them creates out of his day-dreams

the situations which he embodies in his stories, novels, and dramas. The
hero of a day-dream is, however, always the subject himself, either directly
imagined in the part or transparently identified with someone else.
Perhaps day-dreams are so called on account of their similar relation to
reality, as an indication that their content is no more to be accepted as real
than is that of dreams. But it is possible that they share the name of dreams
because of some mental characteristic of the dream which we do not yet
know but after which we are seeking. On the other hand, it is possible that
we are altogether wrong in regarding this similarity of name as significant.
That is a question which can only be answered later.

SIXTH LECTURE
PRELIMINARY HYPOTHESES AND TECHNIQUE OF
INTERPRETATION

We thus realize our need of a new way of approach, a definite method,
if we are to make any advance in our researches into dreams. I will now
offer an obvious suggestion: let us accept as the basis of the whole of our
further enquiry the following hypothesis—that dreams are not a somatic,
but a mental, phenomenon. You know what this means; but what is our
justification in making this assumption? We have none, but on the other
hand there is nothing to prevent us. The position is this: if the dream is a
somatic phenomenon it does not concern us; it can only be of interest to us
on the hypothesis that it is a mental phenomenon. So we will assume that
this hypothesis is true, in order to see what happens if we do so. The results
of our work will determine whether we may adhere to the assumption, and
uphold it in its turn as an inference fairly drawn. Now what exactly is the
object of this enquiry of ours, or to what are we directing our efforts? Our
object is that of all scientific endeavour—namely, to achieve an
understanding of the phenomena, to establish a connection between them,
and, in the last resort, wherever it is possible to increase our power over
them.
So we continue our work on the assumption that dreams are a mental
phenomenon. In that event, they are a performance and an utterance on the
part of the dreamer, but of a kind that conveys nothing to us, and which we
do not understand. Now supposing that I give utterance to something that
you do not understand, what do you do? You ask me to explain, do you not?
Why may not we do the same—ask the dreamer the meaning of the dream?
Remember, we have already found ourselves in a similar position. It
was when we were enquiring into certain errors, and the instance we took
was a slip of the tongue. Someone had said: “Then certain things were
refilled,” and thereupon we asked—no, fortunately it was not we who

asked, but other people who had nothing to do with psycho-analysis—they
asked what he meant by this enigmatic expression. He answered at once
that what he had intended to say was: “That was a filthy business,” but had
checked himself and substituted the milder words: “Things were revealed
there.” I explained to you then that this enquiry was the model for every
psycho-analytic investigation, and you understand now that psycho-analytic
technique endeavours as far as possible to let the persons being analysed
give the answer to their own problems. The dreamer himself then should
interpret his dream for us.
That is not so simple with dreams, however, as we all know. Where
errors were concerned, this method proved possible in many cases; there
were others where the person questioned refused to say anything and even
indignantly repudiated the answer suggested to him. With dreams, instances
of the first type are entirely lacking; the dreamer always says he knows
nothing about it. He cannot very well repudiate our interpretation, since we
have none to offer him. Shall we have to give up our attempt then? Since he
knows nothing, and we know nothing, and a third person can surely know
nothing either, there cannot be any prospect of finding the answer. Well, if
you like, give up the attempt. But if you are not so minded, you can
accompany me. For I assure you that it is not only quite possible, but highly
probable, that the dreamer really does know the meaning of his dream; only
he does not know that he knows, and therefore thinks that he does not.
At this point you will probably call my attention to the fact that I am
again introducing an assumption, the second in quite a short context, and
that by so doing I greatly detract from the force of my claim to a
trustworthy method of procedure. Given the hypothesis that dreams are a
mental phenomenon, and given further the hypothesis that there are in the
minds of men certain things which they know without knowing that they
know them—and so forth! You have only to keep in view the intrinsic
improbability of both these hypotheses, and you may with an easy mind
abandon all interest in the conclusions to be drawn from them.
Well, I have not brought you here either to delude you or to conceal
anything from you. True, I announced that I would give a course of lectures
entitled Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; but it was no part of my
purpose to play the oracle, professing to show you an easy sequence of
facts, whilst carefully concealing all difficulties, filling up gaps, and

glossing over doubtful points, so that you might comfortably enjoy the
belief that you have learnt something new. No, it is the very fact that you
are beginners that makes me anxious to show you our science as it is, with
all its excrescences and crudities, the claims that it makes and the criticism
to which it may give rise. I know indeed that it is the same in every science
and that, especially in the beginnings, it cannot be otherwise. I know too
that, in teaching other sciences, an effort is made at first to hide these
difficulties and imperfections from the learner. But that cannot be done in
psycho-analysis. So I really have set up two hypotheses, the one within the
other; and anyone who finds it all too laborious, or too uncertain, or who is
used to higher degrees of certainty, or to more refined deductions, need go
no further with me. Only I should advise him to leave psychological
problems altogether alone, for it is to be feared that this is a field in which
he will find no access to such exact and sure paths as he is prepared to
tread. And, further, it is quite superfluous for any science which can offer a
real contribution to knowledge to strive to make itself heard and to win
adherents. Its reception must depend upon its results, and it can afford to
wait until these have compelled attention.
But I may warn those of you who are not to be deterred in this way
that my two assumptions are not of equal importance. The first, that dreams
are a mental phenomenon, is the hypothesis which we hope to prove by the
results of our work. The second has already been proved in a different field,
and I am merely taking the liberty of transferring it thence to our problems.
Where, and in what connection, is it supposed to have been proved that
a man can possess knowledge without knowing that he does so, which is the
assumption we are making of the dreamer? Surely that would be a
remarkable and surprising fact, which would change our conception of
mental life and would have no need of concealment. Incidentally, it would
be a fact belied in the very statement of it, which yet attempts to be literally
true—a contradiction in terms. There is not, however, any attempt at
concealment. We cannot blame the fact for people’s ignorance of it, or lack
of interest in it, any more than we ourselves are to blame because all these
psychological problems have been passed in judgement by persons who
have held aloof from all the observations and experiments which alone can
be conclusive.

The proof to which I refer was found in the sphere of hypnotic
phenomena. In the year 1889 I was present at the remarkably impressive
demonstrations by Liébault and Bernheim, in Nancy, and there I witnessed
the following experiment. A man was placed in a condition of
somnambulism, and then made to go through all sorts of hallucinatory
experiences. On being wakened, he seemed at first to know nothing at all of
what had taken place during his hypnotic sleep. Bernheim then asked him in
so many words to tell him what had happened while he was under hypnosis.
The man declared that he could not remember anything. Bernheim,
however, insisted upon it, pressed him, and assured him that he did know
and that he must remember, and lo and behold! the man wavered, began to
reflect, and remembered in a shadowy fashion first one of the occurrences
which had been suggested to him, then something else, his recollection
growing increasingly clear and complete until finally it was brought to light
without a single gap. Now, since in the end he had the knowledge without
having learnt anything from any other quarter in the meantime, we are
justified in concluding that these recollections were in his mind from the
outset. They were merely inaccessible to him; he did not know that he knew
them but believed that he did not know. In fact, his case was exactly similar
to what we assume the dreamer’s to be.
I hope you are duly surprised that this fact is already established and
that you will ask me: “Why did you not refer to this proof before, when we
were considering errors and came to the point of ascribing to a man who
had made a slip of the tongue intentions behind his speech, of which he
knew nothing, and which he denied? If it is possible for a man to believe
that he knows nothing of experiences of which nevertheless he does possess
the recollection, it seems no longer improbable that there should be other
mental processes going on within him about which also he knows nothing.
We should certainly have been impressed by this argument and should have
been in a better position to understand about errors.” Certainly, I might have
brought forward this proof then, but I reserved it for a later occasion when
there would be more need for it. Some of the errors explained themselves,
others suggested to us that in order to understand the connection between
the phenomena it would be advisable to postulate the existence of mental
processes of which the person is entirely ignorant. With dreams we are
compelled to seek our explanations elsewhere, and besides, I am counting
on your being more ready to accept in this connection a proof from the field

of hypnosis. The condition in which we perform errors must seem to you
normal and, as such, to bear no similarity to that of hypnosis. On the other
hand there exists a clear relationship between the hypnotic state and sleep,
the essential condition of dreaming. Hypnosis is actually called artificial
sleep; we say to the people whom we hypnotize: “Sleep,” and the
suggestions made to them are comparable to the dreams of natural sleep.
The mental situation is really analogous in the two cases. In natural sleep
we withdraw our interest from the whole outer world; so also in hypnotic
sleep, with the exception of the one person who has hypnotized us and with
whom we remain in rapport. Again, the so-called “nurse’s sleep” in which
the nurse remains in rapport with the child and can be wakened only by him
is a normal counterpart of hypnotic sleep. So it does not seem so very
audacious to carry over to natural sleep something which is a condition in
hypnosis. The assumption that some knowledge about his dream exists in
the dreamer and that this knowledge is merely inaccessible to him, so that
he himself does not believe he has it, is not a wild invention. Incidentally,
we observe here that a third way of approaching the study of dreams is thus
opened out for us; we may approach it by the avenue of sleep-disturbing
stimuli, by that of day-dreams, and now by that of the dreams suggested
during hypnosis.
Now perhaps we shall return to our task with greater confidence. We
see it is very probable that the dreamer knows something about his dream;
the problem is how to make it possible for him to get at his knowledge and
impart it to us. We do not expect him immediately to tell us what his dream
means, but we do think he will be able to discover its source, from what
circle of thoughts and interests it is derived. With errors, you will remember
the man was asked how the slip of the tongue “refilled” had come about,
and his first association gave us the explanation. The technique we employ
in the case of dreams is very simple and is modelled on this example. Here
again we shall ask the dreamer how he came to have the dream, and his
next words must be regarded as giving the explanation in this case also. It
makes no difference to us therefore, whether he thinks that he does or does
not know anything about it, and we treat both cases alike.
This technique is certainly very simple, nevertheless I am afraid it will
provoke most strenuous opposition in you. You will say: “Another
assumption, the third! And the most improbable of all! When I ask the
dreamer what ideas come to him about the dream, do you mean to say that

his very first association will give the desired explanation? But surely he
might have no association at all, or heaven only knows what the association
might be. We cannot imagine upon what grounds such an expectation is
based. It really implies too much trust in Providence, and this at a point
where rather more exercise of the critical faculty would better meet the
case. Besides, a dream is not like a single slip of the tongue but is made up
of many elements. That being so, upon which association is one to rely?”
You are right in all the unessentials. It is true that a dream differs from
a slip of the tongue in the matter of its many elements as well as in other
points. We must take account of that in our technique. So I suggest to you
that we divide the dream up into its various elements, and examine each
element separately; then we shall have re-established the analogy with a slip
of the tongue. Again, you are right in saying that the dreamer when
questioned on the single elements of the dream may reply that he has no
ideas about them. There are cases in which we accept this answer, and later
I will tell you which these are; curiously enough, they are cases about
which we ourselves may have certain definite ideas. But in general, when
the dreamer declares that he has no ideas, we shall contradict him, press
him to answer, assure him that he must have some idea and—shall find we
are right. He will produce an association, any one, it does not matter to us
what it is. He will be especially ready with information which we may term
historical. He will say: “That is something which happened yesterday” (as
in the instance of the two “prosaic” dreams quoted above) or: “That
reminds me of something which happened recently,” and in this way we
shall come to notice that dreams are much more often connected with
impressions of the day before than we thought at first. Finally, with the
dream as his starting-point, he will recall events which happened less
recently, and at last even some which lie very far back in the past.
In regard to the main issue, however, you are wrong. When you think
it arbitrary to assume that the first association of the dreamer must give us
just what we are looking for, or at any rate lead to it, and further, that the
association is much more likely to be quite capricious and to have no
connection with what we are looking for, and that it only shows my blind
trust in Providence if I expect anything else—then you make a very great
mistake. I have already taken the liberty of pointing out to you that there is
within you a deeply-rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice, that this
belief is quite unscientific, and that it must give ground before the claims of

a determinism which governs even mental life. I ask you to have some
respect for the fact that that one association, and nothing else, occurs to the
dreamer when he is questioned. Nor am I setting up one belief against
another. It can be proved that the association thus given is not a matter of
choice, not indeterminate, and that it is not unconnected with what we are
looking for. Indeed, I have recently learnt—not that I attach too much
importance to the fact—that experimental psychology itself has brought
forward similar proofs.
Because of the importance of the matter I ask you to pay special
attention to this. When I ask a man to say what comes to his mind about any
given element in a dream, I require him to give himself up to the process of
FREE ASSOCIATION which follows when he keeps in mind the original idea.
This necessitates a peculiar attitude of the attention, something quite
different from reflection, indeed, precluding it. Many people adopt this
attitude without any difficulty, but others when they attempt to do so
display an incredible inaptitude. There is a still higher degree of freedom in
association which appears when I dispense with any particular stimulus-
idea and perhaps only describe the kind and species of association that I
want; for example, ask someone to let a proper name or a number occur to
him. An association of this sort should, one would say, be even more
subject to choice and unaccountable than the kind used in our technique.
Nevertheless, it can be shown that in every instance it will be strictly
determined by important inner attitudes of mind, which are unknown to us
at the moment when they operate, just as much unknown as are the
disturbing tendencies which cause errors, and those tendencies which bring
about so-called “chance” actions.
I myself and many after me have repeatedly made an examination of
names and numbers called up without any particular idea as a starting-point;
some of these experiments have been published. The method is this: a train
of associations is stirred up by the name which occurred, and these
associations, as you see, are no longer quite free, but are attached just so far
as the associations to the different elements of the dream are attached; this
train of associations is then kept up until the thoughts arising from the
impulse have been exhausted. By that time, however, you will have
explained the motivation and significance of the free association with a
name. The experiments yield the same result again and again; the
information they give us often includes a wealth of material and

necessitates going far afield into its ramifications. The associations to
numbers that arise spontaneously are perhaps the most demonstrative; they
follow upon one another so swiftly and make for a hidden goal with such
astounding certainty that one is really quite taken aback. I will give you just
one example of a name-analysis of this sort, because it happens to be one
which does not involve the handling of a great mass of material.
Once, when I was treating a young man, I happened to say something
on this subject and to assert that in spite of our apparent freedom of choice
in such matters we cannot, in point of fact, think of any name which cannot
be shown to be narrowly determined by the immediate circumstances, the
idiosyncrasies, of the person experimented with and his situation at the
moment. As he was inclined to be sceptical, I proposed that he should make
the experiment himself then and there. I knew that he had unusually
numerous relationships of all sorts with women and girls, so I told him that
I thought he would have an exceptionally large number to choose from if he
were to let the name of a woman occur to him. He agreed. To my surprise,
or rather perhaps to his own, he did not overwhelm me with an avalanche of
women’s names, but remained silent for a time, and then confessed that the
only name which came into his mind at all was “Albine.” “How curious!
What do you connect with this name? How many Albines do you know?”
Strangely enough, he knew no one of the name of Albine, and he found no
associations to the name. One might infer that the analysis had failed; but
no, it was already complete, and no further association was required. The
man himself was unusually fair in colouring, and whilst talking to him in
analysis I had often jokingly called him an albino; moreover, we were just
in the midst of tracing the feminine element in his nature. So it was he
himself who was this female albino, the “woman” who interested him most
at the moment.
In the same way, the tunes which suddenly come into a man’s head can
be shown to be conditioned by some train of thought to which they belong,
and which for some reason is occupying his mind without his knowing
anything about it. It is easy to show that the connection with the tune is to
be sought either in the words which belong to it or in the source from which
it comes: I must, however, make this reservation, that I do not maintain this
in the case of really musical people of whom I happen to have had no
experience; in them the musical value of the tune may account for its
suddenly emerging into consciousness. The first case is certainly much

more common; I know of a young man who for some time was absolutely
haunted by the tune (a charming one, I admit) of the song of Paris in Helen
of Troy, until his attention was drawn in analysis to the fact that at that time
an “Ida” and a “Helen” were rivals in his interest.
If then the associations which arise quite freely are determined in this
way and belong to some definite context, we are surely justified in
concluding that associations attached to one single stimulus-idea must be
equally narrowly conditioned. Examination shows as a fact that they are not
only attached in the first place to the stimulus-idea which we have provided
for them, but that they are also dependent, in the second place, on circles of
thoughts and interests of strong affective value (complexes, as we call them)
of whose influence at the time nothing is known, that is to say, on
unconscious activities.
Associations attached in this way have been made the subject of very
instructive experiments, which have played a notable part in the history of
psycho-analysis. Wundt’s school originated the so-called ‘association-
experiment,’ in which the subject of the experiment is bidden to reply to a
given ‘stimulus-word’ as quickly as possible with whatever ‘reaction-word’
occurs to him. The following points may then be noted: the interval which
elapses between the sounding of the stimulus-word and of the reaction-
word, the nature of the latter, and possibly any mistake which comes in
when the same experiment is repeated later, and so on. The Zurich School,
under the leadership of Bleuler and Jung, arrived at the explanation of the
reactions to the association-experiment by asking the person experimented
upon to throw light upon any associations which seemed at all remarkable,
by means of subsequent associations. In this way it became clear that these
unusual reactions were most strictly determined by the complexes of the
person concerned. By this discovery Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge
between experimental psychology and psycho-analysis.
Having heard this you may possibly say: “We admit now that free
associations are subject to determination and not a matter of choice, as we
thought at first, and we admit this also in the case of associations to the
elements of dreams. But it is not this that we are bothering about. You
maintain that the association to each element in the dream is determined by
some mental background to this particular element, a background of which
we know nothing. We cannot see that there is any proof of this. Naturally

we expect that the association to the dream-element will be shown to be
conditioned by one of the complexes of the dreamer, but what good is that
to us? That does not help us to understand the dream; it merely leads to
some knowledge of these so-called complexes, as did the association-
experiment; but what have these to do with the dream?”
You are right, but you are overlooking an important point, the very
thing which deterred me from choosing the association-experiment as a
starting-point for this discussion. In this experiment the stimulus-word, the
single thing which determines the reaction, is chosen by us at will, and the
reaction stands as intermediary between this stimulus-word and the
complex aroused in the person experimented upon. In the dream, the
stimulus-word is replaced by something derived from the mental life of the
dreamer, from sources unknown to him, and hence may very probably be
itself a ‘derivative of a complex.’ It is not, therefore, altogether fantastic to
suppose that the further associations connected with the elements of the
dream are determined by no other complex than that which has produced
the particular element itself, and that they will lead to the discovery of that
complex.
Let me give you another instance which may serve to show that, in the
case of dreams, the facts bear out our expectations. The forgetting of proper
names is really an excellent prototype of what happens in dream-analysis,
only that in the former case one person alone is concerned, while in the
interpretation of dreams there are two. When I forget a name temporarily, I
am still certain that I know it, and by way of a détour through Bernheim’s
experiment, we are now in a position to achieve a similar certainty in the
case of the dreamer. Now this name which I have forgotten, and yet really
know, eludes me. Experience soon teaches me that no amount of thinking
about it, even with effort, is any use. I can, however, always think of
another or of several other names instead of the forgotten one. When such a
substitute name occurs to me spontaneously, only then is the similarity
between this situation and that of dream-analysis evident. The dream-
element also is not what I am really looking for; it is only a substitute for
something else, for the real thing which I do not know and am trying to
discover by means of dream-analysis. Again the difference is that when I
forget a name I know perfectly well that the substitute is not the right one,
whereas we only arrived at this conception of the dream-element by a
laborious process of investigation. Now there also is a way in which, when

we forget a name, we can by starting from the substitute, arrive at the real
thing eluding our consciousness at the moment, i.e. the forgotten name. If I
turn my attention to these substitute names and let further associations to
them come into my mind, I arrive after a short or a long way round at the
name I have forgotten, and in so doing I discover that the substitutes I have
spontaneously produced had a definite connection with, and were
determined by, the forgotten name.
I will give you an instance of an analysis of this sort: one day I found
that I could not call to mind the name of the small country on the Riviera, of
which Monte Carlo is the capital. It was most annoying, but so it was. I
delved into all my knowledge about the country; I thought of Prince Albert
of the House of Lusignan, of his marriages, of his passion for deep-sea
exploration—in fact of everything I could summon up, but all to no
purpose. So I gave up trying to think and, instead of the name I had lost, let
substitute names come into my mind. They came quickly: Monte Carlo
itself, then Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Albania was the first to
attract my attention; it was immediately replaced by Montenegro, probably
because of the contrast between black and white. Then I noticed that four of
the substitute names have the same syllable “mon,” and immediately I
recalled the forgotten word and cried out “Monaco.” You see the substitutes
really originated in the forgotten name; the four first came from the first
syllable and the last gave the sequence of the syllables and the whole of the
final syllable. Incidentally, I could quite easily find out what had made me
forget the name for the time being. Monaco is the Italian name for Munich,
and it was some thoughts connected with this town which had acted as an
inhibition.
Now that is a very pretty example, but it is too simple. In other cases
you might have to take a longer succession of associations to the substitute
name, and then the analogy to dream-analysis would be clearer. I have had
experiences of that sort, too. A stranger once invited me to drink some
Italian wine with him, and in the inn he found he had forgotten the name of
the wine which he had meant to order on account of his very pleasant
recollections of it. A number of dissimilar substitute names occurred to him,
and from these I was able to infer that the thought of someone called
Hedwig had made him forget the name of the wine. Sure enough, not only
did he tell me that there had been a Hedwig with him on the occasion when
he first tasted the wine, but this discovery brought back to him the name he

wanted. He was now happily married, and “Hedwig” belonged to earlier
days which he did not care to recall.
What is possible in the case of forgotten names must be also possible
in the interpretation of dreams: starting from the substitute, we must be able
to arrive at the real object of our search by means of a train of associations;
and further, arguing from what happens with forgotten names, we may
assume that the associations to the dream-element will have been
determined not only by that element but also by the real thought which is
not in consciousness. If we could do this, we should have gone some way
towards justifying our technique.

SEVENTH LECTURE
MANIFEST CONTENT AND LATENT THOUGHTS

You see that our study of errors has not been fruitless. Thanks to our
exertions in that direction, we have—reasoning from the hypotheses with
which you are familiar—secured two results: a conception of the nature of
the dream-element and a technique of dream-interpretation. The conception
of the dream-element is as follows: it is not in itself a primary and essential
thing, a ‘thought proper,’ but a substitute for something else unknown to the
person concerned, just as is the underlying intention of the error, a
substitute for something the knowledge of which is indeed possessed by the
dreamer but is inaccessible to him. We hope to be able to carry over the
same conception on to the dream as a whole, which consists of a number of
such elements. Our method is to allow other substitute-ideas, from which
we are able to divine that which lies hidden, to emerge into consciousness
by means of free association to the said elements.
I am now going to propose that we introduce an alteration in our
nomenclature in order to make our terminology more flexible. Instead of
using the words “hidden,” “inaccessible,” or “proper,” let us give a more
precise description and say “inaccessible to the consciousness of the
dreamer” or “unconscious.” By that we mean nothing more than was
implied in the case of the forgotten word, or the underlying intention
responsible for the error; that is to say, unconscious at the moment. It
follows that in contradistinction we may call the dream-elements
themselves, and those substitute-ideas arrived at by the process of
association, conscious. No theoretical implication is so far contained in
these terms; no exception can be taken to the use of the word “unconscious”
as a description at once applicable and easy to understand.[26]
Now, transferring our conception from the single element to the dream
as a whole, it follows that the latter is the distorted substitute for something
else, something unconscious, and that the task of dream-interpretation is to

discover these unconscious thoughts. Hence are derived three important
rules which should be observed in the work of dream-interpretation:
1. We are not to trouble about the surface meaning of the dream,
whether it be reasonable or absurd, clear or confused; in no case does it
constitute the unconscious thoughts we are seeking. (An obvious limitation
of this rule will force itself upon us later.)
2. We are to confine our work to calling up substitute-ideas for every
element and not to ponder over them and try to see whether they contain
something which fits in, nor to trouble ourselves about how far they are
taking us from the dream-element.
3. We must wait until the hidden unconscious thoughts which we are
seeking appear of their own accord, just as in the case of the missing word
“Monaco” in the experiment which I described.
Now we understand also how entirely indifferent it is whether we
remember much or little of our dreams, above all whether we remember
them accurately or not. The dream as remembered is not the real thing at all,
but a distorted substitute which, by calling up other substitute-ideas,
provides us with a means of approaching the thought proper, of bringing
into consciousness the unconscious thoughts underlying the dream. If our
recollection was at fault, all that has happened is that a further distortion of
the substitute has taken place, and this distortion itself cannot be without
motivation.
We can interpret our own dreams as well as those of others; indeed, we
learn more from our own and the process carries more conviction. Now if
we experiment in this direction, we notice that something is working
against us. Associations come, it is true, but we do not admit them all; we
are moved to criticize and to select. We say to ourselves of one association:
“No, that does not fit in—it is irrelevant,” and of another: “That is too
absurd,” and of a third: “That is quite beside the point”; and then we can
observe further that in making such objections we stifle, and in the end
actually banish, the associations before they have become quite clear. So on
the one hand we tend to hold too closely to the initial idea, that is, the
dream-element itself, and on the other, by allowing ourselves to select, we
vitiate the results of the process of free association. If we are not attempting
the interpretation by ourselves, but are allowing someone else to interpret,
we shall clearly perceive another motive impelling us to this selection,

forbidden as we know it to be. We find ourselves thinking at times: “No,
this association is too unpleasant; I cannot, or will not, tell it to him.”
Clearly these objections threaten to spoil the success of our work. We
must guard against them when we are interpreting our own dreams by
resolving firmly not to yield to them, and, in interpreting those of someone
else, by laying down the hard and fast rule that he must not withhold any
association, even if one of the four objections I have named rises up against
it, namely, that it is too unimportant, too absurd, too irrelevant or too
unpleasant to speak of. He promises to keep this rule, and we may well feel
annoyed when we find how badly he fulfils his promise later on. At first we
account for this by imagining that in spite of our authoritative assurance he
is not convinced that the process of free association will be justified by its
results; and perhaps our next idea will be to win him over first to our theory,
by giving him books to read or sending him to lectures so that he may be
converted to our views on the subject. But we shall be saved from any such
false steps by observing that the same critical objections against certain
associations arise even in ourselves, whom we surely cannot suspect of
doubt, and can only subsequently, on second thoughts as it were, be
overcome.
Instead of being annoyed at the dreamer’s disobedience, we can turn
this experience to good account as a means of learning something new,
something which is the more important the more unprepared we were for it.
We realize that the work of dream-interpretation is encountering opposition
by a resistance which expresses itself in this very form of critical
objections. This resistance is independent of the theoretical conviction of
the dreamer. We learn even more than this. Experience shows that a critical
objection of this nature is never justified. On the contrary, the associations
which people wish to suppress in this way prove without exception to be the
most important, to be decisive for the discovery of the unconscious thought.
When an association is accompanied by an objection of this sort it
positively calls for special notice.
This resistance is something entirely new; a phenomenon which we
have found by following out our hypotheses, although it was not included in
them. We are not altogether agreeably surprised by this new factor which
we have to reckon with, for we suspect already that it will not make our
work any easier: it might almost tempt us to give up the effort with dreams

altogether. To take such a trivial subject and then to have so much trouble,
instead of spinning along smoothly with our technique! But we might on
the other hand find these difficulties fascinating and be led to suspect that
the work will be worth the trouble. Resistances invariably confront us when
we try to penetrate to the hidden unconscious thought from the substitute
offered by the dream-element. We may suppose, therefore, that something
very significant must be concealed behind the substitute; for, if not, why
should we meet with such difficulties, the purpose of which is to keep up
the concealment? When a child will not open his clenched fist to show what
is in it, we may be quite certain that it is something which he ought not to
have.
As soon as we introduce into our subject the dynamic conception of
resistance, we must bear in mind that this factor is something quantitatively
variable. There are greater and lesser resistances, and we are prepared to
find these differences showing themselves in the course of our work.
Perhaps we can connect with this another experience also met with in the
process of dream-interpretation. I mean that sometimes only a few
associations—perhaps not more than one—suffice to lead us from the
dream-element to the unconscious thought behind it, whilst on other
occasions long chains of associations are necessary and many critical
objections have to be overcome. We shall probably think that the number of
associations necessary varies with the varying strength of the resistances,
and very likely we shall be right. If there is only a slight resistance, the
substitute is not far removed from the unconscious thought; a strong
resistance on the other hand causes great distortions of the latter, and
thereby entails a long journey back from the substitute to the unconscious
thought itself.
Perhaps this would be a good moment to select a dream and try our
technique upon it, to see whether the expectations we have entertained are
realized. Very well, but what dream shall we choose? You do not know how
difficult it is for me to decide, nor can I make it clear to you yet what the
difficulties are. Obviously there must be dreams in which on the whole
there is very little distortion, and one would think it would be best to begin
with these. But which are the least distorted dreams? Those which make
good sense and are not confused, of which I have already given you two
examples? In assuming this, we should make a great mistake, for
examination shows that these dreams have undergone an exceptionally high

degree of distortion. Supposing then that I make no special condition but
take any dream at random, you would probably be very much disappointed.
We might have to observe and record such a vast number of associations to
the single dream-elements that it would be quite impossible to gain any
clear view of the work as a whole. If we write the dream down and compare
with it all the associations which it produces, we are likely to find that they
have multiplied the length of the text of the dream many times. So the most
practical method would seem to be that of selecting for analysis several
short dreams, each of which can at least convey some idea to us or confirm
some supposition. This will be the course we shall decide to take, unless
experience gives us a hint where we ought really to look for slightly
distorted dreams.
But I can suggest another means of simplifying matters, one which lies
right before us. Instead of attempting the interpretation of whole dreams, let
us confine ourselves to single dream-elements and find out by taking a
series of examples how the application of our technique explains them:—
(a) A lady related that as a child she very often dreamt that God had a
pointed paper cap on his head. How are you going to understand that
without the help of the dreamer? It sounds quite nonsensical; but the
absurdity disappears when the lady says that as a little girl she used to have
a cap like that put on her head at table, because she wouldn’t give up
looking at the plates of her brothers and sisters to see whether any of them
had been given more than she. Evidently the cap was meant to serve the
purpose of blinkers; this piece of historical information was given, by the
way, without any difficulty. The interpretation of this element and, with it,
of the whole short dream becomes easy enough with the help of a further
association of the dreamer’s: “As I had been told that God knew everything
and saw everything, the dream could only mean that I knew and saw
everything as God did, even when they tried to prevent me.” This example
is perhaps too simple.
(b) A sceptical patient had a longer dream, in which certain people
were telling her about my book on Wit and praising it very highly. Then
something else came in about a canal; it might have been another book in
which the word canal occurred, or something else to do with a canal ... she
did not know ... it was quite vague.

Now you will certainly be inclined to suppose that the canal in the
dream will defy interpretation on account of its vagueness. You are right in
expecting difficulty, but the difficulty is not caused by the vagueness; on the
contrary, the difficulty in interpretation is caused by something else, by the
same thing that makes the element vague. The dreamer had no association
to the word “canal”; naturally I did not know what to say either. Shortly
afterwards, to be accurate, on the next day, she told me that an association
had occurred to her which perhaps had something to do with it. It was in
fact a witty remark which some one had told her. On board ship between
Dover and Calais a well-known author was talking to an Englishman who
in some particular context quoted the words: “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y
a qu’un pas.” The author answered: “Oui, le Pas-de-Calais,” meaning that
he regarded France as sublime and England as ridiculous. Of course, the
Pas-de-Calais is a canal—that is to say, the Canal la Manche—the English
Channel. Now, you ask, do I think that this association had anything to do
with the dream? Certainly I think so: it gives the true meaning of the
puzzling dream-element. Or are you inclined to doubt that the joke already
existed before the dream and was the unconscious thought behind the
element “canal,” and to maintain that it was a subsequent invention? The
association reveals the scepticism disguised under the obtrusive admiration,
and resistance was no doubt the cause both of the association being so long
in occurring to her, and of the corresponding dream-element being so
vague. Observe here the relation between the dream-element and the
unconscious thought underlying it: it is, as it were, a fragment of the
thought, an allusion to it; by being isolated in that way it became quite
incomprehensible.
(c) A patient had a fairly long dream, part of which was as follows:
Several members of his family were seated at a table of a particular
shape ... etc. This table reminded the dreamer that he had seen one of the
same sort when he was visiting a certain family. From that his thoughts ran
on thus: in this family the relationship between father and son was a
peculiar one, and the patient presently added that his own relationship to his
father was, as a matter of fact, of the same nature. So the table was
introduced into the dream to indicate this parallelism.
It happened that this dreamer had long been familiar with the demands
of dream-interpretation; otherwise he might have taken exception to the
idea of investigating so trivial a detail as the shape of a table. We do

literally deny that anything in the dream is a matter of chance or of
indifference, and it is precisely by enquiring into such trivial and
(apparently) unmotivated details that we expect to arrive at our conclusion.
You may perhaps still be surprised that the dream-work should happen to
choose the table, in order to express the thought “Our relationship is just
like theirs.” But even this is explicable when you learn that the family in
question was named “Tischler.” (Tisch = table.) In making his relations sit
at this table the dreamer’s meaning was that they too were “Tischler.”[27]
And notice another thing: that in relating dream-interpretations of this sort
one is forced into indiscretion. There you have one of the difficulties I
alluded to in the matter of choosing examples. I could easily have given you
another example instead of this one, but probably I should have avoided this
indiscretion only to commit another in its place.
This seems to me a good point at which to introduce two new terms
which we might have used already. Let us call the dream as related the
manifest dream-content, and the hidden meaning, which we should come by
in following out the associations, the latent dream-thoughts. Then we must
consider the relation between the manifest content and the latent thoughts,
as shown in the above examples. There are many varieties of these
relations. In examples (a) and (b) the manifest dream-element is also an
integral part of the latent thoughts, but only a fragment of them. A small
piece of a great, composite, mental structure in the unconscious dream-
thoughts has made its way into the manifest dream also, in the form of a
fragment or in other cases as an allusion, like a catch-word or an
abbreviation in a telegraphic code. The interpretation has to complete the
whole to which this scrap or allusion belongs, which it did most
successfully in example (b). One method of the distorting process in which
the dream-work consists is therefore that of substituting for something else
a fragment or an allusion. In example (c) we notice, moreover, another
possible relation between manifest content and latent thought, a relation
which is even more plainly and distinctly expressed in the following
examples:—
(d) The dreamer was pulling a certain lady of his acquaintance out of
a ditch. He himself found the meaning of this dream-element by means of
the first association. It meant: he “picked her out,” preferred her.[28]

(e) Another man dreamt that his brother was digging up his garden all
over again. The first association was to deep-trenching for vegetables, the
second gave the meaning. The brother was retrenching. (Retrenching his
expenses).[29]
(f) The dreamer was climbing a mountain from which he had a
remarkably wide view. This sounds most reasonable; perhaps no
interpretation is called for and we have only to find out what recollection is
referred to in the dream, and what had aroused it. No, you are mistaken; it
comes out that this dream needed interpretation just as much as any other,
more confused. For the dreamer remembers nothing about mountain-
climbing himself; instead, it occurs to him that an acquaintance is
publishing a Rundschau (Review), on the subject of our relations with the
most distant parts of the earth: hence, the latent thought is one in which the
dreamer identifies himself with the “reviewer” (lit. one who takes a survey).
Here you come across a new type of relation between the manifest and
the latent element in dreams. The former is not so much a distortion of the
latter as a representation—a plastic, concrete piece of imagery, originating
in the sound of a word. It is true that this amounts in effect to a distortion,
for we have long forgotten from what concrete image the word sprang, and
hence fail to recognize it when that image is substituted for it. When you
consider that the manifest dream consists of visual images in by far the
greatest number of cases, and less frequently of thoughts and words, you
will easily realize that this kind of relation between the manifest and the
latent has a special significance in the structure of dreams. You see too that
in this way it becomes possible for a long series of abstract thoughts to
create substitute-images in the manifest dream which do indeed serve the
purpose of concealment. This is how our picture-puzzles are made up. The
source of the semblance of wit which goes with this type of representation
is a special question which we need not touch on here.
There is a fourth kind of relation between the manifest and the latent
elements which I will say nothing about until the time comes for it in my
account of our technique. Even then I shall not have given you a full list of
these possible relations, but we shall have sufficient for our purpose.
Now do you think you can summon up courage to venture on the
interpretation of a whole dream? Let us see whether we are adequately
equipped for the task. I shall not, of course, choose one of the most obscure,

but all the same it shall be one which shows the characteristics of dreams in
a well-marked form.
A young woman who had already been married for a number of years
dreamt as follows: She was at the theatre with her husband, and one side of
the stalls was quite empty. Her husband told her that Elise L. and her fiancé
also wanted to come, but could only get bad seats, three for a florin and a
half, and of course they could not take those. She replied that in her opinion
they did not lose much by that.
The first thing stated by the dreamer is that the occasion giving rise to
the dream is alluded to in the manifest content: her husband had really told
her that Elise L., an acquaintance of about her own age, had become
engaged, and the dream is the reaction to this piece of news. We know
already that in many dreams it is easy to point to some such occasion
occurring on the day before, and that this is often traced by the dreamer
without any difficulty. This dreamer supplies us with further information of
the same sort about other elements in the manifest dream. To what did she
trace the detail of one side of the stalls being empty? It was an allusion to a
real occurrence of the week before, when she had meant to go to a certain
play and had therefore booked seats early, so early that she had to pay extra
for the tickets. On entering the theatre it was evident that her anxiety had
been quite superfluous, for one side of the stalls was almost empty. It would
have been time enough if she had bought the tickets on the actual day of the
performance and her husband did not fail to tease her about having been in
too great a hurry. Next, what about the one florin and a half (1 fl. 50)? This
was traced to quite another context which had nothing to do with the
former, but it again refers to some news received on the previous day. Her
sister-in-law had had a present of 150 florins from her husband and had
rushed off in a hurry, like a silly goose, to a jeweller’s shop and spent it all
on a piece of jewellery. What about the number three? She knew nothing
about that unless this idea could be counted an association, that the engaged
girl, Elise L., was only three months younger than she herself who had been
married ten years. And the absurdity of taking three tickets for two people?
She had nothing to say to this and refused to give any more associations or
information whatever.
Nevertheless, her few associations have provided us with so much
material that it is possible to discover the latent dream-thoughts. We are

struck by the fact that in her statements references to time are noticeable at
several points, which form a common basis for the different parts of this
material. She had got the theatre tickets too soon, taken them in too great a
hurry, so that she had to pay extra for them; in the same way her sister-in-
law had hurried off to the jeweller’s with her money to buy an ornament
with it, as though she might miss something. If the strongly emphasized
points: “too early,” “too great a hurry,” are connected with the occasion for
the dream (namely, the news that her friend, only three months younger
than herself, had now found a good husband after all) and with the criticism
expressed in her asperity about her sister-in-law, that it was folly to be so
precipitate, there occurs to us almost spontaneously the following
construction of the latent dream-thoughts, for which the manifest dream is a
highly-distorted substitute:
“It was really foolish of me to be in such a hurry to marry! Elise’s
example shows me that I too could have found a husband later on.” (The
over-haste is represented by her own conduct in buying the tickets and that
of her sister-in-law in buying the jewellery. Going to the theatre is
substituted for getting married.) This would be the main thought; perhaps
we may go on, though with less certainty because the analysis in these
passages ought not to be unsupported by statements of the dreamer: “And I
might have had one a hundred times better for the money!” (150 florins is
100 times more than one florin and a half.) If we may substitute the dowry
for the money, it would mean that the husband is bought with the dowry:
both the jewellery and the bad seats would stand for the husband. It would
be still more desirable if we could see some connection between the
element “three tickets” and a husband; but our knowledge does not as yet
extend to this. We have only found out that the dream expresses
depreciation of her own husband and regret at having married so early.
In my opinion we shall be more surprised and confused by the result of
this our first attempt at dream-interpretation than satisfied with it. Too many
ideas force themselves upon us at once, more than as yet we can master. We
see already that we shall not come to the end of what the interpretation of
this dream can teach us. Let us immediately single out those points in which
we can definitely see some new knowledge.
In the first place: we note that in the latent thoughts the chief emphasis
falls upon the element of hurry; in the manifest dream that is exactly a

feature about which we find nothing. Without analysis we could have had
no suspicion that this thought entered in at all. It seems possible, therefore,
that precisely the main point round which the unconscious thoughts centre
does not appear in the manifest dream at all. This fact must radically change
the impression made upon us by the whole dream. In the second place: in
the dream there is a nonsensical combination of ideas (three for one florin
and a half); in the dream-thoughts we detect the opinion: “It was folly (to
marry so early).” Can one reject the conclusion that this thought, “It was
folly,” is represented by the introduction into the manifest dream of an
absurd element? In the third place: comparison shows us that the relation
between manifest and latent elements is no simple one, certainly not of such
a kind that a manifest always replaces a latent element. The relation
between the two is of the nature of a relation between two different groups,
so that a manifest element can represent several latent thoughts or a latent
thought be replaced by several manifest elements.
As regards the meaning of the dream and the dreamer’s attitude
towards it, here again we might find many surprising things to say. The lady
certainly admitted the interpretation, but she wondered at it; she had not
been aware that she had such disparaging thoughts of her husband; she did
not even know why she should so disparage him. So there is still much that
is incomprehensible about it. I really think that as yet we are not properly
equipped for interpreting a dream and that we need further instruction and
preparation first.

EIGHTH LECTURE
CHILDREN’S DREAMS

We had the impression that we had advanced too rapidly; let us
therefore retrace our steps a little. Before we made our last experiment in
which we tried to overcome the difficulty of dream-distortion by means of
our technique, we said that it would be best to circumvent it by confining
our attention to dreams in which distortion is absent or occurs only to a very
slight extent, if there are any such dreams. In doing this, we are again
departing from the actual course of development of our knowledge; for in
reality it was only after consistently applying our method of interpretation,
and after exhaustive analysis of dreams in which distortion occurred, that
we became aware of the existence of those in which it is lacking.
The dreams we are looking for are met with in children: short, clear,
coherent, and easy to understand, they are free from ambiguity and yet are
unmistakable dreams. You must not think, however, that all dreams in
children are of this type. Distortion in dreams begins to appear very early in
childhood, and there are on record dreams of children between five and
eight years old which already show all the characteristics of the dreams of
later life. But, if you confine yourselves to those occurring in the period
between the dawn of recognizable mental activity and the fourth or fifth
year of life, you will discover a series which we should characterize as
infantile, and, in the later years of childhood, you may find single dreams of
the same type; indeed, even in grown-up people under certain conditions
dreams appear which in no way differ from the typically infantile.
Now from these children’s dreams it is possible to obtain without any
difficulty trustworthy information about the essential nature of dreams,
which we hope will prove to be decisive and universally valid.
1. In order to understand these dreams there is no need for any analysis
nor for the employment of any technique. It is not necessary to question the
child who relates his dream. But we must know something about his life; in

every instance there is some experience from the previous day which
explains the dream. The dream is the mind’s reaction in sleep to the
experience of the previous day.
Let us consider some examples in order to base our further conclusions
upon them:
(a) A boy of a year and ten months old had to present someone with a
basket of cherries as a birthday gift. He plainly did it very unwillingly,
although he had been promised some of them for himself. The next morning
he told his dream: “Hermann eaten all the cherries.”
(b) A little girl of three and a quarter years went for the first time for a
trip on the lake. When they came to land, she did not wish to leave the boat
and cried bitterly; the time on the water had evidently gone too quickly for
her. Next morning she said: “Last night I was sailing on the lake.” We may
probably infer that this trip lasted longer.
(c) A boy five and a quarter years old was taken on an excursion to the
Escherntal near Hallstatt. He had heard that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the
Dachstein and had shown great interest in that mountain. From the lodgings
in Aussee there was a fine view of the Dachstein, and with a telescope it
was possible to make out the Simony Hut on top. The child had repeatedly
endeavoured to see the hut through the telescope, but nobody knew whether
he had succeeded. The excursion began in a mood of joyful expectation.
Whenever a new mountain came into sight, the little boy asked: “Is that the
Dachstein?” Every time his question was answered in the negative he grew
more out of spirits and presently became silent and refused to climb a little
way up to the waterfall with the others. He was thought to be overtired, but
the next morning he said quite happily: “Last night I dreamt that we were in
the Simony Hut.” So it was with this expectation that he had taken part in
the excursion. The only detail he gave was one he had heard before: “You
have to climb up steps for six hours.”
These three dreams will be enough to give us all the information we
need at this point.
2. We see that these childhood dreams are not meaningless; they are
complete, comprehensible mental acts. Remember the medical verdict
about dreams, which I told you, and the comparison with unskilled fingers
wandering over the keys of the piano. You cannot fail to notice how sharply
this conception is contradicted by the children’s dreams I have quoted. Now

it would surely be most extraordinary if a child were able to achieve the
performance of complete mental acts during sleep, and the grown-up person
in the same situation contented himself with spasmodic reactions. Besides,
we have every reason for attributing better and deeper sleep to a child.
3. In these dreams there is no distortion and therefore they need no
interpretation: the manifest and the latent content is here identical. From
this we conclude that distortion is not essential to the nature of the dream. I
expect that this statement will take a weight off your minds. Nevertheless,
closer consideration forces us to admit that even in these dreams distortion
is present, though in a very slight degree, that there is a certain difference
between the manifest content and the latent dream-thought.
4. The child’s dream is a reaction to an experience of the previous day,
which has left behind a regret, a longing, or an unsatisfied wish. In the
dream we have the direct, undisguised fulfilment of this wish. Now consider
our discussion as to the part played by the external or internal somatic
stimuli as disturbers of sleep and begetters of dreams. We learnt certain
quite definite facts on this point, but this explanation only held good in a
small number of dreams. In these children’s dreams there is nothing to
indicate the influence of such somatic stimuli; we can make no mistake
about it, for the dreams are perfectly comprehensible and each can easily be
grasped as a whole. But we need not on that account give up our notion of
the stimulus as causing the dream. We can only ask why we forget from the
outset that there are mental as well as bodily sleep-disturbing stimuli; surely
we know that it is these which are mainly responsible for disturbing the
sleep of the grown-up person, in that they hinder him from bringing about
in himself the mental condition essential for sleep, i.e. the withdrawal of
interest from the outside world. He wishes not to have any interruption in
his life; he would prefer to continue working at whatever occupies him, and
that is the reason why he does not sleep. The mental stimulus which
disturbs sleep is therefore for a child the unsatisfied wish, and his reaction
to this is a dream.
5. This takes us by a very short step to a conclusion about the function
of dreams. If dreams are the reaction to a mental stimulus their value must
lie in effecting a discharge of the excitation so that the stimulus is removed
and sleep can continue. We do not yet know how this discharge through the
dream is effected dynamically, but we notice already that dreams are not

disturbers of sleep (the accusation commonly brought against them), but are
guardians and deliverers of it from disturbing influences. True, we are apt to
think we should have slept better if we had not dreamed, but there we are
wrong: the truth is that without the help of the dream we should not have
slept at all, and we owe it to the dream that we slept as well as we did. It
could not help disturbing us a little, just as a policeman often cannot avoid
making a noise when driving off disturbers of the peace who would wake
us.
6. That dreams are brought about by a wish and that the content of the
dream expresses this wish is one main characteristic of dreams. The other
equally constant feature is that the dream does not merely give expression
to a thought, but represents this wish as fulfilled, in the form of an
hallucinatory experience. “I should like to sail on the lake,” runs the wish
which gives rise to the dream; the content of the dream itself is: “I am
sailing on the lake.” So that even in these simple dreams belonging to
childhood there is still a difference between the latent and the manifest
dream, and still a distortion of the latent dream-thought, in the translation
of the thought into an experience. In interpreting a dream, we must first of
all undo this process of alteration. If this is to be regarded as one of the
most universal characteristics of all dreams, we then know how to translate
the dream-fragment I quoted before: “I see my brother digging” does not
mean “my brother is retrenching,” but “I wish my brother would retrench,
he is to retrench.” Of the two universal characteristics here mentioned the
second is obviously more likely to be acknowledged without opposition
than the first. It is only by extensive investigations that we can make sure
that what produces the dream must always be a wish and cannot sometimes
be a preoccupation, a purpose, or reproach; but the other characteristic
remains unaffected, namely, that the dream does not merely reproduce this
stimulus, but, by a kind of living it through, removes it, sets it aside,
relieves it.
7. In connection with these characteristics of dreams we may take up
again our comparison between dreams and errors. In the latter we
distinguished between a disturbing tendency and one which is disturbed, the
error being a compromise between the two. Dreams fall into the same
category; the disturbed tendency can only, of course, be the tendency to
sleep, while the disturbing tendency resolves itself into the mental stimulus
which we may call the wish (clamouring for gratification), since at present

we know of no other mental stimulus disturbing sleep. Here again the
dream is the result of a compromise; we sleep, and yet we experience the
satisfaction of a wish; we gratify a wish and at the same time continue to
sleep. Each achieves part-success and part-failure.
8. You will remember that at one point we hoped to find a path to an
understanding of the problems presented by dreams in the fact that certain
very transparent phantasy-formations are called “day-dreams.” Now these
day-dreams are literally wish-fulfilments, fulfilments of ambitious or erotic
wishes, which we recognize as such; they are, however, carried out in
thought, and, however vividly imagined, they never take the form of
hallucinatory experiences. Here, therefore, the less certain of the two main
characteristics of the dream is retained, whereas the other, to which the
condition of sleep is essential and which cannot be realized in waking life,
is entirely lacking. So in language we find a hint that a wish-fulfilment is a
main characteristic of dreams. And further, if the experience we have in
dreams is only another form of imaginative representation, a form which
becomes possible under the peculiar conditions of the sleeping state—“a
nocturnal day-dream,” as we might call it—we understand at once how it is
that the process of dream-formation can abrogate the stimulus operating at
night and can bring gratification; for day-dreaming also is a mode of
activity closely linked up with gratification, which is in fact the only reason
why people practise it.
Again, there are other linguistic expressions, besides this, which imply
the same thing. We are familiar with the proverbs: “The pig dreams of
acorns and the goose of maize.” “What do chickens dream of? Of millet.”
The proverb, you see, goes even lower in the scale than we do, beyond the
child to the animal, and asserts that the content of dreams is the satisfaction
of a want. And there are many phrases which seem to point to the same
thing: we say “as beautiful as a dream.” “I should never have dreamt of
such a thing.” “I never imagined that in my wildest dreams.” Here
colloquial speech is clearly partial in its judgement. Of course there are also
anxiety-dreams, and dreams the content of which is painful or indifferent,
but these have not given rise to any special phrases. We do indeed speak of
“bad” dreams, but by a “dream” pure and simple common usage always
understands some sort of exquisite wish-fulfilment. Nor is there any
proverb which attempts to assert that pigs or geese dream of being
slaughtered!

It is, of course, inconceivable that this wish-fulfilling character of
dreams should have escaped the notice of writers on the subject. On the
contrary, they have very often remarked upon it; but it has not occurred to
any of them to recognize this characteristic as universal, and to take it as the
key to the explanation of dreams. We can easily imagine what may have
deterred them, and later we will discuss the question.
Now see how much information we have gained, and that with hardly
any trouble, from our study of children’s dreams! We have learnt that the
function of dreams is to protect sleep; that they arise out of two conflicting
tendencies, of which the one, the desire for sleep, remains constant, whilst
the other endeavours to satisfy some mental stimulus; that dreams are
proved to be mental acts, rich in meaning; that they have two main
characteristics, i.e., they are wish-fulfilments and hallucinatory experiences.
And meanwhile we could almost have forgotten that we were studying
psycho-analysis. Apart from the connection we have made between dreams
and errors our work has not borne any specific stamp. Any psychologist
knowing nothing of the assumptions of psycho-analysis could have given
this explanation of children’s dreams. Why has no one done so?
If only all dreams were of the infantile type the problem would be
solved and our task already achieved, and that without questioning the
dreamer, referring to the unconscious or having recourse to the process of
free association. Clearly it is in this direction that we must continue our
work. We have already repeatedly found that characteristics alleged to be
universally valid have afterwards proved to hold good only for a certain
kind and a limited number of dreams. So the question we now have to
decide is whether the common characteristics revealed by children’s dreams
are any more stable than these, and whether they hold also for those dreams
whose meaning is not obvious and in whose manifest content we can
recognize no reference to a wish remaining from the day before. Our idea is
that these other dreams have undergone a good deal of distortion and on
that account we must refrain from immediate judgement. We suspect too
that to unravel this distortion we shall need the help of psycho-analytic
technique, which we could dispense with while learning, as we have just
now done, the meaning of children’s dreams.
There is yet one other class of dreams at least in which no distortion is
present and which, like children’s dreams, we easily recognize to be wish-

fulfilments. These are dreams which are occasioned all through life by
imperative physical needs—hunger, thirst, sexual desire—and are wish-
fulfilments in the sense of being reactions to internal somatic stimuli. Thus I
have on record the dream of a little girl, one year and seven months old,
which consisted of a kind of menu, together with her name (Anna F ...,
strawberries, bilberries, egg, pap), the dream being a reaction to a day of
fasting, enforced on account of indigestion due to eating the fruit which
appeared twice in the dream. At the same time her grandmother—their
combined ages totalled seventy—was obliged, owing to a floating kidney,
to go without food for a day and dreamt that night that she had been invited
out and had had the most tempting delicacies set before her. Observations
on prisoners who are left to go hungry, and on people who suffer privations
whilst travelling or on expeditions, show that in these circumstances they
regularly dream about the satisfaction of their wants. Thus Otto
Nordenskjöld in his book on the Antarctic (1904) tells us of the band of
men in whose company he spent the winter (Vol. I, p. 336): “Our dreams
showed very clearly the direction our thoughts were taking. Never had we
dreamt so frequently and so vividly as at that time. Even those of our
comrades who usually dreamt but rarely had now long stories to tell in the
mornings when we exchanged our latest experiences in this realm of
phantasy. All the dreams were about that outside world now so far away, but
often they included a reference to our condition at the time ... eating and
drinking were, incidentally, the pivot on which our dreams most often
turned. One of us, who was particularly good at going out to large dinners
in his sleep, was delighted when he could tell us in the morning that he had
had a three-course dinner. Another dreamt of tobacco, whole mountains of
tobacco; another of a ship which came full sail over the water, at last clear
of ice. Yet another dream deserves mention: the postman came with the
letters and gave a long explanation of why they were so late; he said he had
made a mistake in delivering them, and had had great trouble in getting
them back again. Of course, things even more impossible occupied our
minds in sleep, but the lack of imagination in almost all the dreams which I
dreamt myself or heard the others tell was quite striking. It would certainly
be of great psychological interest if we had a record of all these dreams.
You can imagine how we longed for sleep, when it offered each one of us
all that he most eagerly desired.” Another quotation, this time from Du Prel:
“Mungo Park, when nearly dying of thirst on a journey in Africa, dreamt

continually of the well-watered hills and valleys of his home. So Trenck,
tormented with hunger in the redoubt at Magdebourg, saw himself in his
dreams surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part
in Franklin’s first expedition, when on the point of dying of hunger owing
to their terrible privations, dreamt regularly of abundant food to eat.”
Anyone who has made himself thirsty at night by eating highly-
seasoned dishes at supper is likely to dream of drinking. Of course it is not
possible to relieve acute hunger or thirst by dreaming; in that case we
awake thirsty and are obliged to drink real water. The service of the dream
is here of little practical account, but it is none the less clear that it was
called up for the purpose of protecting sleep from the stimulus impelling us
to wake up and act. Where the intensity of the desire is less, ‘satisfaction’-
dreams do often answer the purpose.
In the same way, when the stimulus is that of sexual desire the dream
provides satisfaction, but of a kind which shows peculiarities worthy of
mention. Since it is a characteristic of the sexual impulse that it is a degree
less dependent on its object than are hunger and thirst, the satisfaction in a
pollution-dream can be real; and, in consequence of certain difficulties in
the relation to the object (which will be discussed later), it particularly often
happens that the real satisfaction is yet connected with a vague or distorted
dream-content. This peculiarity of pollution-dreams makes them, as O.
Rank has observed, suitable objects for the study of dream-distortion.
Moreover, with adults, dreams of desire usually contain besides the
satisfaction something else, springing from a purely mental source and
requiring interpretation if it is to be understood.
We do not maintain, by the way, that wish-fulfilment dreams of the
infantile type occur in adults solely as reactions to the imperative desires I
have mentioned. We are equally familiar with short clear dreams of this
type, occasioned by certain dominating situations and unquestionably
produced by mental stimuli. For example, there are ‘impatience’-dreams in
which someone making preparations for a journey, for a theatrical
performance in which he is specially interested, or for a lecture or a visit,
has his expectations prematurely realized in a dream, and finds himself the
night before the actual experience already at his journey’s end, at the
theatre, or talking to the friend he is going to visit. Or again, there is the
‘comfort’-dream, rightly so-called, in which someone who wants to go on

sleeping dreams that he has already got up, that he is washing, or is at
school, while all the time he is really continuing his sleep, meaning that he
would rather dream of getting up than do so in reality. In these dreams the
desire for sleep, which we have recognized as regularly participating in
dream-formation, expresses itself plainly and appears as their actual
originator. The need for sleep ranks itself quite rightly with the other great
physical needs.
I would refer you at this point to the reproduction of a picture by
Schwind in the Schack Gallery at Munich[30] and would ask you to notice
how correctly the artist has realized the way in which a dream arises out of
a dominating situation. The picture is called The Prisoner’s Dream, and the
subject of the dream must undoubtedly be his escape. It is a happy thought
that the prisoner is to escape by the window, for it is through the window
that the ray of light has entered and roused him from sleep. The gnomes
standing one above the other no doubt represent the successive positions he
would have to assume in climbing up to the window; and, if I am not
mistaken and do not attribute too much intentional design to the artist, the
features of the gnome at the top, who is filing the grating through (the very
thing the prisoner himself would like to do), resemble the man’s own.
I have said that in all dreams, other than those of children and such as
conform to the infantile type, we encounter the obstacle of distortion. We
cannot immediately say whether they too are wish-fulfilments, as we are
inclined to suppose, nor can we guess from their manifest content in what
mental stimulus they originate, or prove that they, like the others, endeavour
to remove or relieve the stimulus. They must, in fact, be interpreted, i.e.
translated; the process of distortion must be reversed, and the manifest
content replaced by the latent thought, before we can make any definite
pronouncement whether what we have found out about infantile dreams
may claim to hold good for all dreams alike.

NINTH LECTURE
THE DREAM-CENSORSHIP

Our study of children’s dreams has taught us how dreams originate,
what their essential character is, and what their function. Dreams are the
means of removing, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that
disturb sleep. It is true that with the dreams of adults we have been able to
explain one group only, those which we termed dreams of the infantile type.
We do not yet know how it may be with the others, neither do we
understand them. The result we have arrived at already is one, however, of
which the significance is not to be under-estimated. Every time that we
fully understand a dream it proves to be a wish-fulfilment; and this
coincidence cannot be accidental or unimportant.
Dreams of another type are assumed by us to be distorted substitutes
for an unknown content, which first of all has to be traced; we have various
grounds for this assumption, amongst others the analogy to our conception
of errors. Our next task is to investigate and understand this dream-
distortion.
It is dream-distortion which makes dreams seem strange and
incomprehensible. There are several things we want to know about it: first,
whence it comes (its dynamics), secondly, what it does, and finally, how it
does it. Further, we can say that distortion is the production of the dream-
work. Let us describe the dream-work and trace out the forces in it.
Now let me tell you a dream recorded by a lady well-known in psycho-
analytical circles[31], who said that the dreamer was an elderly woman,
highly cultivated and held in great esteem. The dream was not analysed and
our informant observed that for psycho-analysts it needed no interpreting.
Nor did the dreamer herself interpret it, but she criticized it and condemned
it in such a way as though she knew what it meant. “Imagine,” she said,
“such abominable nonsense being dreamt by a woman of fifty, whose only
thought day and night is concern for her child.”

I will now tell you the dream, which is about “love service in war-
time.”[32] ‘She went to the First Military Hospital and said to the sentinel at
the gate that she must speak to the physician-in-chief (giving a name which
she did not know), as she wished to offer herself for service in the hospital.
In saying this, she emphasized the word service in such a way that the
sergeant at once perceived that she was speaking of “love service.” As she
was an old lady, he let her pass after some hesitation, but instead of finding
the chief physician, she came to a large gloomy room, where a number of
officers and army doctors were standing or sitting around a long table. She
turned to a staff doctor and told him her proposal; he soon understood her
meaning. The words she said in her dream were: “I and countless other
women and girls of Vienna are ready for the soldiers, officers or men, to....”
This ended in a murmur. She saw, however, by the half-embarrassed, half-
malicious expressions of the officers that all of them grasped her meaning.
The lady continued: “I know our decision sounds odd, but we are in bitter
earnest. The soldier on the battlefield is not asked whether he wishes to die
or not.” There followed a minute of painful silence; then the staff doctor put
his arm round her waist and said: “Madam, supposing it really came to this,
that ... (murmur.)” She withdrew herself from his arm, thinking: “They are
all alike,” and replied: “Good heavens, I am an old woman and perhaps it
won’t happen to me. And one condition must be observed: age must be
taken into account, so that an old woman and a young lad may not ...
(murmur); that would be horrible.” The staff doctor said: “I quite
understand”; but some of the officers, amongst them one who as a young
man had made love to her, laughed loudly, and the lady asked to be taken to
the physician-in-chief, whom she knew, so that everything might be put
straight. It then struck her, to her great consternation, that she did not know
his name. The staff doctor, however, with the utmost respect and courtesy,
showed her the way to the second floor, up a very narrow iron spiral
staircase leading direct from the room where they were to the upper storeys.
As she went up, she heard an officer say: “That is a tremendous decision, no
matter whether she is young or old; all honour to her!” With the feeling that
she was simply doing her duty, she went up an endless staircase.’
This dream was repeated twice within a few weeks, with alterations
here and there which, as the lady remarked, were quite unimportant and
entirely meaningless.

The way in which this dream progresses corresponds to the course of a
day-dream; there are only a few places where an interruption occurs, and
many individual points in its content might have been cleared up by
enquiry: this, however, as you know, was not undertaken. But the most
striking and to us the most interesting thing about it is the occurrence of
many gaps, not in the recollection, but in the content. In three places the
latter is, as it were, blotted out; where these gaps occur the speeches are
interrupted by a murmur. As we did not analyse the dream, we have, strictly
speaking, no right to say anything about its meaning; but there are certain
indications from which we may draw conclusions, e.g. the words “love
service”; and, above all, the broken speeches immediately preceding the
murmurs require completion of a kind which admits of only one
construction. If we do so complete them a phantasy results, in which the
content is that the dreamer is ready at the call of duty to offer herself to
gratify the sexual needs of the troops, irrespective of rank. This is certainly
shocking, a model of a shamelessly libidinous phantasy, but—the dream
says nothing about this. Just where the context demands this confession,
there is in the manifest dream an indistinct murmur: something has been
lost or suppressed.
I hope you recognize how obvious is the inference that it is just the
shocking nature of these passages which has led to their suppression. Now
where will you find a parallel to what has taken place here? In these times
you have not far to seek. Take up any political paper and you will find that
here and there in the text something is omitted and in its place the blank
white of the paper meets your eye: you know that this is the work of the
press censor. Where these blank spaces occur, there originally stood
something of which the authorities at the censorship disapproved and which
has been deleted on that account. You probably think it a pity, for that must
have been the most interesting part, the “cream” of the news.
On other occasions the censorship has not dealt with the sentence in its
completed form; for the writer, foreseeing which passages were likely to be
objected to by the censor, has forestalled him by softening them down,
making some slight modification or contenting himself with hints and
allusions to what he really wants to write. In this case there are no blanks,
but from the roundabout and obscure mode of expression you can detect the
fact that, at the time of writing, the author had the censorship in mind.

Now keeping to this parallel we say that those speeches in the dream
which were omitted or disguised by a murmur have also been sacrificed to
some form of censorship. We actually use the term DREAM-CENSORSHIP, and
ascribe part of the distortion to its agency. Wherever there are gaps in the
manifest dream we know that the censorship is responsible; and indeed we
should go further and recognize that wherever, amongst other more clearly-
defined elements, one appears which is fainter, more indefinite or more
dubious in recollection, it is evidence of the work of the censorship. It is,
however, seldom that it takes a form so undisguised, so naïve, as we might
say, as it does in the case of the dream about “love service;” far more often
the censorship makes itself felt in the second way I mentioned: by effecting
modifications, hints, and allusions in place of the true meaning.
There is a third way in which the dream-censorship works, to which
the ordinances of the Press censorship supply no parallel; but it happens
that I can demonstrate to you this particular mode of activity on the part of
the dream-censorship in the only dream hitherto analysed by us. You will
remember the dream of the “three bad theatre tickets, costing one florin and
a half.” In the latent thoughts underlying this dream, the element “too great
a hurry, too early” was in the foreground; the meaning was: “It was folly to
marry so early, it was foolish also to take the tickets so early, it was
ridiculous of the sister-in-law to spend her money so hurriedly on a piece of
jewellery.” Nothing of this central element of the dream-thoughts appeared
in the manifest content, where everything was focussed on going to the
theatre and taking tickets. By this displacement of the accent and
regrouping of the dream-elements, the manifest content was made so unlike
the latent thoughts that nobody would suspect the presence of the latter
behind the former. This displacement of accent is one of the principal
means employed in distortion, and it is this which gives the dream that
character of strangeness which makes the dreamer himself reluctant to
recognize it as the product of his own mind.
Omission, modification, regrouping of material—these then are the
modes of the dream-censorship’s activity and the means employed in
distortion. The censorship itself is the originator, or one of the originators,
of distortion, the subject of our present enquiry. Modification and alteration
in arrangement are commonly included under the term ‘displacement.’

After these remarks on the activities of the dream-censorship, let us
turn our attention to its dynamics. I hope you are not taking the expression
“censorship” in too anthropomorphic a sense, picturing to yourselves the
censor as a stern little manikin or a spirit, who lives in a little chamber of
the brain and there discharges the duties of his office; and neither must you
localize it too exactly, so that you imagine a “brain-centre” whence there
emanates a censorial influence, liable to cease with the injury or
disappearance of that centre. For the present we may regard it merely as a
useful term by which to express a dynamic relationship. This need not
hinder us from asking what sort of tendencies exercise this influence and is
it exercised upon; and further, we must not be surprised to discover that we
have already come across the censorship, perhaps without recognizing it.
Indeed this has actually happened. Remember a surprising experience
we had when we began to apply our method of free association: we
discovered that our efforts to penetrate from the dream-element to the
unconscious thought proper for which the former is a substitute encountered
a certain resistance. The strength of this resistance, we said, varies, being
sometimes enormous and at other times very slight. In the latter case we
need only a few connecting-links for the work of interpretation; but where
there is great resistance we are compelled to go through long chains of
associations, which carry us far from the initial idea, and on the way we
have to overcome all the difficulties of professedly critical objections to
associations arising. That which we encountered as resistance in the work of
interpretation we now meet again as the censorship in the dream-work: the
resistance is simply the censorship objectified; it proves to us that the power
of the censorship is not exhausted in effecting distortion, being thereby
extinguished, but that the censorship remains as a permanent institution, the
object of which is to maintain the distortion when once it has been
achieved. Moreover, just as the strength of the resistance encountered
during interpretation varies with each element, so too the degree of
distortion effected by the censorship is different for each element of a whole
dream. A comparison of the manifest and the latent dream shows that
certain latent elements are completely eliminated, others more or less
modified, and others again appear in the manifest dream-content unaltered
or perhaps even intensified.
Our purpose, however, was to find out which are the tendencies
exercising the censorship and upon which tendencies it is exercised. Now

this question, which is fundamental for the understanding of dreams and
perhaps of human life altogether, is easy to answer when we survey the
series of dreams which we have succeeded in interpreting. The tendencies
which exercise the censorship are those which are acknowledged by the
waking judgement of the dreamer and with which he feels himself to be at
one. You may be sure that when you repudiate any correctly-found
interpretation of a dream of your own, you do so from the same motives as
cause the censorship to be exercised and distortion effected, and make
interpretation necessary. Consider the dream of our lady of fifty: her dream,
although it had not been interpreted, struck her as shocking and she would
have been even more outraged if Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth had told her
something of its unmistakable meaning; it was just this attitude of
condemnation which caused the offensive passages in the dream to be
replaced by a murmur.
Those tendencies against which the dream-censorship is directed must
next be described from the point of view of this inner critical standard.
When we do this, we can only say that they are invariably of an
objectionable nature, offensive from the ethical, æsthetic or social point of
view, things about which we do not dare to think at all, or think of only with
abhorrence. Above all are these censored wishes, which in dreams are
expressed in a distorted fashion, manifestations of a boundless and ruthless
egoism; for the dreamer’s own ego makes its appearance in every dream,
and plays the principal part, even if it knows how to disguise itself
completely as far as the manifest content is concerned. This sacro egoismo
of dreams is certainly not unconnected with the attitude of mind essential to
sleep: the withdrawal of interest from the whole outside world.
The ego which has discarded all ethical bonds feels itself at one with
all the demands of the sexual impulse, those which have long been
condemned by our æsthetic training and those which are contrary to all the
restraints imposed by morality. The striving for pleasure—the libido, as we
say,—chooses its objects unchecked by any inhibition, preferring indeed
those which are forbidden: not merely the wife of another man, but, above
all, the incestuous objects of choice which by common consent humanity
holds sacred—the mother and the sister of men, the father and the brother
of women. (Even the dream of our fifty-year-old lady is an incestuous one,
the libido being unmistakably directed towards the son.) Desires which we
believe alien to human nature show themselves powerful enough to give

rise to dreams. Hate, too, rages unrestrainedly; wishes for revenge, and
death-wishes, against those who in life are nearest and dearest—parents,
brothers and sisters, husband or wife, the dreamer’s own children—are by
no means uncommon. These censored wishes seem to rise up from a
veritable hell; when we know their meaning, it seems to us in our waking
moments as if no censorship of them could be severe enough. Dreams
themselves, however, are not to blame for this evil content; you surely have
not forgotten that their harmless, nay, useful, function is to protect sleep
from disturbance. Depravity does not lie in the nature of dreams; in fact,
you know that there are dreams which can be recognized as gratifying
justifiable desires and urgent bodily needs. It is true that there is no
distortion in these dreams, but then there is no need for it, they can perform
their function without offending the ethical and æsthetic tendencies of the
ego. Remember, too, that the degree of distortion is proportionate to two
factors: on the one hand, the more shocking the wish that must be censored,
the greater will be the distortion; but it is also great in proportion as the
demands of the censorship are severe. Hence in a strictly brought up and
prudish young girl, a rigid censorship will distort dream-excitations which
we medical men would have recognized as permissible and harmless
libidinous desires, and which the dreamer herself would judge in the same
way ten years later.
Besides, we are still not nearly far enough advanced to allow ourselves
to be outraged at the result of our work of interpretation. I think we still do
not understand it properly; but first of all it is incumbent upon us to secure
it against certain possible attacks. It is not at all difficult to detect weak
points in it. Our interpretations were based on hypotheses which we
adopted earlier: that there really is some meaning in dreams; that the idea of
mental processes being unconscious for a time, which was first arrived at
through hypnotic sleep, may be applied also to normal sleep; and that all
associations are subject to determination. Now if, reasoning from these
hypotheses, we had obtained plausible results in our dream-interpretation
we should have been justified in concluding that these hypotheses were
correct. But what if these discoveries are of the kind I have described? In
that case, surely it seems natural to say: “These results are impossible,
absurd, at the very least highly improbable, so there must have been
something wrong about the hypotheses. Either the dream is after all not a
mental phenomenon, or there is nothing which is unconscious in our normal

condition, or there is a flaw somewhere in our technique. Is it not simpler
and more satisfactory to assume this than to accept all the abominable
conclusions which we profess to have deduced from our hypotheses?”
Both! it is both simpler and more satisfactory, but not on that account
necessarily more correct. Let us give ourselves time: the matter is not yet
ripe for judgement. First of all, we can make the case against our
interpretations even stronger. The fact that our results are so unpleasant and
repellent would not perhaps weigh so very heavily with us; a stronger
argument is the emphatic and well-grounded repudiation by dreamers of the
wish-tendencies which we try to foist upon them after interpretating their
dreams. “What?” says one, “You want to prove to me from my dream that I
grudge the money I have spent on my sister’s dowry and my brother’s
education? But it is out of the question; I spend my whole time working for
my brothers and sisters and my only interest in life is to do my duty by
them, as, being the eldest, I promised our dead mother I would.” Or a
woman says: “I am supposed to wish that my husband were dead? Really
that is outrageous nonsense! Not only is our married life very happy, though
perhaps you won’t believe that, but if he died I should lose everything I
possess in the world.” Or someone else will reply: “Do you mean to suggest
that I entertain sexual desires towards my sister? The thing is ludicrous; she
is nothing to me; we get on badly with one another, and for years I have not
exchanged a word with her.” We still might not be much impressed if these
dreamers neither admitted nor denied the tendencies attributed to them; we
might say that these are just the things of which they are quite unconscious.
But when they detect in their own minds the exact opposite of such a wish
as is interpreted to them, and when they can prove to us by their whole
conduct in life that the contrary desire predominates, surely we must be
nonplussed. Is it not about time now for us to discard our whole work of
dream-interpretation as something which has led to a reductio ad
absurdum?
No, not even now. Even this stronger argument falls to pieces when
subjected to a critical attack. Assuming that unconscious tendencies do exist
in mental life, the fact that the opposite tendencies predominate in
conscious life goes to prove nothing. Perhaps there is room in the mind for
opposite tendencies, for contradictions, existing side by side; indeed,
possibly the very predominance of the one tendency conditions the
unconscious nature of the opposite. So the first objections raised only

amount to the statement that the results of dream-interpretation are not
simple and are very disagreeable. To the first charge we may reply that,
however much enamoured of simplicity you may be, you cannot thereby
solve one of the problems of dreams; you have to make up your mind at the
outset to accept the fact of complicated relations. And, as regards the
second point, you are manifestly wrong in taking the fact that something
pleases or repels yourself as the motive for a scientific judgement. What
does it matter if you do find the results of dream-interpretation unpleasant,
or even mortifying and repulsive? Ça n’empêche pas d’exister—as I, when
a young doctor, heard my chief, Charcot, say in a similar case. We must be
humble and put sympathies and antipathies honourably in the background if
we would learn to know reality in this world. If a physicist could prove to
you that organic life on the earth was bound to become extinct before long,
would you venture to say to him also: “That cannot be so; I dislike the
prospect too much.” I think you would say nothing, until another physicist
came along and convicted the first of a mistake in his premises or his
calculations. If you repudiate whatever is distasteful to you, you are
repeating the mechanism of a dream structure rather than understanding and
mastering it.
Perhaps, then, you will undertake to overlook the offensive nature of
the censored dream-wishes and will fall back upon the argument that it is
surely very improbable that we ought to concede so large a part in the
human constitution to what is evil. But do your own experiences justify you
in this statement? I will say nothing of how you may appear in your own
eyes, but have you met with so much goodwill in your superiors and rivals,
so much chivalry in your enemies and so little envy amongst your
acquaintances, that you feel it incumbent on you to protest against the idea
of the part played by egoistic baseness in human nature? Do you not know
how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that
concerns sexual life? Or are you ignorant of the fact that all the excesses
and aberrations of which we dream at night are crimes actually committed
every day by men who are wide awake? What does psycho-analysis do in
this connection but confirm the old saying of Plato that the good are those
who content themselves with dreaming of what others, the wicked, actually
do?
And now look away from individuals to the great war still devastating
Europe: think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now

allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that
a handful of unprincipled place-hunters and corrupters of men would have
succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their
followers were not also guilty? Will you venture, even in these
circumstances, to break a lance for the exclusion of evil from the mental
constitution of humanity?
You will accuse me of taking a one-sided view of war, and tell me that
it has also called out all that is finest and most noble in mankind, heroism,
self-sacrifice, and public spirit. That is true; but do not now commit the
injustice, from which psycho-analysis has so often suffered, of reproaching
it that it denies one thing because it affirms another. It is no part of our
intention to deny the nobility in human nature, nor have we ever done
anything to disparage its value. On the contrary, I show you not only the
evil wishes which are censored but also the censorship which suppresses
them and makes them unrecognizable. We dwell upon the evil in human
beings with the greater emphasis only because others deny it, thereby
making the mental life of mankind not indeed better, but incomprehensible.
If we give up the one-sided ethical valuation then, we are sure to find the
truer formula for the relation of evil to good in human nature.
Here the matter rests. We need not give up the results of our work of
dream-interpretation, even though we cannot fail to find them strange.
Perhaps later we shall be able to come nearer to understanding them by
another path. For the present let us hold fast to this: dream-distortion is due
to the censorship exercised, by certain recognized tendencies of the ego,
over desires of an offensive character which stir in us at night during sleep.
Obviously, when we ask ourselves why it is just at night that they appear
and what is the origin of these reprehensible wishes, we find that there is
still much to investigate and many questions to answer.
It would, however, be wrong if we neglected to give due prominence at
this point to another result of these investigations. The dream-wishes which
would disturb our sleep are unknown to us; we first learn about them by
dream-interpretation; they are therefore to be designated “unconscious at
the moment” in the sense in which we have used the term. But we must
recognize that they are also more than unconscious at the moment; for the
dreamer denies them, as we have so frequently found, even after he has
learnt of them through the interpretation of his dream. Here we have a

repetition of the case which we first met with when interpreting the slip of
the tongue “hiccough,” where the after-dinner speaker indignantly assured
us that neither then nor at any time had he been conscious of any feeling of
disrespect towards his chief. We ventured even then to doubt the value of
this assertion and assumed instead that the speaker was permanently
ignorant of the existence of this feeling within him. We meet with the same
situation every time we interpret a dream in which there is a high degree of
distortion, and this lends an added significance to our conception. We are
now prepared to assume that there are processes and tendencies in mental
life, of which we know nothing; have known nothing; have, for a very long
time, perhaps even never, known anything about at all. This gives the term
unconscious a fresh meaning for us: the qualification “at the moment” or
“temporary” is seen to be no essential attribute, the term may also mean
permanently unconscious, not merely “latent at the moment.” You see that
later on we shall have to discuss this point further.

TENTH LECTURE
SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

We have found out that the distortion in dreams which hinders our
understanding of them is due to the activities of a censorship, directed
against the unacceptable, unconscious wish-impulses. But of course we
have not asserted that the censorship is the only factor responsible for the
distortion, and as a matter of fact a further study of dreams leads to the
discovery that there are yet other causes contributing to this effect; that is as
much as to say, if the censorship were eliminated we should nevertheless be
unable to understand dreams, nor would the manifest dream be identical
with the latent dream-thoughts.
This other cause of the obscurity of dreams, this additional
contribution to distortion, is revealed by our becoming aware of a gap in
our technique. I have already admitted to you that there are occasions when
persons being analysed really have no associations to single elements in
their dreams. To be sure, this does not happen as often as they declare that it
does; in very many instances the association may yet be elicited by
perseverance; but still there remain a certain number of cases where
association fails altogether or, if something is finally extorted, it is not what
we need. If this happens during psycho-analytic treatment it has a certain
significance which does not concern us here; but it also occurs in the course
of interpretation of dreams in normal people, or when we are interpreting
our own. When we are convinced in such circumstances that no amount of
pressing is of any use, we finally discover that this unwelcome contingency
regularly presents itself where special dream-elements are in question; and
we begin to recognize the operation of some new principle, whereas at first
we thought we had only come across an exceptional case in which our
technique had failed.
In this way it comes about that we try to interpret these “silent”
elements, and attempt to translate them by drawing upon our own resources.
It cannot fail to strike us that we arrive at a satisfactory meaning in every

instance in which we venture on this substitution, whereas the dream
remains meaningless and disconnected as long as we do not resolve to use
this method. The accumulation of many exactly similar instances then
affords us the required certainty, our experiment having been tried at first
with considerable diffidence.
I am presenting all this somewhat in outline, but that is surely
allowable for purposes of instruction, nor is it falsified by so doing, but
merely made simpler.
We arrive in this way at constant translations for a series of dream-
elements, just as in popular books on dreams we find such translations for
everything that occurs in dreams. You will not have forgotten that when we
employ the method of free association such constant substitutions for
dream-elements never make their appearance.
Now you will at once say that this mode of interpretation seems to you
far more uncertain and open to criticism than even the former method of
free association. But there is still something more to be said: when we have
collected from actual experience a sufficient number of such constant
translations, we eventually realize that we could actually have filled in these
portions of the interpretation from our own knowledge, and that they really
could have been understood without using the dreamer’s associations. How
it is that we are bound to know their meaning is a matter which will be dealt
with in the second half of our discussion.
We call a constant relation of this kind between a dream-element and
its translation a symbolic one, and the dream-element itself a symbol of the
unconscious dream-thought. You will remember that some time ago, when
we were examining the different relations which may exist between dream-
elements and the thoughts proper underlying them, I distinguished three
relations: substitution of the part for the whole, allusion, and imagery. I told
you then that there was a fourth possible relation, but I did not tell you what
it was. This fourth relation is the symbolic, which I am now introducing;
there are connected with it certain very interesting points for discussion, to
which we will turn attention before setting forth our special observations on
this subject. Symbolism is perhaps the most remarkable part of our theory
of dreams.
First of all: since the relation between a symbol and the idea
symbolized is an invariable one, the latter being as it were a translation of

the former, symbolism does in some measure realize the ideal of both
ancient and popular dream-interpretation, one from which we have moved
very far in our technique. Symbols make it possible for us in certain
circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer, who
indeed in any case can tell us nothing about the symbols. If the symbols
commonly appearing in dreams are known, and also the personality of the
dreamer, the conditions under which he lives, and the impressions in his
mind after which his dream occurred, we are often in a position to interpret
it straightaway; to translate it at sight, as it were. Such a feat flatters the
vanity of the interpreter and impresses the dreamer; it is in pleasing contrast
to the laborious method of questioning the latter. But do not let this lead you
away: it is no part of our task to perform tricks nor is that method of
interpretation which is based on a knowledge of symbolism one which can
replace, or even compare with, that of free association. It is complementary
to this latter, and the results it yields are only useful when applied in
connection with the latter. As regards our knowledge of the dreamer’s
mental situation, moreover, you must reflect that you have not only to
interpret dreams of people whom you know well; that, as a rule, you know
nothing of the events of the previous day which stimulated the dream; and
that the associations of the person analysed are the very source from which
we obtain our knowledge of what we call the mental situation.
Further, it is especially remarkable, particularly with reference to
certain considerations upon which we shall touch later, that the most
strenuous opposition has manifested itself again here, over this question of
the existence of a symbolic relation between the dream and the
unconscious. Even persons of judgement and standing, who in other
respects have gone a long way with psycho-analysis, have renounced their
adherence at this point. This behaviour is the more remarkable when we
remember two things: first, that symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, nor
exclusively characteristic of them; and, in the second place, that the use of
symbolism in dreams was not one of the discoveries of psycho-analysis,
although this science has certainly not been wanting in surprising
discoveries. If we must ascribe priority in this field to anyone in modern
times, the discoverer must be recognized in the philosopher K. A. Scherner
(1861); psycho-analysis has confirmed his discovery, although modifying it
in certain important respects.

Now you will wish to hear something about the nature of dream-
symbolism and will want some examples. I will gladly tell you what I
know, but I confess that our knowledge is less full than we could wish.
The symbolic relation is essentially that of a comparison, but not any
kind of comparison. We must suspect that this comparison is subject to
particular conditions, although we cannot say what these conditions are.
Not everything with which an object or an occurrence can be compared
appears in dreams as symbolic of it, and, on the other hand, dreams do not
employ symbolism for anything and everything, but only for particular
elements of latent dream-thoughts; there are thus limitations in both
directions. We must admit also that we cannot at present assign quite
definite limits to our conception of a symbol; for it tends to merge into
substitution, representation, etc., and even approaches closely to allusion. In
one set of symbols the underlying comparison may be easily apparent, but
there are others in which we have to look about for the common factor, the
tertium comparationis contained in the supposed comparison. Further
reflection may then reveal it to us, or on the other hand it may remain
definitely hidden from us. Again, if the symbol is really a comparison, it is
remarkable that this comparison is not exposed by the process of free
association, and also that the dreamer knows nothing about it, but makes
use of it unawares; nay, more, that he is actually unwilling to recognize it
when it is brought to his notice. So you see that the symbolic relation is a
comparison of a quite peculiar kind, the nature of which is as yet not fully
clear to us. Perhaps some indication will be found later which will throw
some light upon this unknown quantity.
The number of things which are represented symbolically in dreams is
not great. The human body as a whole, parents, children, brothers and
sisters, birth, death, nakedness—and one thing more. The only typical, that
is to say, regularly occurring, representation of the human form as a whole
is that of a house, as was recognized by Scherner, who even wanted to
attribute to this symbol an overwhelming significance which is not really
due to it. People have dreams of climbing down the front of a house, with
feelings sometimes of pleasure and sometimes of dread. When the walls are
quite smooth, the house means a man; when there are ledges and balconies
which can be caught hold of, a woman. Parents appear in dreams as
emperor and empress, king and queen or other exalted personages; in this
respect the dream attitude is highly dutiful. Children and brothers and

sisters are less tenderly treated, being symbolized by little animals or
vermin. Birth is almost invariably represented by some reference to water:
either we are falling into water or clambering out of it, saving someone
from it or being saved by them, i.e. the relation between mother and child is
symbolized. For dying we have setting out upon a journey or travelling by
train, while the state of death is indicated by various obscure and, as it were,
timid allusions; clothes and uniforms stand for nakedness. You see that here
the dividing line between the symbolic and the allusive kinds of
representation tends to disappear.
In comparison with the poverty of this enumeration, it cannot fail to
strike us that objects and matters belonging to another range of ideas are
represented by a remarkably rich symbolism. I am speaking of what
pertains to the sexual life—the genitals, sexual processes and intercourse.
An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. A
curious disproportion arises thus, for the matters dealt with are few in
number, whereas the symbols for them are extraordinarily numerous, so that
each of these few things can be expressed by many symbols practically
equivalent. When they are interpreted, therefore, the result of this
peculiarity gives universal offence, for, in contrast to the multifarious forms
of its representation in dreams, the interpretation of the symbols is very
monotonous. This is displeasing to everyone who comes to know of it: but
how can we help it?
As this is the first time in the course of these lectures that I have
touched upon the sexual life, I owe you some explanation of the manner in
which I propose to treat this subject. Psycho-Analysis sees no occasion for
concealments or indirect allusions, and does not think it necessary to be
ashamed of concerning itself with material so important; it is of opinion that
it is right and proper to call everything by its true name, hoping in this way
the more easily to avoid disturbing suggestions. The fact that I am speaking
to a mixed audience can make no difference in this. No science can be
treated as an oracular mystery, or in a manner adapted to school-girls; the
women present, by appearing in this lecture-room, have tacitly expressed
their desire to be regarded on the same footing as the men.
The male genital organ is symbolically represented in dreams in many
different ways, with most of which the common idea underlying the
comparison is easily apparent. In the first place, the sacred number three is

symbolic of the whole male genitalia. Its more conspicuous and, to both
sexes, more interesting part, the penis, is symbolized primarily by objects
which resemble it in form, being long and upstanding, such as sticks,
umbrellas, poles, trees and the like; also by objects which, like the thing
symbolized, have the property of penetrating, and consequently of injuring,
the body,—that is to say, pointed weapons of all sorts: knives, daggers,
lances, sabres; fire-arms are similarly used: guns, pistols and revolvers,
these last being a very appropriate symbol on account of their shape. In the
anxiety-dreams of young girls, pursuit by a man armed with a knife or rifle
plays a great part. This is perhaps the most frequently occurring dream-
symbol: you can now easily translate it for yourselves. The substitution of
the male organ by objects from which water flows is again easily
comprehensible: taps, watering-cans, or springs; and by other objects
which are capable of elongation, such as pulley lamps, pencils which slide
in and out of a sheath, and so on. Pencils, penholders, nail-files, hammers
and other implements are undoubtedly male sexual symbols, based on an
idea of the male organ which is equally easily perceived.
The peculiar property of this member of being able to raise itself
upright in defiance of the law of gravity, part of the phenomena of erection,
leads to symbolic representation by means of balloons, aeroplanes, and,
just recently, Zeppelins. But dreams have another, much more impressive,
way of symbolizing erection; they make the organ of sex into the essential
part of the whole person, so that the dreamer himself flies. Do not be upset
by hearing that dreams of flying, which we all know and which are often so
beautiful, must be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitement,
dreams of erection. One psycho-analytic investigator, P. Federn, has
established the truth of this interpretation beyond doubt; but, besides this,
Mourly Vold, a man highly praised for his sober judgement, who carried out
the experiments with artificial postures of the arms and legs, and whose
theories were really widely removed from those of psycho-analysis (indeed
he may have known nothing about it), was led by his own investigations to
the same conclusion. Nor must you think to object to this on the ground that
women can also have dreams of flying; you should rather remind
yourselves that the purpose of dreams is wish-fulfilment, and that the wish
to be a man is frequently met with in women, whether they are conscious of
it or not. Further, no one familiar with anatomy will be misled by supposing
that it is impossible for a woman to realize this wish by sensations similar

to those of a man, for the woman’s sexual organs include a small one which
resembles the penis, and this little organ, the clitoris, does actually play
during childhood and in the years before sexual intercourse the same part as
the large male organ.
Male sexual symbols less easy to understand are certain reptiles and
fishes: above all, the famous symbol of the serpent. Why hats and cloaks
are used in the same way is certainly difficult to divine, but their symbolic
meaning is quite unquestionable. Finally, it may be asked whether the
representation of the male organ by some other member, such as the hand
or the foot, may be termed symbolic. I think the context in which this is
wont to occur, and the female counterparts with which we meet, force this
conclusion upon us.
The female genitalia are symbolically represented by all such objects
as share with them the property of enclosing a space or are capable of
acting as receptacles: such as pits, hollows and caves, and also jars and
bottles, and boxes of all sorts and sizes, chests, coffers, pockets, and so
forth. Ships too come into this category. Many symbols refer rather to the
uterus than to the other genital organs: thus cupboards, stoves and, above
all, rooms. Room symbolism here links up with that of houses, whilst doors
and gates represent the genital opening. Moreover, material of different
kinds is a symbol of woman,—wood, paper, and objects made of these,
such as tables and books. From the animal world, snails and mussels at any
rate must be cited as unmistakable female symbols; of the parts of the body,
the mouth as a representation of the genital opening, and, amongst
buildings, churches and chapels are symbols of a woman. You see that all
these symbols are not equally easy to understand.
The breasts must be included amongst the organs of sex; these, as well
as the larger hemispheres of the female body, are represented by apples,
peaches and fruit in general. The pubic hair in both sexes is indicated in
dreams by woods and thickets. The complicated topography of the female
sexual organs accounts for their often being represented by a landscape
with rocks, woods and water, whilst the imposing mechanism of the male
sexual apparatus lends it to symbolization by all kinds of complicated and
indescribable machinery.
Yet another noteworthy symbol of the female genital organ is a jewel-
case, whilst “jewel” and “treasure” are used also in dreams to represent the

beloved person,[33] and sweetmeats frequently stand for sexual pleasures.
Gratification derived from a person’s own genitals is indicated by any kind
of play, including playing the piano. The symbolic representation of
onanism by sliding or gliding and also by pulling off a branch is very
typical. A particularly remarkable dream-symbol is the falling out or
extraction of teeth; the primary significance of this is certainly castration as
a punishment for onanism. Special representations of sexual intercourse are
less frequent in dreams than we should expect after all this, but we may
mention in this connection rhythmical activities such as dancing, riding and
climbing, and also experiencing some violence, e.g. being run over. To these
may be added certain manual occupations, and of course being threatened
with weapons.
You must not imagine that these symbols are either employed or
translated quite simply: on all sides we meet with what we do not expect.
For instance, it seems hardly credible that there is often no sharp
discrimination of the different sexes in these symbolic representations.
Many symbols stand for sexual organs in general, whether male or female:
for instance, a little child, or a little son or daughter. At another time a
symbol which is generally a male one may be used to denote the female
sexual organ, or vice versa. This is incomprehensible until we have
acquired some knowledge of the development of conceptions about
sexuality amongst human beings. In many cases this ambiguity of the
symbols may be apparent rather than real; and moreover, the most striking
amongst them, such as weapons, pockets and chests, are never used
bisexually in this way.
I will now give a brief account, beginning with the symbols
themselves instead of with the objects symbolized, to show you from what
spheres the sexual symbols have for the most part been derived, and I will
add a few remarks relating particularly to those in which the attribute in
common with the thing symbolized is hard to detect. An instance of an
obscure symbol of this kind is the hat, or perhaps head-coverings in
general; this usually has a masculine significance, though occasionally a
feminine one. In the same way a cloak betokens a man, though perhaps
sometimes without special reference to the organs of sex. It is open to you
to ask why this should be so. A tie, being an object which hangs down and
is not worn by women, is clearly a male symbol, whilst underlinen and
linen in general stands for the female. Clothes and uniforms, as we have

heard, represent nakedness or the human form; shoes and slippers
symbolize the female genital organs. Tables and wood we have mentioned
as being puzzling, but nevertheless certain, female symbols; the act of
mounting ladders, steep places or stairs is indubitably symbolic of sexual
intercourse. On closer reflection we shall notice that the rhythmic character
of this climbing is the point in common between the two, and perhaps also
the accompanying increase in excitation—the shortening of the breath as
the climber ascends.
We have already recognized that landscapes represent the female
sexual organs; mountains and rocks are symbols of the male organ; gardens,
a frequently occurring symbol of the female genitalia. Fruit stands for the
breasts, not for a child. Wild animals denote human beings whose senses are
excited, and, hence, evil impulses or passions. Blossoms and flowers
represent the female sexual organs, more particularly, in virginity. In this
connection you will recollect that the blossoms are really the sexual organs
of plants.
We already know how rooms are used symbolically. This
representation may be extended, so that windows and doors (entrances and
exits from rooms) come to mean the openings of the body; the fact of rooms
being open or closed also accords with this symbolism: the key, which
opens them, is certainly a male symbol.
This is some material for a study of dream-symbolism. It is not
complete, and could be both extended and made deeper. However, I think it
will seem to you more than enough; perhaps you may dislike it. You will
ask: “Do I then really live in the midst of sexual symbols? Are all the
objects round me, all the clothes I wear, all the things I handle, always
sexual symbols and nothing else?” There really is good reason for surprised
questions, and the first of these would be: How do we profess to arrive at
the meaning of these dream-symbols, about which the dreamer himself can
give us little or no information?
My answer is that we derive our knowledge from widely different
sources: from fairy tales and myths, jokes and witticisms, from folk-lore,
i.e. from what we know of the manners and customs, sayings and songs, of
different peoples, and from poetic and colloquial usage of language.
Everywhere in these various fields the same symbolism occurs, and in
many of them we can understand it without being taught anything about it.

If we consider these various sources individually, we shall find so many
parallels to dream-symbolism that we are bound to be convinced of the
correctness of our interpretations.
The human body is, we said, according to Scherner frequently
symbolized in dreams by a house; by an extension of this symbolism,
windows, doors and gates stand for the entrances to cavities in the body,
and the façades may either be smooth or may have balconies and ledges to
hold on to. The same symbolism is met with in colloquialisms; for instance,
we speak of “a thatch of hair,” or a “tile hat,” or say of someone that he is
not right “in the upper storey.”[34] In anatomy, too, we speak of the openings
of the body as its “portals.”[35]
We may at first find it surprising that parents appear in our dreams as
kings and emperors and their consorts, but we have a parallel to this in fairy
tales. Does it not begin to dawn upon us that the many fairy tales which
begin with the words “Once upon a time there were a king and queen”
simply mean: “Once upon a time there were a father and mother?” In family
life the children are sometimes spoken of jestingly as princes, and the eldest
son as the crown prince. The king himself is called the father of his people.
[36]
Again, in some parts, little children are often playfully spoken of as little
animals, e.g. in Cornwall, as “little toad,” or in Germany as “little worm,”
and, in sympathizing with a child, Germans say “poor little worm.”
Now let us return to the house symbolism. When in our dreams we
make use of the projections of houses as supports, does that not suggest a
well-known, popular German saying, with reference to a woman with a
markedly developed bust: “She has something for one to hold on to” (Die
hat etwas zum Anhalten), whilst another colloquialism in the same
connection is: “She has plenty of wood in front of her house” (Die hat viel
Holz vor dem Hause), as though our interpretation were to be borne out by
this when we say that wood is a female maternal symbol.
There is still something to be said on the subject of wood. It is not easy
to see why wood should have come to represent a woman or mother, but
here a comparison of different languages may be useful to us. The German
word Holz (wood) is said to be derived from the same root as the Greek
ὔλη, which means stuff, raw material. This would be an instance of a
process which is by no means rare, in that a general name for material has
come finally to be applied to a particular material only. Now, in the Atlantic

Ocean, there is an island named Madeira, and this name was given to it by
the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it was covered
with dense forests; for in Portuguese the word for wood is madeira. But you
cannot fail to notice that this madeira is merely a modified form of the
Latin materia, which again signifies material in general. Now materia is
derived from mater = mother, and the material out of which anything is
made may be conceived of as giving birth to it. So, in the symbolic use of
wood to represent woman or mother, we have a survival of this old idea.
Birth is regularly expressed by some connection with water: we are
plunging into or emerging from water, that is to say, we give birth or are
being born. Now let us not forget that this symbol has a twofold reference
to the actual facts of evolution. Not only are all land mammals, from which
the human race itself has sprung, descended from creatures inhabiting the
water—this is the more remote of the two considerations—but also every
single mammal, every human being, has passed the first phase of existence
in water—that is to say, as an embryo in the amniotic fluid of the mother’s
womb—and thus, at birth, emerged from water. I do not maintain that the
dreamer knows this; on the other hand, I contend that there is no need for
him to know it. He probably knows something else from having been told it
as a child, but even this, I will maintain, has contributed nothing to symbol-
formation. The child is told in the nursery that the stork brings the babies,
but then where does it get them? Out of a pond or a well—again, out of the
water. One of my patients who had been told this as a child (a little count,
as he was then) afterwards disappeared for a whole afternoon, and was at
last found lying at the edge of the castle lake, with his little face bent over
the clear water, eagerly gazing to see whether he could catch sight of the
babies at the bottom of the water.
In the myths of the births of heroes, a comparative study of which has
been made by O. Rank—the earliest is that of King Sargon of Akkad, about
2800 B.C.—exposure in water and rescue from it play a major part. Rank
perceived that this symbolizes birth in a manner analogous to that employed
in dreams. When anyone in his dream rescues somebody from the water, he
makes that person into his mother, or at any rate a mother; and in
mythology, whoever rescues a child from water confesses herself to be its
real mother. There is a well-known joke in which an intelligent Jewish boy,
when asked who was the mother of Moses, answers immediately: “The
Princess.” He is told: “No, she only took him out of the water.” “That’s

what she said,” he replies, showing that he had hit upon the right
interpretation of the myth.
Going away on a journey stands in dreams for dying; similarly, it is the
custom in the nursery, when a child asks questions as to the whereabouts of
someone who has died and whom he misses, to tell him that that person has
“gone away.” Here again, I deprecate the idea that the dream-symbol has its
origin in this evasive reply to the child. The poet uses the same symbol
when he speaks of the other side as “the undiscovered country from whose
bourne no traveller returns.” Again, in everyday speech it is quite usual to
speak of the “last journey,” and everyone who is acquainted with ancient
rites knows how seriously the idea of a journey into the land of the dead
was taken, for instance, in ancient Egyptian belief. In many cases the “Book
of the Dead” survives, which was given to the mummy, like a Baedeker, to
take with him on the last journey. Since burial-grounds have been placed at
a distance from the houses of the living, the last journey of the dead has
indeed become a reality.
Nor does sexual symbolism belong only to dreams. You will all know
the expression “a baggage” as applied contemptuously to a woman, but
perhaps people do not know that they are using a genital symbol. In the
New Testament we read: “The woman is the weaker vessel.” The sacred
writings of the Jews, the style of which so closely approaches that of poetry,
are full of expressions symbolic of sex, which have not always been
correctly interpreted and the exegesis of which, e.g. in the Song of
Solomon, has led to many misunderstandings.[37] In later Hebrew literature
the woman is very frequently represented by a house, the door standing for
the genital opening; thus a man complains, when he finds a woman no
longer a virgin, that “he has found the door open.” The symbol “table” for a
woman also occurs in this literature; the woman says of her husband “I
spread the table for him, but he overturned it.” Lame children are said to
owe their infirmity to the fact that the man “overturned the table.” I quote
here from a treatise by L. Levy in Brünn: Sexual Symbolism in the Bible
and the Talmud.
That ships in dreams signify women is a belief in which we are
supported by the etymologists, who assert that “ship” (Schiff) was originally
the name of an earthen vessel and is the same word as Schaff (schaffen = to
make or produce). That an oven stands for a woman or the mother’s womb

is an interpretation confirmed by the Greek story of Periander of Corinth
and his wife Melissa. According to the version of Herodotus, the tyrant
adjured the shade of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had
murdered out of jealousy, to tell him something about herself, whereupon
the dead woman identified herself by reminding him that he, Periander,
“had put his bread into a cold oven,” thus expressing in a disguised form a
circumstance of which everyone else was ignorant. In the Anthropophyteia,
edited by F. S. Kraus, a work which is an indispensable text-book on
everything concerning the sexual life of different peoples, we read that in a
certain part of Germany people say of a woman who is delivered of a child
that “her oven has fallen to pieces.” The kindling of fire and everything
connected with this is permeated through and through with sexual
symbolism, the flame always standing for the male organ, and the fireplace
or the hearth for the womb of the woman.
If you have chanced to wonder at the frequency with which landscapes
are used in dreams to symbolize the female sexual organs, you may learn
from mythologists how large a part has been played in the ideas and cults of
ancient times by “Mother Earth” and how the whole conception of
agriculture was determined by this symbolism. The fact that in dreams a
room represents a woman you may be inclined to trace to the German
colloquialism by which Frauenzimmer (lit. “woman’s room”) is used for
Frau, that is to say, the human person is represented by the place assigned
for her occupation. Similarly we speak of the Porte, meaning thereby the
Sultan and his government, and the name of the ancient Egyptian ruler,
Pharaoh, merely means “great court.” (In the ancient Orient the courts
between the double gates of the city were places of assembly, like the
market-place in classical times.) But I think this derivation is too
superficial, and it strikes me as more probable that the room came to
symbolize woman on account of its property of enclosing within it the
human being. We have already met with the house in this sense; from
mythology and poetry we may take towns, citadels, castles and fortresses to
be further symbols for women. It would be easy to decide the point by
reference to the dreams of people who neither speak nor understand
German. Of late years I have mainly treated foreign patients, and I think I
recollect that in their dreams rooms stand in the same way for women, even
though there is no word analogous to our Frauenzimmer in their language.
There are other indications that symbolism may transcend the boundaries of

language, a fact already maintained by the old dream-investigator, Schubert,
in 1862. Nevertheless, none of my patients were wholly ignorant of
German, so that I must leave this question to be decided by those analysts
who can collect instances in other countries from persons who speak only
one language.[38]
Amongst the symbols for the male sexual organ, there is scarcely one
which does not appear in jests, or in vulgar or poetic phrases, especially in
the old classical poets. Here, however, we meet not only with such symbols
as occur in dreams but also with new ones, e.g. the implements employed in
various kinds of work, first and foremost, the plough. Moreover, when we
come to male symbols, we trench on very extensive and much-contested
ground, which, in order not to waste time, we will avoid. I should just like
to devote a few remarks to the one symbol which stands, as it were, by
itself; I refer to the number three. Whether this number does not in all
probability owe its sacred character to its symbolic significance is a
question which we must leave undecided, but it seems certain that many
tripartite natural objects, e.g. the clover-leaf, are used in coats-of-arms and
as emblems on account of their symbolism. The so-called “French” lily with
its three parts and, again, the “trisceles,” that curious coat-of-arms of two
such widely separated islands as Sicily and the Isle of Man (a figure
consisting of three bent legs projecting from a central point), are supposed
to be merely disguised forms of the male sexual organ, images of which
were believed in ancient times to be the most powerful means of warding
off evil influences (apotropaea); connected with this is the fact that the
lucky “charms” of our own time may all be easily recognized as genital or
sexual symbols. Let us consider a collection of such charms in the form of
tiny silver pendants: a four-leaved clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horseshoe, a
ladder and a chimney-sweep. The four-leaved clover has taken the place of
that with three leaves, which was really more appropriate for the purposes
of symbolism; the pig is an ancient symbol of fruitfulness; the mushroom
undoubtedly symbolizes the penis, there are mushrooms which derive their
name from their unmistakable resemblance to that organ (Phallus
impudicus); the horseshoe reproduces the contour of the female genital
opening; while the chimney-sweep with his ladder belongs to this company
because his occupation is one which is vulgarly compared with sexual
intercourse. (Cf. Anthropophyteia.) We have learnt to recognize his ladder
in dreams as a sexual symbol: expressions in language show what a

completely sexual significance the word steigen, to mount, has, as in the
phrases: Den Frauen nachsteigen (to run after women) and ein alter Steiger
(an old roué). So, in French, where the word for “step” is la marche, we
find the quite analogous expression for an old rake: un vieux marcheur.
Probably the fact that with many of the larger animals sexual intercourse
necessitates a mounting or “climbing upon” the female has something to do
with this association of ideas.
Pulling off a branch to symbolize onanism is not only in agreement
with vulgar descriptions of that act, but also has far-reaching parallels in
mythology. But especially remarkable is the representation of onanism, or
rather of castration as the punishment for onanism, by the falling out or
extraction of teeth; for we find in folk-lore a counterpart to this which could
only be known to very few dreamers. I think that there can be no doubt that
circumcision, a practice common to so many peoples, is an equivalent and
replacement of castration. And recently we have learnt that certain
aboriginal tribes in Australia practise circumcision as a rite to mark the
attaining of puberty (at the celebration of the boy’s coming of age), whilst
other tribes living quite near have substituted for this practice that of
knocking out a tooth.
I will end my account with these examples. They are only examples;
we know more about this subject and you can imagine how much richer and
more interesting a collection of this sort might be made, not by dilettanti
like ourselves, but by real experts in mythology, anthropology, philology
and folk-lore. We are forced to certain conclusions, which cannot be
exhaustive, but nevertheless will give us plenty to think about.
In the first place, we are confronted with the fact that the dreamer has
at his command a symbolic mode of expression of which he knows nothing,
and does not even recognize, in his waking life. This is as amazing as if you
made the discovery that your housemaid understood Sanscrit, though you
know that she was born in a Bohemian village and had never learnt that
language. It is not easy to bring this fact into line with our views on
psychology. We can only say that the dreamer’s knowledge of symbolism is
unconscious and belongs to his unconscious mental life, but even this
assumption does not help us much. Up till now we have only had to assume
the existence of unconscious tendencies which are temporarily or
permanently unknown to us; but now the question is a bigger one and we

have actually to believe in unconscious knowledge, thought-relations, and
comparisons between different objects, in virtue of which one idea can
constantly be substituted for another. These comparisons are not instituted
afresh every time, but are ready to hand, perfect for all time; this we infer
from their unanimity in different persons, even probably in spite of
linguistic differences.
Whence is our knowledge of this symbolism derived? The usages of
speech cover only a small part of it, whilst the manifold parallels in other
fields are for the most part unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves had to
collate them laboriously in the first instance.
In the second place, these symbolic relations are not peculiar to the
dreamer or to the dream-work by which they are expressed; for we have
discovered that the same symbolism is employed in myths and fairy tales, in
popular sayings and songs, in colloquial speech and poetic phantasy. The
province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide: dream-symbolism is only a
small part of it; it would not even be expedient to attack the whole problem
from the side of dreams. Many of the symbols commonly occurring
elsewhere either do not appear in dreams at all or appear very seldom; on
the other hand, many of the dream-symbols are not met with in every other
department, but, as you have seen, only here and there. We get the
impression that here we have to do with an ancient but obsolete mode of
expression, of which different fragments have survived in different fields,
one here only, another there only, a third in various spheres perhaps in
slightly different forms. At this point I am reminded of the phantasy of a
very interesting insane patient, who had imagined a “primordial language”
(Grundsprache) of which all these symbols were survivals.
In the third place, it must strike you that the symbolism occurring in
the other fields I have named is by no means confined to sexual themes,
whereas in dreams the symbols are almost exclusively used to represent
sexual objects and relations. This again is hard to account for. Are we to
suppose that symbols originally of sexual significance were later employed
differently and that perhaps the decline from symbolic to other modes of
representation is connected with this? It is obviously impossible to answer
these questions by dealing only with dream-symbolism; all we can do is to
hold fast to the supposition that there is a specially close relation between
true symbols and sexuality.

An important clue in this connection has recently been given to us in
the view expressed by a philologist (H. Sperber, of Upsala, who works
independently of psycho-analysis), that sexual needs have had the largest
share in the origin and development of language. He says that the first
sounds uttered were a means of communication, and of summoning the
sexual partner, and that in the later development the elements of speech
were used as an accompaniment to the different kinds of work carried on by
primitive man. This work was performed by associated efforts, to the sound
of rhythmically repeated utterances, the effect of which was to transfer a
sexual interest to the work. Primitive man thus made his work agreeable, so
to speak, by treating it as the equivalent of and substitute for sexual
activities. The word uttered during the communal work had therefore two
meanings, the one referring to the sexual act, the other to the labour which
had come to be equivalent to it. In time the word was dissociated from its
sexual significance and its application confined to the work. Generations
later the same thing happened to a new word with a sexual signification,
which was then applied to a new form of work. In this way a number of
root-words arose which were all of sexual origin but had all lost their sexual
meaning. If the statement here outlined be correct, a possibility at least of
understanding dream-symbolism opens out before us. We should
comprehend why it is that in dreams, which retain something of these
primitive conditions, there is such an extraordinarily large number of sexual
symbols; and why weapons and tools in general stand for the male, and
materials and things worked on for the female. The symbolic relation would
then be the survival of the old identity in words; things which once had the
same name as the genitalia could now appear in dreams as symbolizing
them.
Further, our parallels to dream-symbolism may assist you to appreciate
what it is in psycho-analysis which makes it a subject of general interest, in
a way that was not possible to either psychology or psychiatry; psycho-
analytic work is so closely intertwined with so many other branches of
science, the investigation of which gives promise of the most valuable
conclusions: with mythology, philology, folk-lore, folk psychology and the
study of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a publication has
sprung from psycho-analytic soil, of which the exclusive object is to foster
these relations. I refer to Imago, first published in 1912 and edited by Hanns
Sachs and Otto Rank. In its relation to all these other subjects, psycho-

analysis has in the first instance given rather than received. True, analysis
reaps the advantage of receiving confirmation of its own results, seemingly
so strange, again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis
which supplies the technical methods and the points of view, the application
of which is to prove fruitful in these other provinces. The mental life of the
human individual yields, under psycho-analytic investigation, explanations
which solve many a riddle in the life of the masses of mankind or at any
rate can show these problems in their true light.
I have still given you no idea of the circumstances in which we may
arrive at the deepest insight into that hypothetical “primordial language,” or
of the province in which it is for the most part retained. As long as you do
not know this you cannot appreciate the true significance of the whole
subject. I refer to the province of neurosis; the material is found in the
symptoms and other modes of expression of nervous patients, for the
explanation and treatment of which psycho-analysis was indeed devised.
My fourth point of view takes us back to the place from which we
started and leads into the track we have already marked out. We said that
even if there were no dream-censorship we should still find it difficult to
interpret dreams, for we should then be confronted with the task of
translating the symbolic language of dreams into the language of waking
life. Symbolism, then, is a second and independent factor in dream-
distortion, existing side by side with the censorship. But the conclusion is
obvious that it suits the censorship to make use of symbolism, in that both
serve the same purpose: that of making the dream strange and
incomprehensible.
Whether a further study of the dream will not introduce us to yet
another contributing factor in the distortion, we shall soon see. But I must
not leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching on
the puzzling fact that it has succeeded in rousing such strenuous opposition
amongst educated persons, although the prevalence of symbolism in myth,
religion, art and language is beyond all doubt. Is it not probable that, here
again, the reason is to be found in its relation to sexuality?

ELEVENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM-WORK

When you have successfully grasped the dream-censorship and
symbolic representation, you will not, it is true, have mastered dream-
distortion in its entirety, but you will nevertheless be in a position to
understand most dreams. To do so, you will make use of the two
complementary methods: you will call up the dreamer’s associations till you
have penetrated from the substitute to the thought proper for which it
stands, and you will supply the meaning of the symbols from your own
knowledge of the subject. We will speak later of certain doubtful points
which may arise in the process.
We can now return to a task which we attempted earlier with
inadequate equipment, when we were studying the relations between
dream-elements and the thoughts proper underlying them. We then
determined the existence of four such main relations: substitution of the part
for the whole, hints or allusions, symbolic connection, and plastic word-
representation (images). We will now try to deal with this subject on a
larger scale, by a comparison of the manifest dream-content as a whole with
the latent dream as laid bare by our interpretation.
I hope you will never again confuse these two things. If you succeed in
distinguishing between them, you will have advanced further towards an
understanding of dreams than in all probability most of the readers of my
Interpretation of Dreams have done. Let me again remind you that the
process by which the latent dream is transformed into the manifest dream is
called THE DREAM-WORK; while the reverse process, which seeks to progress
from the manifest to the latent thoughts, is our work of interpretation; the
work of interpretation therefore aims at demolishing the dream-work. In
dreams of the infantile type in which the obvious wish-fulfilments are easily
recognized, the process of dream-work has nevertheless been operative to
some extent, for the wish has been transformed into a reality and, usually,
the thoughts also into visual images. Here no interpretation is necessary; we

only have to retrace both these transformations. The further operations of
the dream-work, as seen in the other types of dreams, we call dream-
distortion, and here the original ideas have to be restored by our
interpretative work.
Having had the opportunity of comparing many dream-interpretations,
I am in a position to give you a comprehensive account of the manner in
which the dream-work deals with the material of the latent dream-thoughts.
But please do not expect to understand too much: it is a piece of description
which should be listened to quietly and attentively.
The first achievement of the dream-work is CONDENSATION; by this
term we mean to convey the fact that the content of the manifest dream is
less rich than that of the latent thoughts, is, as it were, a kind of abbreviated
translation of the latter. Now and again condensation may be lacking, but it
is present as a rule and is often carried to a very high degree. It never works
in the opposite manner, i.e. it never happens that the manifest dream is
wider in range or richer in content than is the latent dream. Condensation is
accomplished in the following ways: (1) certain latent elements are
altogether omitted; (2) of many complexes in the latent dream only a
fragment passes over into the manifest content; (3) latent elements sharing
some common characteristic are in the manifest dream put together, blended
into a single whole.
If you prefer to do so, you can reserve the term ‘condensation’ for this
last process, the effects of which are particularly easy to demonstrate.
Taking your own dreams, you will be able without any trouble to recall
instances of the condensation of different persons into a single figure. Such
a composite figure resembles A. in appearance, but is dressed like B.,
pursues some occupation which recalls C., and yet all the time you know
that it is really D. The composite picture serves, of course, to lay special
emphasis upon some characteristic common to the four people. And it is
possible also for a composite picture to be formed with objects or places, as
with persons, provided only that the single objects or places have some
common attribute upon which the latent dream lays stress. It is as though a
new and fugitive concept were formed, of which the common attribute is
the kernel. From the superimposing of the separate parts which undergo
condensation there usually results a blurred and indistinct picture, as if
several photographs had been taken on the same plate.

The formation of such composite figures must be of great importance
in the dream-work, for we can prove that the common properties necessary
to their formation are purposely manufactured where at first sight they
would seem to be lacking, as, for example, by the choice of some particular
verbal expression for a thought. We have already met with instances of
condensation and composite-formation of this sort; they played an
important part in originating many slips of the tongue. You will remember
the case of the young man who wished to “insort” a lady (beleidigen =
insult, begleiten = escort, composite word begleitdigen). Besides, there are
jokes in which the technique is traceable to condensation of this sort. Apart
from this, however, we may venture to assert that this process is something
quite unusual and strange. It is true that in many a creation of phantasy we
meet with counterparts to the formation of the composite persons of our
dreams, component parts which do not belong to one another in reality
being readily united into a single whole by phantasy, as, for instance, in the
centaurs and fabulous animals of ancient mythology or of Boecklin’s
pictures. “Creative” phantasy can, in fact, invent nothing new, but can only
regroup elements from different sources. But the peculiar thing about the
way in which the dream-work proceeds is this: its material consists of
thoughts, some of which may be objectionable and disagreeable, but which
nevertheless are correctly formed and expressed. The dream-work
transmutes these thoughts into another form, and it is curious and
incomprehensible that in this process of translation—of rendering them, as
it were, into another script or language—the means of blending and
combining are employed. The translator’s endeavour in other cases must
surely be to respect the distinctions observed in the text, and especially to
differentiate between things which are similar but not the same; the dream-
work, on the contrary, strives to condense two different thoughts by
selecting, after the manner of wit, an ambiguous word which can suggest
both thoughts. We must not expect to understand this characteristic straight
away, but it may assume great significance for our conception of the dream-
work.
Although condensation renders the dream obscure, yet it does not give
the impression of being an effect of the dream-censorship. Rather we should
be inclined to trace it to mechanical or economic factors; nevertheless the
censorship’s interests are served by it.

What condensation can achieve is sometimes quite extraordinary: by
this device it is at times possible for two completely different latent trains of
thought to be united in a single manifest dream, so that we arrive at an
apparently adequate interpretation of a dream and yet overlook a second
possible meaning.
Moreover, one of the effects of condensation upon the relationship
between the manifest and the latent dream is that the connection between
the elements of the one and of the other nowhere remains a simple one; for
by a kind of interlacing a manifest element represents simultaneously
several latent ones and, conversely, a latent thought may enter into several
manifest elements. Again, when we come to interpret dreams, we see that
the associations to a single manifest element do not commonly make their
appearance in orderly succession; we often have to wait until we have the
interpretation of the whole dream.
The dream-work, then, follows a very unusual mode of transcription
for the dream-thoughts; not a translation, word for word, or sign for sign;
nor yet a process of selection according to some definite rule, for instance,
as though the consonants only of the words were reproduced and the vowels
omitted; nor again what one might call a process of representation, one
element being always picked out to represent several others. It works by a
different and much more complicated method.
The second achievement of the dream-work is DISPLACEMENT.
Fortunately here we are not breaking perfectly fresh ground; indeed, we
know that it is entirely the work of the dream-censorship. Displacement
takes two forms: first, a latent element may be replaced, not by a part of
itself, but by something more remote, something of the nature of an
allusion; and, secondly, the accent may be transferred from an important
element to another which is unimportant, so that the centre of the dream is
shifted as it were, giving the dream a foreign appearance.
Substitution by allusion is familiar to us in our waking thoughts also,
but with a difference; for it is essential in the latter that the allusion should
be easily comprehensible, and that the content of the substitute should be
associated to that of the thought proper. Allusion is also frequently
employed in wit, where the condition of association in content is dispensed
with and replaced by unfamiliar external associations, such as similarity of
sound, ambiguity of meaning, etc. The condition of comprehensibility,

however, is observed: the joke would lose all its point if we could not
recognize without any effort what is the actual thing to which the allusion is
made. But in dreams allusion by displacement is unrestricted by either
limitation. It is connected most superficially and most remotely with the
element for which it stands, and for that reason is not readily
comprehensible; and, when the connection is traced, the interpretation gives
the impression of an unsuccessful joke or of a “forced,” far-fetched and
“dragged in” explanation. The object of the dream-censorship is only
attained when it has succeeded in making it impossible to trace the thought
proper back from the allusion.
Displacement of accent is not a legitimate device if our object be the
expression of thought; though we do sometimes admit it in waking life in
order to produce a comic effect. I can to some extent convey to you the
impression of confusion which then results, by reminding you of an
anecdote, according to which there was in a certain village a smith who had
committed a capital offence. The court decided that the smith was guilty;
but, since he was the only one of his trade in the village and therefore
indispensable, whereas there were three tailors living there, one of these
three was hanged in his place!
The third achievement of the dream-work is the most interesting from
the psychological point of view. It consists in the transformation of thoughts
into visual images. Let us be quite clear that not everything in the dream-
thoughts is thus transformed; much keeps its original form and appears also
in the manifest dream as thought or knowledge, on the part of the dreamer;
again, translation of them into visual images is not the only possible
transformation of thoughts. But it is nevertheless the essential feature in the
formation of dreams, and, as we know, this part of the dream-work is, if we
except one other case, the least subject to variation; for single dream-
elements, moreover, plastic word-representation is a process already
familiar to us.
Obviously this achievement is by no means an easy one. In order to get
some idea of its difficulty, imagine that you had undertaken to replace a
political leading article in a newspaper by a series of illustrations; you
would have to abandon alphabetic characters in favour of hieroglyphics.
The people and concrete objects mentioned in the article could be easily
represented, perhaps even more satisfactorily, in pictorial form; but you

would expect to meet with difficulties when you came to the portrayal of all
the abstract words and all those parts of speech which indicate relations
between the various thoughts, e.g. particles, conjunctions, and so forth.
With the abstract words you would employ all manner of devices: for
instance, you would try to render the text of the article into other words,
more unfamiliar perhaps, but made up of parts more concrete and therefore
more capable of such representation. This will remind you of the fact that
most abstract words were originally concrete, their original significance
having faded; and therefore you will fall back on the original concrete
meaning of these words wherever possible. So you will be glad that you can
represent the “possessing” of an object as a literal, physical “sitting upon” it
(possess = potis + sedeo). This is just how the dream-work proceeds. In
such circumstances you can hardly demand great accuracy of
representation, neither will you quarrel with the dream-work for replacing
an element which is difficult to reduce to pictorial form, such as the idea of
breaking marriage vows, by some other kind of breaking, e.g. that of an arm
or leg.[39] In this way you will to some extent succeed in overcoming the
awkwardness of rendering alphabetic characters into hieroglyphs.
When you come to represent those parts of speech which indicate
thought-relations, e.g. “because,” “therefore,” “but,” and so on, you have no
such means as those described to assist you; so that these parts of the text
must be lost, so far as your translation into pictorial form is concerned.
Similarly, the content of the dream-thoughts is resolved by the dream-work
into its ‘raw material,’ consisting of objects and activities. You may be
satisfied if there is any possibility of indicating somehow, by a more minute
elaboration of the images, certain relations which cannot be represented in
themselves. In a precisely similar manner the dream-work succeeds in
expressing much of the content of the latent thoughts by means of
peculiarities in the form of the manifest dream, by its distinctness or
obscurity, its division into various parts, etc. The number of parts into
which a dream is divided corresponds as a rule with the number of its main
themes, the successive trains of thought in the latent dream; a short
preliminary dream often stands in an introductory or causal relation to the
subsequent detailed main dream; whilst a subordinate dream-thought is
represented by the interpolation into the manifest dream of a change of
scene, and so on. The form of dreams, then, is by no means unimportant in
itself, and itself demands interpretation. Several dreams in the same night

often have the same meaning, and indicate an endeavour to control more
and more completely a stimulus of increasing urgency. In a single dream, a
specially difficult element may be represented by “doubling” it, i.e. by more
than one symbol.
If we continue the comparison of dream-thoughts with the manifest
dreams representing them, we discover in all directions things we should
never have expected, e.g. that even nonsense and absurdity in dreams have
their meaning; in fact, at this point the contrast between the medical and the
psycho-analytic view of dreams becomes more marked than ever before.
According to the medical view, the dream is absurd because while dreaming
our mental activity has renounced its functions; according to our view, on
the other hand, the dream becomes absurd when it has to represent a
criticism implicit in the latent thoughts—the opinion: “It is absurd.” The
dream I told you, about the visit to the theatre (“three tickets for one florin
and a half”) is a good example of this: the opinion thus expressed was as
follows: “It was absurd to marry so early.”
Similarly, we find out when we interpret dreams what is the real
meaning of the doubts and uncertainties, so frequently mentioned by
dreamers, whether a certain element did actually appear in the dream,
whether it was really this and not rather something else. As a rule, there is
nothing in the latent thoughts corresponding with these doubts and
uncertainties; they originate wholly through the operation of the censorship
and are comparable to a not entirely successful attempt at erasure.
One of our most surprising discoveries is the manner in which
opposites in the latent dream are dealt with by the dream-work. We know
already that points of agreement in the latent material are replaced by
condensation in the manifest dream. Now contraries are treated in just the
same way as similarities, with a marked preference for expression by means
of the same manifest element. An element in the manifest dream which
admits of an opposite may stand simply for itself, or for its opposite, or for
both together; only the sense can decide which translation is to be chosen. It
accords with this that there is no representation of a “No” in dreams, or at
least none which is not ambiguous.
A welcome analogy to this strange behaviour of the dream-work is
furnished in the development of language. Many philologists have
maintained that in the oldest languages opposites such as: strong—weak,

light—dark, large—small, were expressed by the same root word
(antithetical sense of primal words). Thus, in old Egyptian “ken” stood
originally for both “strong” and “weak.” In speaking, misunderstanding was
guarded against in the use of such ambivalent words by the intonation and
accompanying gestures; in writing, by the addition of a so-called
“determinative,” that is to say, of a picture which was not meant to be
expressed orally. Thus, “ken” = “strong” was written in such a way that
after the letters there was a picture of a little man standing upright; when
“ken” meant “weak,” there was added the picture of a man in a slack,
crouching attitude. Only at a later period did the two opposite meanings of
the same primal word come to be designated in two different ways by slight
modifications of the original. Thus, from “ken” meaning “strong—weak”
were derived two words: “ken” = “strong” and “kan” = “weak.” Nor is it
only the oldest languages, in the last stages of their development, which
have retained many survivals of these early words capable of meaning
either of two opposites, but the same is true of much younger languages,
even those which are to-day still living. I will quote some illustrations of
this taken from the work of C. Abel (1884):
In Latin, such ambivalent words are:
altus = high or deep. sacer = sacred or accursed.
As examples of modifications of the original root, I quote:
clamare = to shout. clam = quietly, silently, secretly. siccus = dry.
succus = juice.
and, in German, Stimme = voice. stumm = dumb.
A comparison of kindred languages yields a large number of examples:
English: lock = to shut. German: Loch = hole. Lücke = gap. English:
cleave.[40] German: kleben = to stick, adhere.
The English word “without,” originally carrying with it both a positive
and a negative connotation, is to-day used in the negative sense only, but it
is clear that “with” has the signification, not merely of “adding to,” but of
“depriving of,” from the compounds “withdraw,” “withhold” (cf. the
German wieder).
Yet another peculiarity of the dream-work has its counterpart in the
development of language. In ancient Egyptian, as well as in other later

languages, the sequence of sounds was transposed so as to result in different
words for the same fundamental idea. Examples of this kind of parallels
between English and German words may be quoted:
Topf (pot)—pot. Boat—tub. Hurry—Ruhe (rest). Balken (beam)—
Kloben (club). wait—täuwen (to wait).
Parallels between Latin and German:—
capere—packen (to seize). ren—Niere (kidney).
Such transpositions as have taken place here in the case of single
words are made by the dream-work in a variety of ways. The inversion of
the meaning, i.e. substitution by the opposite, is a device with which we are
already familiar; but, besides this, we find in dreams inversion of situations
or of the relations existing between two persons, as though the scene were
laid in a “topsy-turvy” world. In dreams often enough the hare shoots the
hunter. Again, inversion is met with in the sequence of events, so that in
dreams cause follows effect, which reminds us of what sometimes happens
in a third-rate theatrical performance, when first the hero falls and then the
shot which kills him is fired from the wings. Or there are dreams in which
the whole arrangement of the elements is inverted, so that in interpreting
them the last must be taken first, and the first last, in order to make sense at
all. You remember that we also found this in our study of dream-symbolism,
in which the act of plunging or falling into water has the same meaning as
that of emerging from water, namely, giving birth or being born, and going
up steps or a ladder means the same as coming down them. We cannot fail
to recognize the advantage reaped for dream-distortion by this freedom
from restrictions in representing the dream-thoughts.
These features of the dream-work may be termed archaic. They cling
to the primitive modes of expression of languages or scripts, and yield the
same difficulties, which we shall touch upon later in the course of some
critical observations on this topic.
Now let us consider some other aspects of the subject. Clearly what
has to be accomplished by the dream-work is the transformation of the
latent thoughts, as expressed in words, into perceptual forms, most
commonly into visual images. Now our thoughts originated in such
perceptual forms; their earliest material and the first stages in their
development consisted of sense-impressions, or, more accurately, of

memory-pictures of these. It was later that words were attached to these
pictures and then connected so as to form thoughts. So that the dream-work
subjects our thoughts to a regressive process and retraces the steps in their
development; in the course of this REGRESSION all new acquisitions won
during this development of memory-pictures into thoughts must necessarily
fall away.
This then is what we mean by the dream-work. Beside what we have
learnt of its processes our interest in the manifest dream is bound to recede
far into the background; I will, however, devote still a few more remarks to
the manifest dream, for, after all, that is the only part of the dream with
which we have any direct acquaintance.
It is natural that the manifest dream should lose some of its importance
in our eyes. It must strike us as a matter of indifference whether it is
carefully composed or split up into a succession of disconnected pictures.
Even when the outward form of the dream is apparently full of meaning, we
know that this appearance has been arrived at by the process of dream-
distortion, and can have as little organic connection with the inner content
of the dream as exists between the façade of an Italian church and its
general structure and ground-plan. At times, however, this façade of the
dream has a meaning too, reproducing an important part of the latent
thoughts with little or no distortion. But we cannot know this until we have
interpreted the dream and thus arrived at an opinion with regard to the
degree of distortion present. A similar doubt obtains where two elements
seem to be closely connected; such connection may contain a valuable hint
that the corresponding elements in the latent dream are similarly related, but
at other times we can convince ourselves that what is connected in thought
has become widely separated in the dream.
In general we must refrain from attempting to explain one part of the
manifest dream by another part, as though the dream were a coherent
conception and a pragmatic representation. It is in most cases comparable
rather to a piece of Breccia stone, composed of fragments of different kinds
of stone cemented together in such a way that the markings upon it are not
those of the original pieces contained in it. There is, as a matter of fact, one
mechanism in the dream-work, known as SECONDARY ELABORATION, the
object of which is to combine the immediate results of the work into a
single and fairly coherent whole; during this process the material is often so

arranged as to give rise to total misunderstanding, and for this purpose any
necessary interpolations are made.
On the other hand, we should not overrate the dream-work or attribute
to it more than is its due. Its activity is limited to the achievements here
enumerated; condensation, displacement, plastic representation and
secondary elaboration of the whole dream; these are all that it can effect.
Such manifestations of judgement, criticism, surprise, or deductive
reasoning, as are met with in dreams are not brought about by the dream-
work and are only very rarely the expression of subsequent reflection about
the dream; but are for the most part fragments of the latent thoughts
introduced into the manifest dream with more or less modification and in a
form suited to the context. Again, the dream-work cannot create
conversation in dreams; save in a few exceptional cases, it is imitated from,
and made up of, things heard or even said by the dreamer himself on the
previous day, which have entered into the latent thoughts as the material or
incitement of his dream. Neither do mathematical calculations come into
the province of the dream-work; anything of the sort appearing in the
manifest dream is generally a mere combination of numbers, a pseudo-
calculation, quite absurd as such, and again only a copy of some calculation
comprised in the latent thoughts. In these circumstances it is not surprising
that the interest which was felt in the dream-work soon becomes directed
instead towards the latent thoughts which disclose themselves in a more or
less distorted form through the manifest dream. We are not justified,
however, in a theoretical consideration of the subject, in letting our interest
stray so far that we altogether substitute the latent thoughts for the dream as
a whole, and make some pronouncement on the latter which is only true of
the former. It is strange that the findings of psycho-analysis could be so
misused as to result in confusion between the two. The term “dream” can
only be applied to the results of the dream-work, i.e. to the form into which
the latent thoughts have been rendered by the dream-work.
This work is a process of a quite peculiar type; nothing like it has
hitherto been known in mental life. This kind of condensation,
displacement, and regressive translation of thoughts into images, is a
novelty, the recognition of which in itself richly rewards our efforts in the
field of psycho-analysis. You will again perceive, from the parallels to
dream-work, the connections revealed between psycho-analytic and other
research, especially in the fields of the development of speech and thought.

You will only realize the further significance of the insight so acquired
when you learn that the mechanism of the dream-work is a kind of model
for the formation of neurotic symptoms.
I know too that it is not possible for us yet to grasp the full extent of
the fresh gain accruing to psychology from these labours. We will only hint
at the new proofs thereby afforded of the existence of unconscious mental
activities—for this indeed is the nature of the latent dream-thoughts—and at
the promise dream-interpretation gives of an approach, wider than we ever
guessed at, to the knowledge of the unconscious life of the mind.
Now, however, I think the time has come to give you individual
examples of various short dreams, which will illustrate the points for which
I have already prepared you.

TWELFTH LECTURE
EXAMPLES OF DREAMS AND ANALYSIS OF THEM

You must not be disappointed if I present you once more with
fragments of dream-interpretations, instead of inviting you to participate in
the interpretation of one fine long dream. You will say that after so much
preparation you surely have a right to expect that; and you will express your
conviction that, after successful interpretations of so many thousands of
dreams, it should long ago have been possible to collect a number of
striking examples by which the truth of all our assertions about the dream-
work and dream-thoughts could be demonstrated. Yes, but there are too
many difficulties in the way of fulfilling this wish of yours.
In the first place, I must confess that there is nobody who makes the
interpretation of dreams his main business. In what circumstances, then, do
we come to interpret them? At times we may occupy ourselves, for no
particular purpose, with the dreams of a friend, or we may work out our
own dreams over a period of time in order to train ourselves for psycho-
analytic work; but chiefly we have to do with the dreams of nervous
patients who are undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. These last dreams
provide splendid material and are in no respect inferior to those of healthy
persons, but the technique of the treatment obliges us to subordinate dream-
interpretation to therapeutic purposes and to desist from the attempt to
interpret a large number of the dreams as soon as we have extracted from
them something of use for the treatment. Again, many dreams which occur
during the treatment elude full interpretation altogether; since they have
their origin in the whole mass of material in the mind which is as yet
unknown to us, it is not possible to understand them until the completion of
the cure. To relate such dreams would necessarily involve revealing all the
secrets of a neurosis; this will not do for us, since we have taken up the
problem of dreams in preparation for the study of the neuroses.
Now I expect you would willingly dispense with this material and
would prefer to listen to the explanation of dreams of healthy persons or

perhaps of your own. But the content of these dreams makes that
impossible. One cannot expose oneself, nor anyone whose confidence has
been placed in one, so ruthlessly as a thorough interpretation of a dream
would necessitate; for, as you already know, they touch upon all that is most
intimate in the personality. Apart from the difficulty arising out of the
nature of the material, there is another difficulty as regards relating the
dreams. You are aware that the dream seems foreign and strange to the
dreamer himself; how much more so to an outsider to whom his personality
is unknown. The literature of psycho-analysis shows no lack of good and
detailed dream-analyses; I myself have published some which formed part
of the history of certain pathological cases. Perhaps the best example of a
dream-interpretation is that published by O. Rank, consisting of the analysis
of two mutually-related dreams of a young girl. These cover about two
pages of print, while the analysis of them runs into 76 pages. It would need
almost a whole term’s lectures in order to take you through a work of this
magnitude. If we selected some fairly long and considerably distorted
dream we should have to enter into so many explanations, to adduce so
much material in the shape of associations and recollections, and to go
down so many sidetracks, that a single lecture would be quite unsatisfying
and would give no clear idea of it as a whole. So I must ask you to be
content if I pursue a less difficult course, and relate some fragments from
dreams of neurotic patients, in which this or that isolated feature may be
recognized. Symbols are the easiest features to demonstrate and, after them,
certain peculiarities of the regressive character of dream-representation. I
will tell you why I regard each of the following dreams as worth relating.
1. A dream consisted only of two short pictures: The dreamer’s uncle
was smoking a cigarette, although it was Saturday.—A woman was fondling
and caressing the dreamer as though he were her child.
With reference to the first picture, the dreamer (a Jew) remarked that
his uncle was a very pious man who never had done, and never would do,
anything so sinful as smoking on the Sabbath. The only association to the
woman in the second picture was that of the dreamer’s mother. These two
pictures or thoughts must obviously be related to one another; but in what
way? Since he expressly denied that his uncle would in reality perform the
action of the dream, the insertion of the conditional “if” will at once suggest
itself. “If my uncle, that deeply religious man, were to smoke a cigarette on
the Sabbath, then I myself might be allowed to let my mother fondle me.”

Clearly, that is as much as to say that being fondled by the mother was
something as strictly forbidden as smoking on the Sabbath is to the pious
Jew. You will remember my telling you that in the dream-work all relations
among the dream-thoughts disappear; the thoughts are broken up into their
raw material, and our task in interpreting is to re-insert these connections
which have been omitted.
2. My writings on the subject of dreams have placed me to some extent
in the position of public consultant on the question, and for many years now
I have received letters from the most diverse quarters communicating
dreams to me or asking for my opinion. Naturally I am grateful to all those
who have given me sufficient material with their dreams to make an
interpretation possible, or have themselves volunteered one. The following
dream of a medical student in Munich dating from 1910, belongs to this
category; and I quote it because it may prove to you how hard it is,
generally speaking, to understand a dream until the dreamer has given us
what information he can about it. For I have a suspicion that in the bottom
of your hearts you think that the translating of the symbols is the ideal
method of interpretation and that you would like to discard that of free
association; I want, therefore, to clear your minds of so pernicious an error.
July 18th, 1910. Towards morning I had the following dream: I was
bicycling down a street in Tübingen, when a brown dachshund came
rushing after me and caught hold of one of my heels. I rode a little further
and then dismounted, sat down on a step and began to beat the creature off,
for it had set its teeth fast in my heel. (The dog’s biting me and the whole
scene roused no unpleasant sensations.) Two elderly ladies were sitting
opposite, watching me with grinning faces. Then I woke up and, as has
frequently happened before, with the transition to waking consciousness the
whole dream was clear to me.
In this instance symbolism cannot help us much, but the dreamer goes
on to tell us: “I recently fell in love with a girl, just from seeing her in the
street; but I had no means of introduction to her. I should have liked best to
make her acquaintance through her dachshund, for I am a great animal-
lover myself and was attracted by seeing that she was one too.” He adds
that several times he had separated fighting dogs very skilfully, often to the
amazement of the onlookers. Now we learn that the girl who had taken his
fancy was always seen walking with this particular dog. She, however, has

been eliminated from the manifest dream; only the dog associated with her
has remained. Possibly the elderly ladies who grinned at him represented
her, but the rest of what he tells us does not clear up this point. The fact that
he was riding a bicycle in the dream was a direct repetition of the situation
as he remembered it, for he had not met the girl with the dog except when
he was bicycling.
3. When a man has lost someone dear to him, for a considerable period
afterwards he produces a special type of dream, in which the most
remarkable compromises are effected between his knowledge that that
person is dead and his desire to call him back to life. Sometimes the
deceased is dreamt of as being dead, and yet still alive because he does not
know that he is dead, as if he would only really die if he did know it; at
other times he is half dead and half alive, and each of these conditions has
its distinguishing marks. We must not call these dreams merely nonsensical,
for to come to life again is no more inadmissible in dreams than in fairy
tales, in which it is quite a common fate. As far as I have been able to
analyse such dreams, it appeared that they were capable of a reasonable
explanation, but that the pious wish to recall the departed is apt to manifest
itself in the strangest ways. I will submit a dream of this sort to you, which
certainly sounds strange and absurd enough, and the analysis of which will
demonstrate many points already indicated in our theoretical discussions.
The dreamer was a man who had lost his father some years previously:—
My father was dead but had been exhumed and looked ill. He went on
living, and I did all I could to prevent his noticing it. Then the dream goes
on to other matters, apparently very remote.
That the father was dead we know to be a fact; but the exhumation had
not taken place in reality: indeed, the question of real fact has nothing to do
with anything that follows. But the dreamer went on to say that after he
returned from his father’s funeral one of his teeth began to ache. He wanted
to treat it according to the Jewish precept: “If thy tooth offend thee, pluck it
out,” and accordingly went to the dentist. The latter, however, said that that
was not the way to treat a tooth; one must have patience with it. “I will put
something in it,” he said, “to kill the nerve, and you must come back in
three days’ time, when I will take it out again.” “This ‘taking out,’” said the
dreamer suddenly, “is the exhuming.”

Now was he right? True, the parallel is not exact, for it was not the
tooth which was taken out, but only a dead part of it. As a result of
experience, however, we can well credit the dream-work with inaccuracies
of this sort. We must suppose that the dreamer had, by a process of
condensation, combined the dead father with the tooth, which was dead and
which he yet retained. No wonder then that an absurdity was the result in
the manifest dream, for obviously not all that was said about the tooth could
apply to the father. What then are we to regard as the tertium comparationis
between the father and the tooth,—what common factor makes the
comparison possible?
Such a factor must have existed, for the dreamer went on to observe
that he knew the saying that if one dreams of losing a tooth it means that
one is about to lose a member of his family.
We know that this popular interpretation is incorrect or at least correct
only in a very distorted sense. We shall therefore be the more surprised
actually to discover the subject thus touched upon behind the other elements
of the dream-content.
Without being pressed further, the dreamer then began to talk of his
father’s illness and death, and of the relations which had existed between
father and son. The illness had been a long one, and the care and treatment
of the invalid had cost the son a large sum of money. Yet it never seemed
too much to him, nor did his patience ever fail or the wish occur to him that
the end should come. He prided himself on his true Jewish filial piety and
on his strict observance of the Jewish law. Does not a certain contradiction
strike us here in the thoughts relating to the dream? He had identified the
tooth with the father. He wanted to treat the former according to the Jewish
law which commanded that a tooth which causes pain and annoyance
should be plucked out. His father he also wanted to treat according to the
precepts of the law, but here the command was that he must pay no heed to
expense and annoyance, must take the whole burden upon himself, and not
allow any hostile intention to arise against the cause of the trouble. Would
not the agreement between the two situations be much more convincing if
he had really gradually come to have the same feelings towards his sick
father as he had towards his diseased tooth, that is to say, if he had wished
for death to put a speedy end to his father’s superfluous, painful and costly
existence?

I have no doubt that this was, in reality, his attitude towards his father
during the protracted illness and that his boastful assertions of filial piety
were designed to divert his mind from any recollections of the sort. Under
conditions such as these it is no uncommon thing for the death-wish against
the father to be roused, and to mask itself with some ostensibly
compassionate reflection, such as: “It would be a blessed release for him.”
But I want you particularly to notice that here in the latent thoughts
themselves a barrier has been broken down. The first part of the thoughts
was, we may be sure, only temporarily unconscious, that is, during the
actual process of the dream-work; the hostile feelings towards the father, on
the other hand, had probably been permanently so, possibly dating from
childhood and having at times, during the father’s illness, crept as it were
timidly and in a disguised form into consciousness. We can maintain this
with even greater certainty of other latent thoughts which have
unmistakably contributed to the content of the dream. There are, it is true,
no indications in it of hostile feelings towards the father; but when we
enquire into the origin of such hostility in the life of the child we remember
that fear of the father arises from the fact that in the earliest years of life it is
he who opposes the sexual activity of the boy, as he is usually compelled to
do again, after puberty, from motives of social expediency. This was the
relation in which our dreamer stood to his father; his affection for him had
been tinged with a good deal of respect and dread, the source of which was
early sexual intimidation.
We can now explain the further phrases in the dream from the onanism
complex. “He looked ill” was an allusion to another remark of the dentist’s
—that it did not look well for a tooth to be missing just there—but it also
refers at the same time to the “looking ill” by which the young man, during
the period of puberty, betrays, or fears lest he might betray, his excessive
sexual activity. It was with a lightening of his own heart that in the manifest
dream the dreamer transferred the look of illness from himself to his father,
an inversion with which you are familiar as a device of the dream-work.
“He went on living” accords both with the wish to recall the father to life
and the promise of the dentist to save the tooth. The phrase “I did
everything I could to prevent his noticing” is extremely subtly designed to
lead us to complete it with the words “that he was dead.” The only
completion of them that really makes sense, however, is again to be traced
to the onanism complex, where it is a matter of course that the young man

should do all he can to conceal his sexual life from his father. Finally, I
would remind you that the so-called “toothache dreams” always refer to
onanism, and the punishment for it that is feared.
You see how this incomprehensible dream is built up by a piece of
remarkable and misleading condensation, by omitting from it all the
thoughts that belong to the core of the latent train of thought, and by the
creation of ambiguous substitute-formations to represent those thoughts
which were deepest and most remote in time.
4. We have already tried repeatedly to get to the bottom of those
prosaic and banal dreams which have nothing absurd or strange in them, but
which suggest the question: Why should we dream about such trivialities at
all? I will therefore quote a fresh example of this sort in the shape of three
dreams connected with one another and dreamt by a young lady in the
course of a single night.
(a) She was going through the hall in her house and struck her head on
a low-hanging chandelier with such force as to draw blood. This episode
did not remind her of anything that had actually happened; her remarks led
in quite another direction: “You know how terribly my hair is coming out.
Well, yesterday my mother said to me: ‘My dear child, if it goes on like
this, your head will soon be as bald as your buttocks.’” We see here that the
head stands for the other end of the body. No further assistance is required
to understand the symbolism of the chandelier: all objects capable of
elongation are symbols of the male organ. The real subject of the dream
then is a bleeding at the lower end of the body, caused by contact with the
penis. This might still have other meanings; the dreamer’s further
associations show that the dream has to do with the belief that menstruation
results from sexual intercourse with a man, a notion about sexual matters
which is by no means uncommon amongst immature girls.
(b) The dreamer saw in a vineyard a deep hole which she knew had
been caused by the uprooting of a tree. Her remark on this point was that
“the tree was missing,” meaning that she did not see the tree in the dream;
but the same phrase serves to express another thought, which leaves us in
no doubt as to the symbolic interpretation. The dream refers to another
infantile notion on the subject of sex, to the belief that girls originally had
the same genital organ as boys and that the later conformation of this organ
has been brought about by castration (uprooting the tree).

(c) The dreamer was standing in front of her writing-table drawer
which she knows so well that, if anyone touched it, she would immediately
be aware of it. The writing-table drawer, like all drawers, chests and boxes,
is a symbol of the female genital. She knew that when sexual intercourse
(or, as she thought, any contact at all) has taken place the genital shows
certain indications of the fact, and she had long had a fear of being
convicted of this. I think that in all three dreams the main emphasis lies on
the idea of knowing. She had in mind the time of childish investigations into
sexual matters, of the results of which she had been very proud at the time.
5. Here is another example of symbolism. But this time I must preface
it with a short account of the mental situation in which the dream occurred.
A man and a woman who were in love had spent a night together; he
described her nature as maternal, she was one of those women whose desire
to have a child comes out irresistibly during caresses. The conditions of
their meeting, however, made it necessary to take precautions to prevent the
semen from entering the womb. On waking the next morning, the woman
related the following dream:—
An officer with a red cap was pursuing her in the street. She fled from
him and ran up the staircase, with him after her. Breathless, she reached
her rooms and slammed and locked the door behind her. The man remained
outside and, peeping through the keyhole in the door, she saw him sitting on
a bench outside, weeping.
In the pursuit by the officer with the red cap and the breathless
climbing of the stairs you will recognize the representation of the sexual
act. That the dreamer shuts her pursuer out may serve as an example of the
device of inversion so frequently employed in dreams, for in reality it was
the man who withdrew before the completion of the sexual act. In the same
way, she has projected her own feeling of grief on to her partner, for it is he,
who weeps in the dream, his tears at the same time alluding to the seminal
fluid.
You will certainly have heard it said at some time or other that psycho-
analysis maintains that all dreams have a sexual meaning. You are now in a
position yourselves to form an opinion as to the falseness of this reproach.
You have learnt of wish-fulfilment dreams, dealing with the gratification of
the most obvious needs—hunger, thirst, and the longing for liberty—
comfort-dreams and impatience-dreams, as well as those which are frankly

avaricious and egoistical. You may, however, certainly bear it in mind that,
according to the results of psycho-analysis, dreams in which a marked
degree of distortion is present mainly (but here again not exclusively) give
expression to sexual desires.
6. I have a special motive in giving many instances of the use of
symbols in dreams. In our first lecture I complained of the difficulty of
demonstrating my statements in such a way as to carry conviction with
regard to the findings of psycho-analysis, and since then you have doubtless
agreed with me. Now the separate propositions of psycho-analysis are
nevertheless so intimately related that conviction on a single point easily
leads to acceptance of the greater part of the whole theory. It might be said
of psycho-analysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your
whole hand. If you accept the explanation of errors as satisfactory, you
cannot logically stop short of belief in all the rest. Now dream-symbolism
provides another, equally good, approach to such acceptance. I will recount
to you a dream, which has already been published, of a woman of the
poorer classes, whose husband was a watchman and of whom we may be
sure that she had never heard of dream-symbolism and psycho-analysis.
You can then judge for yourselves whether the interpretation arrived at with
the help of sexual symbols can justly be called arbitrary or forced.
“... Then someone broke into the house and in terror she cried for a
watchman. But the watchman, accompanied by two tramps, had gone into a
church, which had several steps leading up to it. Behind the church there
was a mountain and, up above, a thick wood. The watchman wore a helmet,
gorget and cloak, and had a full brown beard. The two tramps, who had
gone along peaceably with him, had aprons twisted round their hips like
sacks. A path led from the church to the mountain and was overgrown on
both sides with grass and bushes which grew denser and denser, and at the
top of the mountain there was a regular wood.”
You will recognize without any trouble the symbols here employed:
the male organ is represented by the trinity of three persons appearing,
whilst the female sexual organs are symbolized by a landscape with a
chapel, a mountain and a wood, and once more you have the act of going up
steps as symbolic of the sexual act. The part of the body called in the dream
“a mountain” is similarly termed in anatomy the mons veneris.

7. I will tell you another dream which is to be explained in the light of
symbolism, a dream, moreover, which is noteworthy and convincing from
the fact that the dreamer himself translated all the symbols, though he
brought no previous theoretical knowledge to the interpretation. This is a
very unusual circumstance and we have no accurate idea of the conditions
which give rise to it.
He was walking with his father in a place which must have been the
Prater,[41] for they saw the Rotunda with a little building in front of it, to
which was made fast a captive balloon which looked rather slack. His
father asked him what it was all for; the son wondered at his asking, but
explained it nevertheless. Then they came to a court-yard, where a large
sheet of metal lay spread out. His father wanted to break off a big piece, but
looked round first in case anyone should notice him. He said to his son that
all the same he need only tell the overseer and then he could take it
straightaway. Some steps led down from this court to a shaft, the sides of
which were upholstered with some soft stuff, something like a leather
armchair. At the bottom of this shift was a rather long platform and, beyond
it, another shaft.
The following is the dreamer’s own interpretation:—“The Rotunda
stands for my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it for the penis,
which I have had to complain of for being limp.” A more detailed
translation would then run thus: the rotunda stands for the buttocks
(regularly included by children amongst the genitals), the smaller structure
in front is the scrotum. In the dream, his father asks him what all this is, i.e.
what are the purpose and function of the genitals. To invert this situation so
that the son asks the questions is an obvious idea, and, since these questions
were never asked in reality, we must construe the dream-thoughts as a wish
or take them in a conditional sense: “If I had asked my father to explain....”
The sequel to this thought we shall find presently.
The court-yard where the sheet-metal lay is not in the first place to be
explained symbolically, but is a reference to the father’s place of business.
From motives of discretion I have substituted “sheet-metal” for the actual
material dealt with by him, but otherwise I have made no alteration in the
words of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had
been much scandalized by the extremely questionable practices upon which
the high profits largely depended. Hence the sequel to the dream-thought

mentioned above would run: “(If I had asked him), he would have deceived
me as he deceives his customers.” The dreamer himself gives a second
explanation for the pulling off the piece of metal which serves to represent
commercial dishonesty: it means, he says, the practice of masturbation. Not
only is this an explanation with which we have long been familiar, but it is
well in accordance with this interpretation that the secret practice of
masturbation should be expressed by the opposite idea (“We may do it
openly”). So the fact that this practice is imputed to the father, as was the
questioning in the first scene of the dream, is exactly what we should
expect. The dreamer immediately interpreted the shaft, on account of the
soft upholstering of the walls, as the vagina, and I, on my own account,
offer the remark that going-down as well as going-up stands for sexual
intercourse.
The details of the long platform at the bottom of the first shaft, and
beyond that the second shaft, were explained by the dreamer himself from
his own history. He had practised intercourse for some time and then given
it up on account of inhibitions, but hoped to be able to resume it by the help
of the treatment.
8. I quote the two following dreams, dreamt by a foreigner with
marked polygamous tendencies, because they may serve to illustrate the
statement that the dreamer’s own person is present in every dream, even
when it is disguised in the manifest content. The trunks in the dreams are
female symbols.
(a) The dreamer was going on a journey and his luggage was being
taken to the station on a carriage. There were a number of trunks piled one
on the top of the other, and amongst them two large black boxes like those
of a commercial traveller. He said consolingly to someone: “You see those
are only going as far as the station.”
He does, as a matter of fact, travel with a great deal of luggage, and he
also brings many stories about women to the treatment. The two black
trunks stand for two dark women who at the moment are playing the
principal part in his life. One of them wanted to follow him to Vienna, but
on my advice he had telegraphed to put her off.
(b) A scene at a customs house:—A fellow-traveller opened his trunk
and said nonchalantly, smoking a cigarette: “There is nothing to declare in
that.” The customs official seemed to believe him, but felt in the trunk again

and found a strictly prohibited article. The traveller then said in a resigned
way: “Well, it can’t be helped.” The dreamer himself is the traveller and I
am the official. He is generally very straightforward with me, but had made
up his mind to conceal from me a relation which he had recently formed
with a lady, for he assumed quite correctly that I knew her. He displaces on
to a stranger the embarrassing situation of being detected, so that he himself
does not seem to come into the dream at all.
9. Here we have an example of a symbol which I have not yet
mentioned:—
The dreamer met his sister with two friends who were themselves
sisters. He shook hands with these two, but not with his sister.
There was no real episode connected with this in his mind. Instead, his
thoughts went back to a time when his observations led him to wonder why
a girl’s breasts are so late in developing. The two sisters, therefore, stand for
the breasts; he would have liked to grasp them with his hand, if only it had
not been his sister.
10. Here is an example of death symbolism in dreams:—The dreamer
was crossing a very high, steep, iron bridge, with two people whose names
he knew, but forgot on waking. Suddenly both of them had vanished and he
saw a ghostly man in a cap and an overall. He asked him whether he were
the telegraph messenger.... “No.” Or the coachman?... “No.” He then went
on, and in the dream, had a feeling of great dread; on waking, he followed it
up with the phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and that he fell
into the abyss.
When stress is laid upon the fact that people in a dream are unknown
to the dreamer, or that he has forgotten their names, they are, as a rule,
persons with whom he is intimately connected. The dreamer was one of a
family of three children; if he had ever wished for the death of the other
two, it would be only just that he should be visited with the fear of death.
With reference to the telegraph messenger, he remarked that they always
bring bad news. From his uniform, the man in the dream might have been a
lamp-lighter, who also puts out the lights, as the spirit of death extinguishes
the torch of life. With the coachman he associated Uhland’s poem of the
voyage of King Karl, and recalled a dangerous sail on a lake with two
companions, when he played the part of the king in the poem. The iron

bridge suggested to him a recent accident, also the stupid saying: “Life is a
suspension bridge.”
11. The following may be regarded as another example of a death-
dream:—
An unknown gentleman was leaving a black-edged visiting card on the
dreamer.
12. I give another dream which will interest you from several points of
view; it is to be traced partly, however, to a neurotic condition in the
dreamer:—
He was in a train which stopped in the open country. He thought there
was going to be an accident and that he must make his escape, so he went
through all the compartments, killing everyone he met,—driver, guard, and
so on.
This dream recalls a story told him by a friend. On a certain Italian
line, an insane man was being conveyed in a small compartment, but by
some mistake a passenger was allowed to get in with him. The madman
murdered the other traveller. Thus the dreamer identified himself with this
insane man, his reason being that he was at times tormented by an
obsession that he must make away with “everyone who shared his
knowledge.” Then he himself found a better motivation for the dream. The
day before, he had seen at the theatre a girl he had meant to marry but had
given up because she gave him cause for jealousy. Knowing the intensity
which jealousy could assume in him, he would really have been mad to
want to marry her. That is to say, he thought her so unreliable that his
jealousy would have led him to murder everyone who got in his way. The
going through a number of rooms, or, as here, compartments, we have
already learnt to know as a symbol of marriage (the expression of
monogamy according to the rule of opposites).
With reference to the train’s stopping in the open country and the fear
of an accident, he told the following story:—
Once when such a sudden halt occurred on the line outside a station, a
young lady who was in the carriage said that perhaps there was going to be
a collision, and that the best thing to do was to raise the legs high. This
phrase “raise the legs” had associations with many walks and excursions
into the country, which he had shared with the girl mentioned above in the
happy early days of their love. Here was a new argument for the contention

that he would be mad to marry her now; nevertheless, my knowledge of the
situation led me to regard it as certain that there existed in him all the same
the desire to fall a victim to this form of madness.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE
ARCHAIC AND INFANTILE FEATURES IN DREAMS

Let us start afresh from our conclusion that, under the influence of the
censorship, the dream-work translates the latent dream-thoughts into
another form. These thoughts are of the same nature as the familiar,
conscious thoughts of waking life; the new form in which they are
expressed is, owing to many peculiar characteristics, incomprehensible to
us. We have said that it goes back to phases in our intellectual development
which we have long outgrown—to hieroglyphic writing, to symbolic-
connections, possibly to conditions which existed before the language of
thought was evolved. On this account we called the form of expression
employed by the dream-work archaic or regressive.
From this you may draw the inference that a more profound study of
the dream-work must lead to valuable conclusions about the initial stages of
our intellectual development, of which at present little is known. I hope it
will be so, but so far this task has not been attempted. The era to which the
dream-work takes us back is “primitive” in a twofold sense: in the first
place, it means the early days of the individual—his childhood—and,
secondly, in so far as each individual repeats in some abbreviated fashion
during childhood the whole course of the development of the human race,
the reference is phylogenetic. I believe it not impossible that we may be
able to discriminate between that part of the latent mental processes which
belongs to the early days of the individual and that which has its roots in the
infancy of the race. It seems to me, for instance, that symbolism, a mode of
expression which has never been individually acquired, may claim to be
regarded as a racial heritage.
This, however, is not the only archaic feature in dreams. You are all
familiar from actual experience with the peculiar amnesia of childhood to
which we are subject. I mean that the first years of life, up to the age of
five, six, or eight, have not left the same traces in memory as our later
experiences. True, we come across individuals who can boast of continuous

recollection from early infancy to the present time, but it is incomparably
more common for the opposite, a blank in memory, to be found. In my
opinion, this has not aroused sufficient surprise. At two years old the child
can speak well and soon shows his capacity for adapting himself to
complicated mental situations, and, moreover, says things which he himself
has forgotten when they are repeated to him years later. And yet memory is
more efficient in early years, being less overburdened than it is later. Again,
there is no reason to regard the function of memory as an especially high or
difficult form of mental activity; on the contrary, excellent memory may be
found in people who are yet on a very low plane intellectually.
But I must draw your attention to a second peculiarity, based upon the
first—namely, that from the oblivion in which the first years of childhood
are shrouded certain clearly retained recollections emerge, mostly in the
form of plastic images, for the retention of which there seems no adequate
ground. Memory deals with the mass of impressions received in later life by
a process of selection, retaining what is important and omitting what is not;
but with the recollections retained from childhood this is not so. They do
not necessarily reflect important experiences in childhood, not even such as
must have seemed important from the child’s standpoint, but are often so
banal and meaningless in themselves that we can only ask ourselves in
amazement why just this particular detail has escaped oblivion. I have tried,
with the help of analysis, to attack the problem of childhood amnesia and of
the fragments of recollection which break through it, and have come to the
conclusion that, whatever may appear to the contrary, the child no less than
the adult only retains in memory what is important; but that what is
important is represented (by the processes of condensation and, more
especially, of displacement, already familiar to you) in the memory by
something apparently trivial. For this reason I have called these childhood
recollections screen-memories; a thorough analysis can evolve from them
all that has been forgotten.
It is a regular task in psycho-analytic treatment to fill in the blank in
infantile memories, and, in so far as the treatment is successful to any extent
at all (very frequently, therefore) we are enabled to bring to light the content
of those early years long buried in oblivion. These impressions have never
really been forgotten, but were only inaccessible and latent, having become
part of the unconscious. But sometimes it happens that they emerge
spontaneously from the unconscious, and it is in connection with dreams

that this happens. It is clear that the dream-life knows the way back to these
latent, infantile experiences. Many good illustrations of this are to be found
in psycho-analytical literature, and I myself have been able to furnish a
contribution of the sort. I once dreamt in a particular connection of someone
who had evidently done me a service and whom I saw plainly. He was a
one-eyed man, short, fat and high-shouldered; from the context I gathered
that he was a doctor. Fortunately I was able to ask my mother, who was still
living, what was the personal appearance of the doctor who attended us at
the place where I was born and which I left at the age of three; she told me
that he had only one eye and was short, fat and high-shouldered; I learnt
also of the accident which was the occasion of this doctor’s being called in
and which I had forgotten. This command of the forgotten material of the
earliest years of childhood is thus a further ‘archaic’ feature of dreams.
This knowledge has a bearing on another of the problems which up to
the present have proved insoluble. You will remember the astonishment
caused by our discovery that dreams have their origin in actively evil or in
excessive sexual desires, which have made both the dream-censorship and
dream-distortion necessary. Supposing now that we have interpreted a
dream of this sort, and the circumstances are specially favourable in that the
dreamer does not quarrel with the interpretation itself, he does nevertheless
invariably ask how any such wish could come into his mind, since it seems
quite foreign to him and he is conscious of desiring the exact opposite. We
need have no hesitation in pointing out to him the origin of the wish he
repudiates: these evil impulses may be traced to the past, often indeed to a
past which is not so very far away. It may be demonstrated that he once
knew and was conscious of them, even if this is no longer so. A woman who
had a dream meaning that she wished to see her only daughter (then
seventeen years old) lying dead found, with our help, that at one time she
actually had cherished this death-wish. The child was the offspring of an
unhappy marriage, which ended in the speedy separation of husband and
wife. Once when the child was as yet unborn the mother, in an access of
rage after a violent scene with her husband, beat her body with her clenched
fists in order to kill the baby in her womb. How many mothers who to-day
love their children tenderly, perhaps with excessive tenderness, yet
conceived them unwillingly and wished that the life within them might not
develop further; and have indeed turned this wish into various actions,
fortunately of a harmless kind. The later death-wish against beloved

persons, which appears so puzzling, thus dates from the early days of the
relationship to them.
A father, whose dream when interpreted shows that he wished for the
death of his eldest and favourite child, is in the same way obliged to recall
that there was a time when this wish was not unknown to him. The man,
whose marriage had proved a disappointment, often thought when the child
was still an infant that if the little creature who meant nothing to him were
to die he would again be free and would make better use of his freedom. A
large number of similar impulses of hate are to be traced to a similar source;
they are recollections of something belonging to the past, something which
was once in consciousness and played its part in mental life. From this you
will be inclined to draw the conclusion that such dreams and such wishes
would not occur in cases where there have been no changes of this sort in
the relations between two persons, that is to say, where the relation has been
of the same character from the beginning. I am prepared to grant you this
conclusion, only I must warn you that you have to consider, not the literal
meaning of the dream, but what it signifies on interpretation. It may be that
the manifest dream of the death of some beloved person was only using this
as a terrible mask, whilst really meaning something totally different, or it is
possible that the beloved person is an illusory substitute for someone else.
This situation will, however, raise in you another and much more
serious question. You will say: “Even though this death-wish did at one
time actually exist and this is confirmed by recollection, that is still no true
explanation; for the desire has long since been overcome and surely at the
present time can exist in the unconscious merely as a recollection, of no
affective value, and not as a powerful exciting agent. For this later
assumption we have no evidence. Why is the wish recollected at all in
dreams?” This is a question which you are really justified in asking; the
attempt to answer it would take us far afield and would oblige us to define
our position with regard to one of the most important points in the theory of
dreams. But I must keep within the limits of our discussion and must
forbear to follow up this question; so you must be reconciled to leaving it
for the present. Let us content ourselves with the actual evidence that this
wish, long since subdued, can be proved to have given rise to the dream,
and let us continue our enquiry whether other evil wishes also can be traced
in the same way to the past.

Let us keep to the death-wishes, which we shall certainly find mostly
derived from the unbounded egoism of the dreamer. Wishes of this sort are
very often found to be the underlying agents of dreams. Whenever anyone
gets in our way in life—and how often must this happen when our relations
to one another are so complicated!—a dream is immediately prepared to
make away with that person, even if it be father, mother, brother or sister,
husband or wife. It appeared to us amazing that such wickedness should be
innate in humanity, and certainly we were not inclined to admit without
further evidence that this result of our interpretation of dreams was correct.
But, when once we had seen that the origin of wishes of this sort must be
looked for in the past, we had little difficulty in finding the period in the
past of the individual in which there is nothing strange in such egoism and
such wishes, even when directed against the nearest and dearest. A child in
his earliest years (which later are veiled in oblivion) is just the person who
frequently displays such egoism in boldest relief; invariably, unmistakable
tendencies of this kind, or, more accurately, surviving traces of them, are
plainly visible in him. For a child loves himself first and only later learns to
love others and to sacrifice something of his own ego to them. Even the
people whom he seems to love from the outset are loved in the first instance
because he needs them and cannot do without them—again therefore, from
motives of egoism. Only later does the impulse of love detach itself from
egoism: it is a literal fact that the child learns how to love through his own
egoism.
In this connection it will be instructive to compare a child’s attitude
towards his brothers and sisters with his attitude towards his parents. The
little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, and often he is
quite frank about it. It is unquestionable that in them he sees and hates his
rivals, and it is well known how commonly this attitude persists without
interruption for many years, till the child reaches maturity and even later.
Of course it often gives place to a more tender feeling, or perhaps we
should say it is overlaid by this, but the hostile attitude seems very
generally to be the earlier. We can most easily observe it in children of two
and a half to four years old when a new baby arrives, which generally meets
with a very unfriendly reception; remarks such as “I don’t like it. The stork
is to take it away again” are very common. Subsequently every opportunity
is seized to disparage the new-comer; attempts are even made to injure it
and actual attacks upon it are by no means unheard-of. If the difference in

age is less, by the time the child’s mental activity is more fully developed
the rival is already in existence and he adapts himself to the situation; if on
the other hand there is a greater difference between their ages, the new baby
may rouse certain kindly feelings from the first, as an object of interest, a
sort of living doll; and when there is as much as eight years or more
between them, especially if the elder child is a girl, protective, motherly
impulses may at once come into play. But, speaking honestly, when we find
a wish for the death of a brother or a sister latent in a dream we need
seldom be puzzled, for we find its origin in early childhood without much
trouble, or indeed, quite often in the later years when they still lived
together.
There is probably no nursery without violent conflicts between the
inhabitants, actuated by rivalry for the love of the parents, competition for
possessions shared by them all, even for the actual space in the room they
occupy. Such hostility is directed against older as well as younger brothers
and sisters. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said: “If there is anyone whom
a young English lady hates more than her mother it is her elder sister.” Now
there is something in this dictum which jars upon us; it is hard enough to
bring ourselves to understand hatred and rivalry between brothers and
sisters, but how can feelings of hate force themselves into the relation
between mother and daughter, parents and children?
This relationship is no doubt a more favourable one, also from the
children’s point of view; and this too is what our expectations require: we
find it far more offensive for love to be lacking between parents and
children than between brothers and sisters. We have, so to speak, sanctified
the former love while allowing the latter to remain profane. Yet everyday
observation may show us how frequently the sentiments entertained
towards each other by parents and grown-up children fall short of the ideal
set up by society, and how much hostility lies smouldering, ready to burst
into flame if it were not stifled by considerations of filial or parental duty
and by other, tender impulses. The motives for this hostility are well known,
and we recognize a tendency for those of the same sex to become alienated,
daughter from mother and father from son. The daughter sees in her mother
the authority which imposes limits to her will, whose task it is to bring her
to that renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in certain
cases, too, the mother is still a rival, who objects to being set aside. The
same thing is repeated still more blatantly between father and son. To the

son the father is the embodiment of the social compulsion to which he so
unwillingly submits, the person who stands in the way of his following his
own will, of his early sexual pleasures and, when there is family property,
of his enjoyment of it. When a throne is involved this impatience for the
death of the father may approach tragic intensity. The relation between
father and daughter or mother and son would seem less liable to disaster;
the latter relation furnishes the purest examples of unchanging tenderness,
undisturbed by any egoistic considerations.
Why, you ask, do I speak of things so banal and so well-known to
everybody? Because there exists an unmistakable tendency in people’s
minds to deny the significance of these things in real life and to pretend that
the social ideal is much more frequently realized than it actually is. But it is
better that psychology should tell the truth than that it should be left to
cynics to do so. This general denial is only applied to real life, it is true; for
fiction and drama are free to make use of the motives laid bare when these
ideals are rudely disturbed.
There is nothing to wonder at therefore if the dreams of a great number
of people bring to light the wish for the removal of their parents, especially
of the parent whose sex is the same as the dreamer’s. We may assume that
the wish exists in waking life as well, sometimes even in consciousness if it
can disguise itself behind another motive, as the dreamer in our third
example disguised his real thought by pity for his father’s useless suffering.
It is but rarely that hostility reigns alone,—far more often it yields to more
tender feelings which finally suppress it, when it has to wait in abeyance till
a dream shows it, as it were, in isolation. That which the dream shows in a
form magnified by this very isolation resumes its true proportions when our
interpretation has assigned to it its proper place in relation to the rest of the
dreamer’s life. (H. Sachs.) But we also find this death-wish where there is
no basis for it in real life and where the adult would never have to confess
to entertaining it in his waking life. The reason for this is that the deepest
and most common motive for estrangement, especially between parent and
child of the same sex, came into play in the earliest years of childhood.
I refer to that rivalry of affections in which sexual elements are plainly
emphasized. The son, when quite a little child, already begins to develop a
peculiar tenderness towards his mother, whom he looks upon as his own
property, regarding his father in the light of a rival who disputes this sole

possession of his; similarly the little daughter sees in her mother someone
who disturbs her tender relation to her father and occupies a place which
she feels she herself could very well fill. Observation shows us how far
back these sentiments date, sentiments which we describe by the term
Oedipus complex, because in the Oedipus myth the two extreme forms of
the wishes arising from the situation of the son—the wish to kill the father
and to marry the mother—are realized in an only slightly modified form. I
do not assert that the Oedipus complex exhausts all the possible relations
which may exist between parents and children; these relations may well be
a great deal more complicated. Again, this complex may be more or less
strongly developed, or it may even become inverted, but it is a regular and
very important factor in the mental life of the child; we are more in danger
of underestimating than of overestimating its influence and that of the
developments which may follow from it. Moreover, the parents themselves
frequently stimulate the children to react with an Oedipus complex, for
parents are often guided in their preferences by the difference in sex of their
children, so that the father favours the daughter and the mother the son; or
else, where conjugal love has grown cold, the child may be taken as a
substitute for the love-object which has ceased to attract.
It cannot be said that the world has shown great gratitude to psycho-
analytic research for the discovery of the Oedipus complex; on the contrary,
the idea has excited the most violent opposition in grown-up people; and
those who omitted to join in denying the existence of sentiments so
universally reprehended and tabooed have later made up for this by
proffering interpretations so wide of the mark as to rob the complex of its
value. My own unchanged conviction is that there is nothing in it to deny or
to gloss over. We ought to reconcile ourselves to facts in which the Greek
myth itself saw the hand of inexorable destiny. Again, it is interesting to
find that the Oedipus complex, repudiated in actual life and relegated to
fiction, has there come to its own. O. Rank in a careful study of this theme
has shown how this very complex has supplied dramatic poetry with an
abundance of motives in countless variations, modifications and disguises,
in short, subject to just the distortion familiar to us in the work of the
dream-censorship. So we may look for the Oedipus complex even in those
dreamers who have been fortunate enough to escape conflicts with their
parents in later life; and closely connected with this we shall find what is
termed the castration complex, the reaction to that intimidation in the field

of sex or to that restraint of early infantile sexual activity which is ascribed
to the father.
What we have already ascertained has guided us to the study of the
child’s mental life, and we may now hope to find in a similar way an
explanation of the source of the other kind of prohibited wishes in dreams,
i.e. the excessive sexual desires. We are impelled therefore to study the
development of the sexual life of the child, and here from various sources
we learn the following facts. In the first place, it is an untenable fallacy to
suppose that the child has no sexual life and to assume that sexuality first
makes its appearance at puberty, when the genital organs come to maturity.
On the contrary he has from the very beginning a sexual life rich in content,
though it differs in many points from that which later is regarded as normal.
What in adult life are termed “perversions” depart from the normal in the
following respects: (1) in a disregard for the barriers of species (the gulf
between man and beast), (2) in the insensibility to barriers imposed by
disgust, (3) in the transgression of the incest-barrier (the prohibition against
seeking sexual gratification with close blood-relations), (4) in
homosexuality and, (5) in the transferring of the part played by the genital
organs to other organs and different areas of the body. All these barriers are
not in existence from the outset, but are only gradually built up in the
course of development and education. The little child is free from them: he
does not perceive any immense gulf between man and beast, the arrogance
with which man separates himself from the other animals only dawns in
him at a later period. He shows at the beginning of life no disgust for
excrement, but only learns this feeling slowly under the influence of
education; he attaches no particular importance to the difference between
the sexes, in fact he thinks that both have the same formation of the genital
organs; he directs his earliest sexual desires and his curiosity to those
nearest to him or to those who for other reasons are specially beloved—his
parents, brothers and sisters or nurses; and finally we see in him a
characteristic which manifests itself again later at the height of some love-
relationship—namely, he does not look for gratification in the sexual organs
only, but discovers that many other parts of the body possess the same sort
of sensibility and can yield analogous pleasurable sensations, playing
thereby the part of genital organs. The child may be said then to be
polymorphously perverse, and even if mere traces of all these impulses are
found in him, this is due on the one hand to their lesser intensity as

compared with that which they assume in later life and, on the other hand,
to the fact that education immediately and energetically suppresses all
sexual manifestations in the child. This suppression may be said to be
embodied in a theory; for grown-up people endeavour to overlook some of
these manifestations, and, by misinterpretation, to rob others of their sexual
nature, until in the end the whole thing can be altogether denied. It is often
the same people who first inveigh against the sexual “naughtiness” of
children in the nursery and then sit down to their writing-tables to defend
the sexual purity of the same children. When they are left to themselves or
when they are seduced children often display perverse sexual activity to a
really remarkable extent. Of course grown-up people are right in not taking
this too seriously and in regarding it, as they say, as “childish tricks” and
“play,” for the child cannot be judged either by a moral or legal code as if
he were mature and fully responsible; nevertheless these things do exist,
and they have their significance both as evidence of innate constitutional
tendencies and inasmuch as they cause and foster later developments: they
give us an insight into the child’s sexual life and so into that of humanity as
a whole. If then we find all these perverse wishes behind the distortions of
our dreams, it only means that dreams in this respect also have regressed
completely to the infantile condition.
Amongst these forbidden wishes special prominence must still be
given to the incestuous desires, i.e. those directed towards sexual
intercourse with parents or brothers and sisters. You know in what
abhorrence human society holds, or at least professes to hold, such
intercourse, and what emphasis is laid upon the prohibitions of it. The most
preposterous attempts have been made to account for this horror of incest:
some people have assumed that it is a provision of nature for the
preservation of the species, manifesting itself in the mind by these
prohibitions because in-breeding would result in racial degeneration; others
have asserted that propinquity from early childhood has deflected sexual
desire from the persons concerned. In both these cases, however, the
avoidance of incest would have been automatically secured and we should
be at a loss to understand the necessity for stern prohibitions, which would
seem rather to point to a strong desire. Psycho-analytic investigations have
shown beyond the possibility of doubt that an incestuous love-choice is in
fact the first and the regular one, and that it is only later that any opposition

is manifested towards it, the causes of which are not to be sought in the
psychology of the individual.
Let us sum up the results which our excursion into child-psychology
has brought to the understanding of dreams. We have learnt not only that
the material of the forgotten childish experiences is accessible to the dream,
but also that the child’s mental life, with all its peculiarities, its egoism, its
incestuous object-choice, persists in it and therefore in the unconscious, and
that our dreams take us back every night to this infantile stage. This
corroborates the belief that the Unconscious is the infantile mental life, and,
with this, the objectionable impression that so much evil lurks in human
nature grows somewhat less. For this terrible evil is simply what is original,
primitive and infantile in mental life, what we find in operation in the child,
but in part overlook in him because it is on so small a scale, and in part do
not take greatly to heart because we do not demand a high ethical standard
in a child. By regressing to this infantile stage our dreams appear to have
brought the evil in us to light, but the appearance is deceptive, though we
have let ourselves be dismayed by it; we are not so evil as the interpretation
of our dreams would lead us to suppose.
If the evil impulses of our dreams are merely infantile, a reversion to
the beginnings of our ethical development, the dream simply making us
children again in thought and feeling, it is surely not reasonable to be
ashamed of these evil dreams. But the reasoning faculty is only part of our
mental life; there is much in it besides which is not reasonable, and so it
happens that, although it is unreasonable, we nevertheless are ashamed of
such dreams. We subject them to the dream-censorship and are ashamed
and indignant when one of these wishes by way of exception penetrates our
consciousness in a form so undisguised that we cannot fail to recognize it;
yes, we even at times feel just as much ashamed of a distorted dream as if
we really understood it. Just think of the outraged comment of the
respectable elderly lady upon her dream about “love service,” although it
was not interpreted to her. So the problem is not yet solved, and it is still
possible that if we pursue this question of the evil in dreams we may arrive
at another conclusion and another estimate of human nature.
Our whole enquiry has led to two results which, however, merely
indicate the beginning of new problems and new doubts. In the first place:
the regression in dreams is one not only of form but of substance. Not only

does it translate our thoughts into a primitive form of expression, but it also
re-awakens the peculiarities of our primitive mental life—the old
supremacy of the ego, the initial impulses of our sexual life, even restores to
us our old intellectual possession if we may conceive of symbolism in this
way. And secondly: all these old infantile characteristics, which were once
dominant and solely dominant, must to-day be accounted to the
unconscious and must alter and extend our views about it. “Unconscious” is
no longer a term for what is temporarily latent: the unconscious is a special
realm, with its own desires and modes of expression and peculiar mental
mechanisms not elsewhere operative. Yet the latent dream-thoughts
disclosed by our interpretation do not belong to this realm; rather they
correspond to the kind of thoughts we have in waking life also. And yet
they are unconscious: how is the paradox to be resolved? We begin to
realize that here we must discriminate. Something which has its origin in
our conscious life and shares its characteristics—we call it the “residue”
from the previous day—meets together with something from the realm of
the unconscious in the formation of a dream, and it is with these two
contributing elements that the dream-work is accomplished. The influence
of the unconscious impinging upon this residue probably constitutes the
condition for regression. This is the deepest insight into the nature of
dreams possible to us until we have explored further fields in the mind; but
soon it will be time to give another name to the unconscious character of
the latent dream-thoughts, in order to distinguish it from that unconscious
material which has its origin in the province of the infantile.
We can of course also ask: What is it that forces our mental activity
during sleep to such regression? Why cannot the mental stimuli that disturb
sleep be dealt with without it? And if on account of the dream-censorship
the mental activity has to disguise itself in the old, and now
incomprehensible, form of expression, what is the object of re-animating
the old impulses, desires and characteristics, now surmounted; what, in
short, is the use of regression in substance as well as in form? The only
satisfactory answer would be that this is the one possible way in which
dreams can be formed, that, dynamically considered, the relief from the
stimulus giving rise to the dream cannot otherwise be accomplished. But
this is an answer for which, at present, we have no justification.

FOURTEENTH LECTURE
WISH-FULFILMENT

Shall I remind you once more of the steps by which we have arrived at
our present position? When in applying our technique we came upon the
distortion in dreams, we made up our minds to avoid it for the moment and
turned to the study of infantile dreams for some definite information about
the nature of dreams in general. Next, equipped with the results of this
investigation, we attacked the question of dream-distortion directly, and I
hope that bit by bit we have also mastered that. Now, however, we are
bound to admit that our findings in these two directions do not exactly tally,
and it behoves us to combine and correlate our results.
Both enquiries have made it plain that the essential feature in the
dream-work is the transformation of thoughts into hallucinatory experience.
It is puzzling enough to see how this process is accomplished, but this is a
problem for general psychology, and we have not to deal with it here. We
have learnt from children’s dreams that the object of the dream-work is to
remove, by means of the fulfilment of some wish, a mental stimulus which
is disturbing sleep. We could make no similar pronouncement with regard
to distorted dreams until we understood how to interpret them, but from the
outset we expected to be able to bring our ideas about them into line with
our views on infantile dreams. This expectation was for the first time
fulfilled when we recognized that all dreams are really children’s dreams;
that they make use of infantile material and are characterized by impulses
and mechanisms which belong to the childish mind. When we feel we have
mastered the distortion in dreams we must go on to find out whether the
notion that dreams are WISH-FULFILMENTS holds good of distorted dreams
also.
We have just subjected a series of dreams to interpretation, but without
taking the question of wish-fulfilment into consideration at all. I feel certain
that while we were talking about them the question repeatedly forced itself
upon you: “What has become of the wish-fulfilment which is supposed to

be the object of the dream-work?” Now this question is important, for it is
the one which our lay critics are constantly asking. As you know, mankind
has an instinctive antipathy to intellectual novelties; one of the ways in
which this shows itself is that any such novelty is immediately reduced to
its very smallest compass, and if possible embodied in some catch-word.
“Wish-fulfilment” has become the catch-word for the new theory of dreams.
Directly they hear that dreams are said to be wish-fulfilments, the laity asks:
“Where does the wish-fulfilment come in?” and their asking the question
amounts to a repudiation of the idea. They can immediately think of
countless dreams of their own which were accompanied by feeling so
unpleasant as sometimes to reach the point of agonizing dread; and so this
statement of the psycho-analytical theory of dreams appears to them highly
improbable. It is easy to reply that in distorted dreams the wish-fulfilment is
not openly expressed, but has to be looked for, so that it cannot be shown
until the dreams have been interpreted. We know too that the wishes
underlying these distorted dreams are those which are prohibited and
rejected by the censorship, and that it is just their existence which is the
cause of distortion and the motive for the intervention of the censorship.
But it is difficult to make the lay critic understand that we must not ask
about the wish-fulfilment in a dream before it has been interpreted; he
always forgets this. His reluctance to accept the theory of wish-fulfilment is
really nothing but the effect of the dream-censorship, causing him to replace
the real thought by a substitute, and following from his repudiation of these
censored dream-wishes.
Of course we ourselves must feel the need to explain why so many
dreams are painful in content; and in particular we shall want to know how
we come to have ‘anxiety-dreams.’ Here for the first time we are confronted
with the problem of the affects in dreams; a problem which deserves special
study, but one which we cannot concern ourselves with just now,
unfortunately. If the dream is a wish-fulfilment, it should be impossible for
any painful emotions to come into it: on this point the lay critics seem to be
right. But the matter is complicated by three considerations which they have
overlooked.
First, it may happen that the dream-work is not wholly successful in
creating a wish-fulfilment, so that part of the painful feeling in the latent
thoughts is carried over into the manifest dream. Analysis would then have
to show that these thoughts were a great deal more painful than the dream

which is formed from them; this much can be proved in every instance. We
admit then that the dream-work has failed in its purpose, just as a dream of
drinking excited by the stimulus of thirst fails to quench that thirst. One is
still thirsty after it and has to wake up and drink. Nevertheless, it is a proper
dream: it has renounced nothing of its essential nature. We must say: “Ut
desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.” The clearly recognizable
intention remains a praiseworthy one, at any rate. Such instances of failure
in the work are by no means rare, and one reason is that it is so much more
difficult for the dream-work to produce the required change in the nature of
the affect than to modify the content; affects are often very intractable. So it
happens that in the process of the dream-work the painful content of the
dream-thoughts is transformed into a wish-fulfilment while the painful
affect persists unchanged. When this occurs the affect is quite out of
harmony with the content, which gives our critics the opportunity of
remarking that the dream is so far from being a wish-fulfilment that even a
harmless content may be accompanied in it by painful feelings. Our answer
to this rather unintelligent comment will be that it is just in dreams of this
sort that the wish-fulfilling tendency of the dream-work is most apparent,
because it is there seen in isolation. The mistake in this criticism arises
because people who are not familiar with the neuroses imagine a more
intimate connection between content and affect than actually exists, and so
cannot understand that there may be an alteration in the content while the
accompanying affect remains unchanged.
A second consideration, much more important and far-reaching but
equally overlooked by the laity, is the following. A wish-fulfilment must
certainly bring some pleasure; but we go on to ask: “To whom?” Of course
to the person who has the wish. But we know that the attitude of the
dreamer towards his wishes is a peculiar one: he rejects them, censors them,
in short, he will have none of them. Their fulfilment then can afford him no
pleasure, rather the opposite, and here experience shows that this
“opposite,” which has still to be explained, takes the form of anxiety. The
dreamer, where his wishes are concerned, is like two separate people
closely linked together by some important thing in common. Instead of
enlarging upon this I will remind you of a well-known fairy-tale in which
you will see these relationships repeated. A good fairy promised a poor man
and his wife to fulfil their first three wishes. They were delighted and made
up their minds to choose the wishes carefully. But the woman was tempted

by the smell of some sausages being cooked in the next cottage and wished
for two like them. Lo! and behold, there they were—and the first wish was
fulfilled. With that, the man lost his temper and in his resentment wished
that the sausages might hang on the tip of his wife’s nose. This also came to
pass, and the sausages could not be removed from their position; so the
second wish was fulfilled, but it was the man’s wish and its fulfilment was
most unpleasant for the woman. You know the rest of the story: as they
were after all man and wife, the third wish had to be that the sausages
should come off the end of the woman’s nose. We might make use of this
fairy-tale many times over in other contexts, but here it need only serve to
illustrate the fact that it is possible for the fulfilment of one person’s wish to
be very disagreeable to someone else, unless the two people are entirely at
one.
It will not be difficult now to arrive at a still better understanding of
anxiety-dreams. There is just one more observation to be made use of and
then we may adopt an hypothesis which is supported by several
considerations. The observation is that anxiety-dreams often have a content
in which there is no distortion; it has, so to speak, escaped the censorship.
This type of dream is frequently an undisguised wish-fulfilment, the wish
being of course not one which the dreamer would accept but one which he
has rejected; anxiety has developed in place of the working of the
censorship. Whereas the infantile dream is an open fulfilment of a wish
admitted by the dreamer, and the ordinary distorted dream is the disguised
fulfilment of a repressed wish, the formula for the anxiety-dream is that it is
the open fulfilment of a repressed wish. Anxiety is an indication that the
repressed wish has proved too strong for the censorship and has
accomplished or was about to accomplish its fulfilment in spite of it. We
can understand that fulfilment of a repressed wish can only be, for us who
are on the side of the censorship, an occasion for painful emotions and for
setting up a defence. The anxiety then manifested in our dreams is, if you
like to put it so, anxiety experienced because of the strength of wishes
which at other times we manage to stifle. The study of dreams alone does
not reveal to us why this defence takes the form of anxiety; obviously we
must consider the latter in other connections.
The hypothesis which holds good for anxiety-dreams without any
distortion may be adopted also for those which have undergone some
degree of distortion, and for other kinds of unpleasant dreams in which the

accompanying unpleasant feelings probably approximate to anxiety.
Anxiety-dreams generally wake us; we usually break off our sleep before
the repressed wish behind the dream overcomes the censorship and reaches
complete fulfilment. In such a case the dream has failed to achieve its
purpose, but its essential character is not thereby altered. We have compared
the dream with a night-watchman, a guardian of sleep, whose purpose it is
to protect sleep from interruption. Now night-watchmen also, just like
dreams, have to rouse sleepers when they are not strong enough to ward off
the cause of disturbance or danger alone. Nevertheless we do sometimes
succeed in continuing to sleep even when our dreams begin to give us some
uneasiness and to turn to anxiety. We say to ourselves in sleep: “It is only a
dream after all,” and go on sleeping.
You may ask when it happens that the dream-wish is able to overcome
the censorship. This may depend either on the wish or on the censorship: it
may be that for unknown reasons the strength of the wish at times becomes
excessive; but our impression is that it is more often the attitude of the
censorship which is responsible for this shifting in the balance of power. We
have already heard that the censorship works with varying intensity in each
individual instance, treating the different elements with different degrees of
strictness; now we may add that it is very variable in its general behaviour
and does not show itself always equally severe towards the same element. If
then it chances that the censorship feels itself for once powerless against
some dream-wish which threatens to overthrow it, it then, instead of making
use of distortion, employs the last weapon left to it and destroys sleep by
bringing about an access of anxiety.
At this point it strikes us that we still have no idea why these evil,
rejected wishes rise up just at night-time, so as to disturb us when we sleep.
The answer can hardly be found except in another hypothesis which goes
back to the nature of sleep itself. During the day the heavy pressure of a
censorship is exercised upon these wishes and, as a rule, it is impossible for
them to make themselves felt at all. But in the night it is probable that this
censorship, like all the other interests of mental life, is suspended, or at least
very much weakened, in favour of the single desire for sleep. So it is due to
this partial abrogation of the censorship at night that the forbidden wishes
can again become active. There are nervous people suffering from insomnia
who confess that their sleeplessness was voluntary in the first instance; for
they did not dare to go to sleep because they were afraid of their dreams—

that is to say, they feared the consequences of the diminished vigilance of
the censorship. You will have no difficulty in understanding that this
curtailment of the censorship does not argue any flagrant carelessness: sleep
impairs our motor functions; even if our evil intentions do begin to stir
within us the utmost they can do is to produce a dream, which is for all
practical purposes harmless; and it is this comforting circumstance which
gives rise to the sleeper’s remark, made, it is true, in the night but yet not
part of his dream-life: “It is only a dream.” So we let it have its way and
continue to sleep.
Thirdly, if you call to mind our idea that the dreamer striving against
his own wishes is like a combination of two persons, separate and yet
somehow intimately united, you will be able to understand another possible
way in which something that is highly unpleasant may be brought about
through wish-fulfilment: I am speaking of punishment. Here again the fairy-
tale of the three wishes may help to make things clear. The sausages on the
plate were the direct fulfilment of the first person’s (the woman’s) wish; the
sausages on the tip of her nose were the fulfilment of the second person’s
(the husband’s) wish, but at the same time they were the punishment for the
foolish wish of the wife. In the neuroses we shall meet with wishes
corresponding in motivation to the third wish of the fairy-tale, the only one
left. There are many such punishment tendencies in the mental life of man;
they are very strong and we may well regard them as responsible for some
of our painful dreams. Now you will probably think that with all this there
is very little of the famous wish-fulfilment left; but on closer consideration
you will admit that you are wrong. In comparison with the manifold
possibilities (to be discussed later) of what dreams might be—according to
some writers, what they actually are—the solution: wish-fulfilment,
anxiety-fulfilment, punishment-fulfilment, is surely quite a narrow one. Add
to this, that anxiety is the direct opposite of a wish and that opposites lie
very near one another in association and, as we have learned, actually
coincide in the unconscious. Moreover, punishment itself is the fulfilment
of a wish, namely, the wish of the other, censoring person.
On the whole then, I have made no concession to your objections to
the wish-fulfilment theory; we are bound, however, to demonstrate its
presence in any and every distorted dream, and we have certainly no desire
to shirk this task. Let us go back to the dream we have already interpreted,
about the three bad theatre tickets for one florin and a half, from which we

have already learnt a good deal. I hope you still remember it: A lady, whose
husband told her one day about the engagement of her friend Elise who was
only three months younger than herself, dreamt on the following night that
she and her husband were at the theatre and that one side of the stalls was
almost empty. Her husband told her that Elise and her fiancé had wanted to
go to the theatre too; but could not, because they could only get such bad
seats, three tickets for a florin and a half. His wife said that they had not lost
much by it. We discovered that the dream-thoughts had to do with her
vexation at having been in such a hurry to marry and her dissatisfaction
with her husband. We may well be curious how these gloomy thoughts can
have been transformed into a wish-fulfilment, and what trace of it can be
found in the manifest content. Now we know already that the element “too
soon, too great a hurry,” was eliminated by the censorship; the empty stalls
are an allusion to this element. The puzzling phrase three for one and a half
florins is now more comprehensible to us than at first, through the
knowledge of symbolism that we have acquired since then.[42] The number
three really stands for a man and we can easily translate the manifest
element to mean: “to buy a man (husband) with the dowry.” (“I could have
bought one ten times better for my dowry.”) Going to the theatre obviously
stands for marriage. Getting the tickets too soon is in fact a direct substitute
for “marrying too soon.” Now this substitution is the work of the wish-
fulfilment. The dreamer had not always felt so dissatisfied with her
premature marriage as she was on the day when she heard of her friend’s
engagement. She had been proud of her marriage at the time and considered
herself more highly favoured than her friend. One hears that naïve girls, on
becoming engaged, frequently express their delight at the idea that they will
now soon be able to go to all plays and see everything hitherto forbidden
them.
The indication of curiosity and a desire to “look on” evinced here
comes, without doubt, originally from the sexual ‘gazing-impulse,’
especially regarding the parents, and this became a strong motive impelling
the girl to marry early; in this manner going to the theatre became an
obvious allusive substitute for getting married. In her vexation at the
present time on account of her premature marriage she therefore reverted to
the time when this same marriage fulfilled a wish, by gratifying her
skoptophilia; and so, guided by this old wish-impulse, she replaced the idea
of marriage by that of going to the theatre.

We may say that the example we have chosen to demonstrate a hidden
wish-fulfilment is not the most convenient one, but in all other distorted
dreams we should have to proceed in a manner analogous to that employed
above. It is not possible for me to do this here and now, so I will merely
express my conviction that such procedure will invariably meet with
success. But I wish to dwell longer upon this point in our theory: experience
has taught me that it is one of the most perilous of the whole theory of
dreams, exposed to many contradictions and misunderstandings. Besides,
you are perhaps still under the impression that I have already retracted part
of my statement by saying that the dream may be either a wish-fulfilment,
or its opposite, an anxiety or a punishment, brought to actuality; and you
may think this a good opportunity to force me to make further reservations.
Also I have been reproached with presenting facts that seem obvious to
myself in a manner too condensed to carry conviction.
When anyone has gone as far as this in dream-interpretation and has
accepted all our conclusions up to this point, it often happens that he comes
to a standstill at this question of wish-fulfilment and asks: “Admitting that
every dream means something and that this meaning may be discovered by
employing the technique of psycho-analysis, why must it always, in face of
all the evidence to the contrary, be forced into the formula of wish-
fulfilment? Why must our thoughts at night be any less many-sided than our
thoughts by day; so that at one time a dream might be a fulfilment of some
wish; at another time, as you say yourself, the opposite, the actualization of
a dread; or, again, the expression of a resolution, a warning, a weighing of
some problem with its pro’s and con’s, or a reproof, some prick of
conscience, or an attempt to prepare oneself for something which has to be
done—and so forth? Why this perpetual insistence upon a wish or, at the
most, its opposite?”
It might be supposed that a difference of opinion on this point is a
matter of no great moment, if there is agreement on all others. Cannot we
be satisfied with having discovered the meaning of dreams and the ways by
which we can find out the meaning? We surely go back on the advance we
have made if we try to limit this meaning too strictly. But this is not so. A
misunderstanding on this head touches what is essential to our knowledge
of dreams and imperils its value for the understanding of neuroses.
Moreover, that readiness to “oblige the other party” which has its value in

business life is not only out of place but actually harmful in scientific
matters.
My first answer to the question why dreams should not be many-sided
in their meaning is the usual one in such a case: I do not know why they
should not be so, and should have no objection if they were. As far as I am
concerned, they can be so! But there is just one trifling obstacle in the way
of this wider and more convenient conception of dreams—that as a matter
of fact they are not so. My second answer would emphasize the point that to
assume that dreams represent manifold modes of thought and intellectual
operations is by no means a novel idea to myself: once, in the history of a
pathological case, I recorded a dream which occurred three nights running
and never again; and gave it as my explanation that this dream
corresponded to a resolution, the repetition of which became unnecessary as
soon as that resolution was carried out. Later on, I published a dream which
represented a confession. How is it possible for me then to contradict
myself and assert that dreams are always and only wish-fulfilments?
I do it rather than permit a stupid misunderstanding which might cost
us the fruit of all our labours on the subject of dreams; a misunderstanding
that confounds the dream with the latent dream-thoughts, and makes
statements with regard to the former which are applicable to the latter and
to the latter only. For it is perfectly true that dreams can represent, and be
themselves replaced by, all the modes of thought just enumerated:
resolutions, warnings, reflections, preparations or attempts to solve some
problem in regard to conduct, and so on. But when you look closely, you
will recognize that all this is true only of the latent thoughts which have
been transformed into the dream. You learn from interpretations of dreams
that the unconscious thought-processes of mankind are occupied with such
resolutions, preparations and reflections, out of which dreams are formed
by means of the dream-work. If your interest at any given moment is not so
much in the dream-work, but centres on the unconscious thought-processes
in people, you will then eliminate the dream-formation and say of dreams
themselves, what is for all practical purposes correct, that they represent a
warning, a resolve, and so on. This is what is often done in psycho-analytic
work: generally we endeavour simply to demolish the manifest form of
dreams and to substitute for it the corresponding latent thoughts in which
the dream originated.

Thus it is that we learn quite incidentally from our attempt to assess
the latent dream-thoughts that all the highly complicated mental acts we
have enumerated can be performed unconsciously—a conclusion surely as
tremendous as it is bewildering.
But to go back a little: you are quite right in speaking of dreams as
representing these various modes of thought, provided that you are quite
clear in your own minds that you are using an abbreviated form of
expression and do not imagine that the manifold variety of which you speak
is in itself part of the essential nature of dreams. When you speak of “a
dream” you must mean either the manifest dream, i.e. the product of the
dream-work, or at most that work itself, i.e. the mental process which forms
the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream. To use the word in any
other sense is a confusion of ideas which is bound to be mischievous. If
what you say is meant to apply to the latent thoughts behind the dream, then
say so plainly, and do not add to the obscurity of the problem by your loose
way of expressing yourselves. The latent dream-thoughts are the material
which is transformed by the dream-work into the manifest dream. What
makes you constantly confound the material with the process which deals
with it? If you do that, in what way are you superior to those who know of
the final product only, without being able to explain where it comes from or
how it is constructed?
The only thing essential to the dream itself is the dream-work which
has operated upon the thought-material; and when we come to theory we
have no right to disregard this, even if in certain practical situations it may
be neglected. Further, analytic observation shows that the dream-work
never consists merely in translating the latent thoughts into the archaic or
regressive forms of expression described. On the contrary, something is
invariably added which does not belong to the latent thoughts of the day-
time, but which is the actual motive force in dream-formation; this
indispensable component being the equally unconscious wish, to fulfil
which the content of the dream is transformed. In so far, then, as you are
considering only the thoughts represented in it, the dream may be any
conceivable thing—a warning, a resolve, a preparation, and so on; but
besides this, it itself is always the fulfilment of an unconscious wish, and,
when you regard it as the result of the dream-work, it is this alone. A dream
then is never simply the expression of a resolve or warning, and nothing
more: in it the resolve, or whatever it may be, is translated into the archaic

form with the assistance of an unconscious wish, and metamorphosed in
such a way as to be a fulfilment of that wish. This single characteristic, that
of fulfilling a wish, is the constant one: the other component varies; it may
indeed itself be a wish; in which event the dream represents the fulfilment
of a latent wish from our waking hours brought about by the aid of an
unconscious wish.
Now all this is quite clear to myself, but I do not know whether I have
succeeded in making it equally clear to you; and it is difficult to prove it to
you; for, on the one hand, proof requires the evidence afforded by a careful
analysis of many dreams and, on the other hand, this, the crucial and most
important point in our conception of dreams, cannot be presented
convincingly without reference to considerations upon which we have not
yet touched. Seeing how closely linked up all phenomena are, you can
hardly imagine that we can penetrate very far into the nature of any one of
them without troubling ourselves about others of a similar nature. Since as
yet we know nothing about those phenomena which are so nearly akin to
dreams—neurotic symptoms—we must once more content ourselves with
what we actually have achieved. I will merely give you the explanation of
one more example and adduce a new consideration.
Let us take once more that dream to which we have already reverted
several times, the one about the three theatre tickets for one florin and a
half. I can assure you that I had no ulterior motive in selecting it in the first
instance for an illustration. You know what the latent thoughts were: the
vexation, after hearing that her friend had only just become engaged, that
she herself should have married so hastily; depreciation of her husband and
the idea that she could have found a better one if only she had waited. We
also know already that the wish which made a dream out of these thoughts
was the desire to “look on,” to be able to go to the theatre—very probably
an offshoot of an old curiosity to find out at last what really does happen
after marriage. It is well known that in children this curiosity is regularly
directed towards the sexual life of the parents; that is to say, it is an infantile
impulse and, wherever it persists later in life, it has its roots in the infantile
period. But the news received on the day previous to the dream gave no
occasion for the awakening of this skoptophilia; it only roused vexation and
regret. This wish-impulse (of skoptophilia) was not at first connected with
the latent thoughts, and the results of the dream-interpretation could have
been used by the analysis without taking it into consideration at all. But

again, the vexation was not in itself capable of producing a dream: no
dream could be formed out of the thought: “It was folly to be in such a
hurry to marry” until that thought had stirred up the early wish to see at last
what happened after marriage. Then this wish formed the dream-content,
substituting for marriage the going to the theatre; and the form was that of
the fulfilment of the earlier wish: “Now I may go to the theatre and look at
all that we have never been allowed to see; and you may not. I am married
and you have got to wait.” In this way the actual situation was transformed
into its opposite and an old triumph substituted for the recent discomfiture;
and incidentally, satisfaction both of a ‘gazing’ impulse and of one of
egoistic rivalry was brought about. It is this latter satisfaction which
determines the manifest content of the dream; for in it she is actually sitting
in the theatre, while her friend cannot get in. Those portions of the dream-
content behind which the latent thoughts still conceal themselves are to be
found in the form of inappropriate and incomprehensible modifications of
the gratifying situation. The business of interpretation is to put aside those
features in the whole which merely represent a wish-fulfilment and to
reconstruct the painful latent dream-thoughts from these indications.
The consideration which I said I wished to call to your notice is
intended to direct your attention to these latent dream-thoughts now brought
into prominence. I must beg you not to forget that, first, the dreamer is
unconscious of them; secondly that they are quite reasonable and coherent,
so that we can understand them as comprehensible reactions to whatever
stimulus has given rise to the dream; and, thirdly, that they may have the
value of any mental impulse or intellectual operation. I will designate these
thoughts more strictly now than hitherto as the residue from the previous
day; the dreamer may acknowledge them or not. I then distinguish between
this ‘residue’ and ‘latent dream-thoughts,’ so that, as we have been
accustomed to do all along, I will call everything which we learn from the
interpretation of the dream ‘the latent dream-thoughts,’ while ‘the residue
from the previous day’ is only a part of the latent dream-thoughts. Then our
conception of what happens is this: something has been added to the residue
from the previous day, something which also belongs to the unconscious, a
strong but repressed wish-impulse, and it is this alone which makes the
formation of a dream possible. The wish-impulse, acting upon the ‘residue,’
creates the other part of the latent dream-thoughts, that part which no longer

need appear rational or comprehensible from the point of view of our
waking life.
To illustrate the relation between the residue and the unconscious wish
I have elsewhere made use of a comparison which I cannot do better than
repeat here. Every business undertaking requires a capitalist to defray the
expenses and an entrepreneur who has the idea and understands how to
carry it out. Now the part of the capitalist in dream-formation is always and
only played by the unconscious wish; it supplies the necessary fund of
mental energy for it: the entrepreneur is the residue from the previous day,
determining the manner of the expenditure. It is, of course, quite possible
for the capitalist himself to have the idea and the special knowledge needed,
or for the entrepreneur himself to have capital. This simplifies the practical
situation but makes the theory of it more difficult. In economics we
discriminate between the man in his function of capitalist and the same man
in his capacity as entrepreneur; and this distinction restores the fundamental
situation upon which our comparison is based. The same variations are to
be found in the formation of dreams: I leave you to follow them out for
yourselves.
We cannot go any further at this point; for I think it likely that a
disturbing thought has long since occurred to you and it deserves a hearing.
You may ask: “Is the so-called ‘residue’ really unconscious in the sense in
which the wish necessary for the formation of the dream is unconscious?”
Your suspicion is justified: this is the salient point in the whole matter. They
are not both unconscious in the same sense. The dream-wish belongs to a
different type of UNCONSCIOUS, which, as we have seen, has its roots in
the infantile period and is furnished with special mechanisms. It is very
expedient to distinguish the two types of “unconscious” from one another
by speaking of them in different terms. But, all the same, we will rather
wait until we have familiarized ourselves with the phenomena of the
neuroses. If our conception of the existence of any kind of unconscious be
already regarded as fantastic, what will people say if we admit that to reach
our solution we have had to assume two kinds?
Let us break off at this point. Once more you have heard only an
incomplete statement; but is it not a hopeful thought that this knowledge
will be carried further, either by ourselves or by those who come after us?
And have not we ourselves learnt enough that is new and startling?

FIFTEENTH LECTURE
DOUBTFUL POINTS AND CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS

We will not leave the subject of dreams without dealing with the most
common doubts and uncertainties arising in connection with the novel ideas
and conceptions we have been discussing: those of you who have followed
these lectures attentively will have collected some material of the kind.
1. You may have received an impression that even with strict
adherence to technique our work of dream-interpretation leaves so much
room for uncertainty that reliable translation of manifest dreams into their
latent dream-thoughts will be thereby frustrated. You will urge first that one
never knows whether any particular element in a dream is to be understood
literally or symbolically, since things employed as symbols do not thereby
cease to be themselves. Where there is no objective evidence to decide the
question the interpretation on that particular point will be left to be
arbitrarily determined by the interpreter. Further, since in the dream-work
opposites coincide, it is in every instance uncertain whether a specific
dream-element is to be understood in a positive or a negative sense, as itself
or as its opposite—another opportunity for the interpreter to exercise a
choice. Thirdly, on account of the frequency with which inversion of every
kind is employed in dreams, it is open to him to assume whenever he
chooses that such an inversion has taken place. Finally you will point to
having heard that one is seldom certain that the interpretation arrived at is
the only possible one, and that there is danger of overlooking another
perfectly admissible interpretation of the same dream. In these
circumstances, you will conclude, the discretion of the interpreter has a
latitude that seems incompatible with any objective certainty in the result.
Or you may also assume that the fault does not lie in dreams themselves,
but that something erroneous in our conceptions and premises produces the
unsatisfactory character of our interpretations.
All that you say is undeniable and yet I do not think it justifies either
of your conclusions: that dream-interpretation as practised by us is at the

mercy of the interpreter’s arbitrary decisions or that the inadequacy of the
results calls in question the correctness of our procedure. If for the
“arbitrary decision” of the interpreter you will substitute his skill, his
experience and his understanding, then I am with you. This kind of personal
factor is of course indispensable, especially when interpretation is difficult;
it is just the same in other scientific work, however; it can’t be helped that
one man will use any given technique less well, or apply it better, than
another. The impression of arbitrariness made, for example, by the
interpretation of symbols is corrected by the reflection that as a rule the
connection of the dream-thoughts with one another, and of the dream with
the life of the dreamer and the whole mental situation at the time of the
dream, points directly to one of all the possible interpretations and renders
all the rest useless. The conclusion that the imperfect character of the
interpretations proceeds from fallacious hypotheses loses its force when
consideration shows that, on the contrary, the ambiguity or indefiniteness of
dreams is a quality which we should necessarily expect in them.
Let us call to mind our statement that the dream-work undertakes a
translation of the dream-thoughts into a primitive mode of expression,
analogous to hieroglyphics. Now all such primitive systems of expression
are necessarily accompanied by ambiguity and indefiniteness; but we
should not on that account be justified in doubting their practicability. You
know that the coincidence of opposites in the dream-work is analogous to
what is called the antithetical sense of primal words in the oldest languages.
The philologist, R. Abel, to whom we owe this information, writing in
1884, begs us not on any account to imagine that there was any ambiguity
in what one person said to another by means of ambivalent words of this
sort. On the contrary, intonation, gestures and the whole context can have
left no doubt whatever which of the two opposites the speaker had in mind
to convey. In writing where gestures are absent the addition of little
pictorial signs, not meant to receive separate oral expression, replaced
them: e.g. a drawing of a little man, either crouching or standing upright,
according as the ambiguous ken of the hieroglyphic meant “weak” or
“strong.” So that misunderstanding was avoided in spite of the ambiguity of
sounds and signs.
In ancient systems of expression, for instance, in the scripts of the
oldest languages, indefiniteness of various kinds is found with a frequency
which we should not tolerate in our writings to-day. Thus in many Semitic

writings only the consonants of the words appear: the omitted vowels have
to be supplied by the reader from his knowledge and from the context.
Hieroglyphic writing follows a similar principle, although not exactly the
same; and this is the reason why nothing is known of the pronunciation of
ancient Egyptian. There are besides other kinds of indefiniteness in the
sacred writings of the Egyptians: for example, it is left to the writer’s choice
to inscribe the pictures from right to left or from left to right. To be able to
read them, we have to remember that we must be guided by the direction of
the faces of the figures, birds, and so forth. But it was also open to the
writer to set the pictures in vertical columns and, in the case of inscriptions
on smaller objects, he was led by considerations of what was pleasing to the
eye, and of the space at his disposal, to introduce still further alterations in
the arrangement of the signs. The most confusing feature in hieroglyphic
script is that there is no spacing between the words. The pictures are all
placed at equal intervals on the page, and it is generally impossible to know
whether any given sign goes with the preceding one or forms the beginning
of a new word. In Persian cuneiform writing, on the other hand, a slanting
sign is used to separate the words.
The Chinese language, both spoken and written, is exceedingly ancient
but is still used to-day by four hundred million people. Don’t suppose that I
understand it at all; I only obtained some information about it because I
hoped to find in it analogies to the kinds of indefiniteness occurring in
dreams; nor was I disappointed in my expectation, for Chinese is so full of
uncertainties as positively to terrify one. As is well known, it consists of a
number of syllabic sounds which are pronounced singly or doubled in
combination. One of the chief dialects has about four hundred of these
sounds, and since the vocabulary of this dialect is estimated at somewhere
about four thousand words it is evident that every sound has an average of
ten different meanings—some fewer, but some all the more. For this reason
there are a whole series of devices to escape ambiguity, for the context
alone will not show which of the ten possible meanings of the syllable the
speaker wishes to convey to the hearer. Amongst these devices is the
combining of two sounds into a single word and the use of four different
“tones” in which these syllables may be spoken. For purposes of our
comparison a still more interesting fact is that this language is practically
without grammar: it is impossible to say of any of the one-syllabled words
whether it is a noun, a verb or an adjective; and, further, there are no

inflections to show gender, number, case, tense or mood. The language
consists, as we may say, of the raw material only; just as our thought-
language is resolved into its raw material by the dream-work omitting to
express the relations in it. Wherever there is any uncertainty in Chinese the
decision is left to the intelligence of the listener, who is guided by the
context. I made a note of a Chinese saying, which literally translated runs
thus: “Little what see, much what wonderful.” This is simple enough to
understand. It may mean: “The less a man has seen, the more he finds to
wonder at,” or “There is much to wonder at for the man who has seen
little.” Naturally there is no occasion to choose between these two
translations which differ only in grammatical construction. We are assured
that in spite of these uncertainties the Chinese language is a quite
exceptionally good medium of expression; so it is clear that indefiniteness
does not necessarily lead to ambiguity.
Now we must certainly admit that the position of affairs is far less
favourable in regard to the mode of expression in dreams than it is with
these ancient tongues and scripts; for these latter were originally designed
as a means of communication; that is, they were intended to be understood,
no matter what ways or means they had to employ. But just this character is
lacking to dreams: their object is not to tell anyone anything; they are not a
means of communication; on the contrary, it is important to them not to be
understood. So we ought not to be surprised or misled if the result is that a
number of the ambiguities and uncertainties in dreams cannot be
determined. The only certain piece of knowledge gained from our
comparison is that this indefiniteness (which people would like to make use
of as an argument against the accuracy of our dream-interpretations) is
rather to be recognized as a regular characteristic of all primitive systems of
expression.
Practice and experience alone can determine the extent to which
dreams can in actual fact be understood. My own opinion is that this is
possible to a very great extent; and a comparison of the results obtained by
properly-trained analysts confirms my view. It is well known that the lay
public, even in scientific circles, delights to make a parade of superior
scepticism in the face of the difficulties and uncertainties which beset a
scientific achievement; I think they are wrong in so doing. You may
possibly not at all know that the same thing happened at the time when the
Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions were being deciphered. There was a

point at which public opinion was active in declaring that the men
deciphering the cuneiform writing were victims of a chimera and that the
whole business of investigation was a fraud. But in the year 1857 the Royal
Asiatic Society made a conclusive test. They challenged four of the most
distinguished men engaged in this branch of research—Rawlinson, Hincks,
Fox Talbot and Oppert—to send to the Society in sealed envelopes
independent translations of a newly-discovered inscription, and, after
comparing the four versions, they were able to announce that there was
sufficient agreement between the four to justify belief in what had been
achieved and confidence in further progress. The mockery of the learned
laity then gradually came to an end, and certainty in the reading of
cuneiform documents has advanced enormously since then.
2. A second series of objections is closely connected with an
impression which you also have probably not escaped; namely, that a
number of the solutions achieved by our method of dream-interpretation
seem strained, specious, “dragged in,”—in other words, forced, or even
comical or joking. These criticisms are so frequent that I will take at
random the last that has come to my ears. Now listen: a head-master in
Switzerland—that free country—was recently asked to resign his post on
account of his interest in psycho-analysis. He protested and a Berne paper
published the decision of the school authorities on his case. I shall quote a
few sentences from the article which refer to psycho-analysis: “Further, we
are amazed at the far-fetched and factitious character of many of the
examples given in the said book by Dr. Pfister of Zurich.... It is indeed a
matter for surprise that the head-master of a Training College should accept
so credulously all these assertions and such specious evidence.” These
sentences purport to be the final opinion of “One who judges calmly.” I am
much more inclined to think this “calm” factitious. Let us examine these
remarks more closely in the expectation that a certain amount of reflection
and knowledge of the subject will do no harm, even to a “calm judgement.”
It is really quite refreshing to see how swiftly and unerringly anyone
relying merely on his first impressions can arrive at an opinion on some
critical question of psychology in its more abstruse aspects. The
interpretations seem to him far-fetched and strained, and do not commend
themselves to him; consequently, they are wrong and the whole business is
rubbish. Such critics never give even a passing thought to the possibility
that there may be good reasons why the interpretations are bound to convey

this very impression—a thought which would lead to the further question
what these good reasons are.
The circumstance which calls forth this criticism is essentially related
to the effect of displacement, which you have learnt to know as the most
powerful instrument in the service of the dream-censorship. With its aid the
substitute-formations which we call allusions are created; but these
allusions are of a kind not easy to recognize as such; nor is it easy to
discover the thought proper by working back from them, for they are
connected with it by the most extraordinary and unusual extrinsic
associations. But the whole matter throughout concerns things which are
meant to be hidden, intended to be concealed: that is exactly the object of
the dream-censorship. We must not expect, though, to find something that
has been hidden by looking in the very place where it ordinarily belongs.
The frontier surveillance authorities nowadays are a good deal more
cunning in this respect than the Swiss school authorities; for they are not
content with examining portfolios and letter-cases when hunting for
documents and plans; but consider the possibility that spies and smugglers
may conceal anything compromising about their persons, in places where it
is most difficult to detect and where such things certainly do not belong, for
example, between the double soles of their boots. If the concealed articles
are found there, it is certainly true that they have been “dragged” to light,
but they are none the less a very good “find.”
In admitting the possibility that the connection between a latent dream-
element and its manifest substitute may appear most remote and
extraordinary, sometimes even comical or joking, we are guided by our
wide experience of instances in which we did not as a rule find the meaning
ourselves. It is often impossible to arrive at such interpretations by our own
efforts: no sane person could guess the bridge connecting the two. The
dreamer either solves the riddle straightaway by a direct association (he can
do it because it is in his mind that the substitute-formation originated); or
else he provides so much material that there is no longer any need for
special penetration in order to solve it—the solution thrusts itself upon us as
inevitable. If the dreamer does not help us in either of these two ways the
manifest element in question will remain for ever incomprehensible. Let me
give you one more instance of this kind which happened recently. A patient
of mine lost her father during the course of the treatment, after which she
seized every opportunity to bring him back to life in her dreams. In one of

these her father appeared in a certain connection otherwise not applicable
and said: “It is quarter past eleven, it is half past eleven, it is quarter to
twelve.” For the interpretation of this curious detail she could only provide
the association that her father was pleased when his older children were
punctual at the midday meal. This certainly fitted in with the dream-
element, but it threw no light on its origin. The situation which had just
been reached in the treatment gave good grounds for the suspicion that a
carefully-suppressed critical antagonism to her much loved and honoured
father had played a part in this dream. Following out her further
associations, apparently quite remote from the dream, she told how she had
heard a long discussion of psychological questions on the day before and a
relative had said: “Primitive man (Urmensch) survives in all of us.” Now a
light dawns on us. Here was again a splendid opportunity for her to imagine
that her dead father survived, and so in the dream she made him a “clock-
man” (Uhrmensch), telling the quarters up to the time of the midday meal.
The likeness to a pun in this cannot be ignored, and as a matter of fact
it has often happened that a dreamer’s pun has been ascribed to the
interpreter; there are yet other examples in which it is not at all easy to
decide whether we are dealing with a joke or a dream. But you will
remember that the same sort of doubt arose with some slips of the tongue. A
man related as a dream that he and his uncle were sitting in the latter’s auto
(automobile) and his uncle kissed him. The dreamer himself instantly
volunteered the interpretation: it meant “auto-erotism” (a term used in our
theory of the libido, signifying gratification obtained without any external
love-object). Now was this man allowing himself a joke at our expense and
pretending that a pun which occurred to him was part of a dream? I do not
think so: he really did dream it. But where does this bewildering
resemblance between dreams and jokes come from? At one time this
question took me somewhat out of my way, for it necessitated my making a
thorough investigation into the question of wit itself. This led to the
conclusion that wit originates as follows: a preconscious train of thought is
for a moment left to a process of unconscious elaboration, from which it
emerges in the form of a witticism. While under the influence of the
unconscious it is subject to the mechanisms there operative—to
condensation and displacement; that is to say, to the same processes as we
found at work in the dream-work; and the similarity sometimes found
between dreams and wit is to be ascribed to this character common to both.

But the unintentional “dream joke” does not amuse us as does an ordinary
witticism; a deeper study of wit may show you why this is so. The “dream
joke” strikes us as a poor form of wit; it does not make us laugh, it leaves us
cold.
Now in this we are following the path of the ancient method of dream-
interpretation, which has given us, besides much that is useless, many a
valuable example of interpretation upon which we ourselves could not
improve. I will tell you a dream of historic importance which is related in
slightly different versions by Plutarch and Artemidorus of Daldis, the
dreamer being Alexander the Great. When he was laying siege to the city of
Tyre, which was putting up an obstinate resistance (B.C. 322), he dreamt one
night that he saw a dancing satyr. The dream-interpreter Aristandros, who
accompanied the army on its campaigns, interpreted this dream by dividing
the word “satyros” into σὰ Τύρος (“Tyre is thine”), and prophesied from
this the king’s victory over the city. This interpretation decided Alexander to
continue the siege and eventually the city fell. The interpretation, factitious
as it seems, was undoubtedly the right one.
3. I can well imagine that you will be especially impressed on being
told that even people who have long studied the interpretation of dreams in
the course of their work as psycho-analysts have raised objections to our
conception of dreams. It would indeed have been exceptional if so excellent
an opportunity for new mistakes had been let slip; and so assertions have
been made, due to confusion of ideas and based on unjustifiable
generalizations, which are hardly less incorrect than the medical conception
of dreams. One of these statements you know already: that dreams deal with
attempts at adaptation to the situation at the moment and with the solution
of future problems; in other words, that they pursue a “prospective
tendency” or aim (A. Maeder). We have already demonstrated that this
statement rests upon a confusion between dreams and the latent dream-
thoughts and ignores the process of dream-work. If those who speak of this
“prospective tendency” mean thereby to characterize the unconscious
mental activity to which the latent thoughts belong, then, on the one hand,
they tell us nothing new and, on the other hand, the description is not
exhaustive; for unconscious mental activity occupies itself with many other
things besides preparation for the future. There seems to be a much worse
confusion behind the assurance that the “death clause” may be found
underlying every dream; I am not quite clear what this formula is intended

to mean, but I suspect that behind it the dream is confounded with the
whole personality of the dreamer.
An unjustifiable generalization, based on a few striking examples, is
contained in the statement that every dream admits of two kinds of
interpretation: one of the kind we have described, the so-called “psycho-
analytic” interpretation, and the other the so-called “anagogic,” which
disregards the instinctive tendencies and aims at a representation of the
higher mental functions (H. Silberer); there are dreams of this kind, but you
will seek in vain to extend this conception to include even a majority of
dreams. After all you have heard, the statement that all dreams are to be
interpreted bisexually, as a combination of two tendencies which may be
called male and female (A. Adler), will seem to you quite
incomprehensible. Here again, single dreams of this sort do of course occur
and later on you may learn that their structure is similar to that of certain
hysterical symptoms. I mention all these discoveries of new general
characteristics of dreams in order to warn you against them, or at least to
leave you in no doubt about my own opinion of them.
4. At one time the objective value of research into dreams seemed to
be discredited by the fact that patients treated analytically appeared to suit
the content of their dreams to the favourite theories of their doctors, one
class dreaming mainly of sexual impulses, and another of impulses for
mastery, others again even of rebirth (W. Stekel). The force of this
observation is weakened by the reflection that people dreamed dreams
before there was any such thing as psycho-analytic treatment to influence
their dreams and that the patients undergoing treatment nowadays also used
to dream before they began it. The actual fact in this supposedly new
observation is soon shown to be self-evident and of no consequence for the
theory of dreams. The residue from the previous day which gives rise to
dreams is a residue from the great interests of waking life. If the physician’s
words and the stimuli which he gives have become of importance to the
patient they then enter into whatever constitutes the residue and can act as
mental stimuli for dream-formation, just like other interests of affective
value roused on the preceding day which have not subsided; they operate in
the same way as bodily stimuli which affect the sleeper during sleep. Like
these other factors inciting dreams, the trains of thought roused by the
physician can appear in the manifest dream-content or be revealed in the
latent thoughts. We know indeed that dreams can be experimentally

produced, or, to speak more accurately, a part of the dream-material can be
thus introduced into the dream. In influencing his patients thus the analyst
plays a part no different from that of an experimenter, like Mourly Void,
who placed in certain positions the limbs of the person upon whom he
experimented.
We can often influence what a man shall dream about, but never what
he will dream; for the mechanism of the dream-work and the unconscious
dream-wish are inaccessible to external influence of any sort. We realized,
when we were considering dreams arising out of bodily stimuli, that in the
reaction to the bodily or mental stimuli brought to bear upon the dreamer
the peculiarity and independence of dream-life is clearly seen. The criticism
I have just discussed which tends to cast a doubt upon the objectivity of
dream investigation is again an assertion based upon confounding, this time
confounding dreams with—their material.
I wanted to tell you as much as this about the problems of dreams. You
will guess that I have passed over a great deal and will have discovered for
yourselves that my treatment of nearly every point has necessarily been
incomplete; but this is due to the phenomena of dreams being so closely
connected with those of the neuroses. Our plan was to study dreams as an
introduction to the study of the neuroses and it was certainly a better one
than beginning the other way about; but since dreams prepare us for
comprehension of the neuroses, so also can a correctly-formed estimate of
dreams be acquired only after some knowledge of neurotic manifestations
has been gained.
I do not know how you may think about it, but I can assure you that I
do not regret having taken up so much of your interest and of the time at
our disposal in the consideration of problems connected with dreams. I
know no other way by which one can so speedily arrive at conviction of the
correctness of those statements by which psycho-analysis stands or falls. It
requires strenuous work for many months, and even years, to demonstrate
that the symptoms in a case of neurotic illness have a meaning, serve a
purpose, and arise from the patient’s experiences in life. On the other hand,
a few hours’ effort may be enough to show these things in some dream
which at first seemed utterly confused and incomprehensible, and in this
way to confirm all the premises upon which psycho-analysis rests—the
existence of unconscious mental processes, the special mechanisms which

they obey, and the instinctive propelling forces which are expressed by
them. And when we remember how far-reaching is the analogy in the
structure of dreams to that of neurotic symptoms and, with that, reflect how
rapid is the transformation of a dreamer into a wide-awake, reasonable
human being, we acquire an assurance that the neuroses too depend only
upon an alteration in the balance of the forces at work in mental life.

PART III
GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES

SIXTEENTH LECTURE
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND PSYCHIATRY

It pleases me greatly to see you here again to continue our discussions
after a year has passed. Last year the subject of my lectures was the
application of psycho-analysis to errors and to dreams; I hope this year to
lead you to some comprehension of neurotic phenomena which, as you will
soon discover, have much in common with both our former subjects. I must
tell you before I begin, however, that I cannot concede you the same
attitude towards me now as I did last year. Then I endeavoured to make no
step without being in agreement with your judgement; I debated a great deal
with you, submitted to your objections, in fact, recognized you and your
“healthy common-sense” as the deciding factor. That is no longer possible
and for a very simple reason. Errors and dreams are phenomena which were
familiar to you; one might say you had as much experience of them as I, or
could easily have obtained it. The manifestations of neurosis, however, are
an unknown region to you; those of you who are not yourselves medical
men have no access there except through the accounts I give you; and of
what use is the most excellent judgement where there is no knowledge of
the subject under debate?
However, do not receive this announcement as though I were going to
give these lectures ex cathedra or to demand unconditional acceptance from
you. Any such misconception would do me a gross injustice. I do not aim at
producing conviction,—my aim is to stimulate enquiry and to destroy
prejudices. If owing to ignorance of the subject you are not in a position to
adjudicate, then you should neither believe nor reject. You should only
listen and allow what I tell you to make its own effect upon you.
Convictions are not so easily acquired, or, when they are achieved without
much trouble, they soon prove worthless and unstable. No one has a right to
conviction on these matters who has not worked at this subject for many
years, as I have, and has not himself experienced the same new and
astonishing discoveries. Then why these sudden convictions in intellectual

matters, lightning conversions, and instantaneous repudiations? Do you not
see that the coup de foudre, “love at first sight,” proceeds from a very
different mental sphere, from the affective one? We do not require even our
patients to bring with them any conviction in favour of psycho-analysis or
any devotion to it. It would make us suspicious of them. Benevolent
scepticism is the attitude in them which we like best. Therefore will you
also try to let psycho-analytical conceptions develop quietly in your minds
alongside the popular or the psychiatric view, until opportunities arise for
them to influence each other and be united into a decisive opinion.
On the other hand, you are not for a moment to suppose that the
psycho-analytic point of view which I shall lay before you is a speculative
system of ideas. On the contrary, it is the result of experience, being
founded either on direct observations or on conclusions drawn from
observation. Whether these have been drawn in an adequate or a justifiable
manner future advances in science will show; after nearly two and a half
decades and now that I am fairly well advanced in years I may say, without
boasting, that it was particularly difficult, intense, and all-absorbing work
that yielded these observations. I have often had the impression that our
opponents were unwilling to consider this source of our statements, as if
they looked upon them as ideas derived subjectively which anyone could
dispute at his own sweet will. This attitude on the part of my opponents is
not quite comprehensible to me. Perhaps it comes from the circumstance
that physicians pay so little attention to neurotics and listen so carelessly to
what they say that it has become impossible for them to perceive anything
in the patients’ communications or to make detailed observations from
them. I will take this opportunity of assuring you that in these lectures I
shall make few controversial references, least of all to individuals. I have
never been able to convince myself of the truth of the saying that “strife is
the father of all things.” I think the source of it was the philosophy of the
Greek sophists and that it errs, as does the latter, through the over
estimation of dialectics. It seems to me, on the contrary, that scientific
controversy, so-called, is on the whole quite unfruitful, apart from the fact
that it is almost always conducted in a highly personal manner. Until a few
years ago I could boast that I had only once been engaged in a regular
scientific dispute, and that with one single investigator, Löwenfeld of
Munich. The end of it was that we became friends and have remained so to

this day. But I did not repeat the experiment for a very long time because I
was not certain that the outcome would be the same.
Now you will surely judge that a refusal of this kind to discuss matters
publicly points to a high degree of inaccessibility to criticism, to obstinacy,
or, in the polite colloquialism of the scientific world, to “pig-
headedness.”[43] My reply to you would be that, should you have arrived at a
conviction by means of such hard work, you would also thereby derive a
certain right to maintain it with some tenacity. Further, on my own behalf, I
can say that in the course of my work I have modified my views on
important points, changed them or replaced them by others, and have of
course in each case published the fact. What has been the result of this
frankness? Some people have ignored my corrections of myself altogether
and still to-day criticize me in respect of views which no longer mean the
same to me. Others positively reproach me for these changes and declare
me to be unreliable on that account. No one who changes his views once or
twice deserves to be believed, for it is only too likely that he will be
mistaken again in his latest assertions; but anyone who sticks to anything he
has once said, or refuses to give way upon it easily enough, is obstinate or
pig-headed; is it not so? What is to be done in the face of these self-
contradictory criticisms except to remain as one is and behave as seems best
to one? This is what I decided to do; and I am not deterred from
remodelling and improving my theories in accordance with later
experience. I have so far found nothing to alter in my fundamental
standpoint and I hope this will never be necessary.
So now I have to lay before you the psycho-analytic theory of neurotic
manifestations. For this purpose it will be simplest, on account of both the
analogy and the contrast, to take an example which links up with the
phenomena we have already considered. I will take a ‘symptomatic act’
which I see many people commit in my own consulting-room. The analyst
has little to offer to the people who come to a physician’s consulting-room
for half-an-hour to recount the lifelong misery of their fate. His deeper
comprehension makes it difficult for him to give, as another might, the
opinion that there is nothing wrong with them and that they had better take
a light course of hydrotherapy. One of our colleagues once replied, with a
shrug, when asked how he dealt with consultation patients, that he “fined
them so many crowns for ‘wasting the time of the court.’” You will
therefore not be surprised to hear that even the busiest psycho-analysts are

not much sought after for consultations. I have had the ordinary door
between the waiting-room and my consulting-room supplemented by
another door and covered with felt. The reason for this is obvious. Now it
constantly happens when I admit people from the waiting-room that they
omit to close these doors, leaving even both doors open behind them. When
I see this happen, I at once, with some stiffness, request him or her to go
back and make good the omission, no matter how fine a gentleman he may
be nor how many hours she had spent on her toilet. My action gives the
impression of being uncalled-for and pedantic; occasionally too I have
found myself in the wrong, when the person turned out to be one of those
who cannot themselves grasp a door-handle and are glad when those with
them avoid it. But in the majority of cases I was right, for anyone who
behaves in this way and leaves the door of a physician’s consulting-room
open into the waiting-room belongs to the rabble and deserves to be
received with coldness. Now don’t allow yourselves to be biassed before
you have heard the rest. This omission on the part of a patient occurs only
when he has been waiting alone in the outer room and thus leaves an empty
room behind him, never when others, strangers to him, have also been
waiting there. In the latter case he knows very well that it is to his own
interest not to be overheard while he talks to the physician and he never
neglects to close both doors carefully.
Occurring in this way, the patient’s omission is neither accidental nor
meaningless, and not even unimportant, for it betrays the visitor’s attitude
to the physician. He belongs to that large class who seek those in high
places, and wish to be dazzled and intimidated. Perhaps he had made
enquiries by telephone at what time he would be most likely to gain
admittance and had been expecting to find a crowd of applicants in a queue,
as if at the grocer’s in war-time. Then he is shown into an empty room
which, moreover, is most modestly furnished, and he is dumbfounded. He
must somehow make the physician atone for the superfluous respect he had
been prepared to show him; and so he omits to close the doors between the
waiting- and the consulting-rooms. He intends this to mean: “Pooh! there is
no one here and I daresay there won’t be, however long I stay!” He would
behave during the interview in an uncivil and supercilious manner, too, if
his presumption were not curbed at the outset by a sharp reminder.
In the analysis of this little symptomatic act you find nothing that is
not already known to you; namely, the conclusion that it is no accident but

has in it motive, meaning, and intention; that it belongs to a mental context
which can be specified; and that it provides a small indication of a more
important mental process. But above all it implies that the process thus
indicated is not known to the consciousness of the person who carries it out;
for not one of the patients who left the two doors open would have admitted
that he wished to show any depreciation of me by his neglect. Many of
them could probably recall a sense of disappointment on entering the empty
waiting-room, but the connection between this impression and the
succeeding symptomatic act certainly remained outside their consciousness.
Now let us place this little analysis of a symptomatic act by the side of
an observation made on a patient. I will choose one which is fresh in my
memory, and also because it can be described in comparatively few words.
A certain amount of detail is indispensable for any such account.
A young officer, home on short leave of absence, asked me to treat his
mother-in-law, who was living in the happiest surroundings and yet was
embittering her own and her family’s lives by a nonsensical idea. I found
her a well-preserved lady, fifty-three years of age, of a friendly, simple
disposition, who gave without hesitation the following account of herself.
She is most happily married, and lives in the country with her husband who
manages a large factory. She cannot say enough of her husband’s kindness
and consideration; theirs had been a love-marriage thirty years ago, since
when they had never had a cloud, a quarrel, or a moment’s jealousy. Her
two children have both married well, but her husband’s sense of duty keeps
him still at work. A year before, an incredible and, to her, incomprehensible
thing happened. She received an anonymous letter telling her that her
excellent husband was carrying on an intrigue with a young girl, and
believed it on the spot—since then her happiness has been destroyed. The
details were more or less as follows: she had a housemaid with whom she
discussed confidential matters, perhaps rather too freely. This young woman
cherished a positively venomous hatred for another girl who had succeeded
better in life than herself, although of no better origin. Instead of going into
service, the other young woman had had a commercial training, been taken
into the factory and, owing to vacancies caused by the absence of staff on
service in the field, had been promoted to a good position. She lived in the
factory, knew all the gentlemen, and was even addressed as “Miss.” The
other one who had been left behind in life was only too ready to accuse her
former schoolmate of all possible evil. One day our patient and her

housemaid were discussing an elderly gentleman who had visited the house
and of whom it was said that he did not live with his wife but kept a
mistress. Why, she did not know, but she suddenly said: “I cannot imagine
anything more awful than to hear that my husband had a mistress.” The next
day she received by post an anonymous letter in disguised handwriting
which informed her of the very thing she had just imagined. She concluded
—probably correctly—that the letter was the handiwork of her malicious
housemaid, for the woman who was named as the mistress of her husband
was the very girl who was the object of this housemaid’s hatred. Although
she at once saw through the plot and had seen enough of such cowardly
accusations in her own surroundings to place little credence in them, our
patient was nevertheless prostrated by this letter. She became terribly
excited and at once sent for her husband to overwhelm him with reproaches.
The husband laughingly denied the accusation and did the best thing he
could. He sent for the family physician (who also attended the factory), and
he did his best to calm the unhappy lady. The next thing they did was also
most reasonable. The housemaid was dismissed, but not the supposed
mistress. From that time on the patient claims to have repeatedly brought
herself to a calm view of the matter, so that she no longer believes the
contents of the letter; but it has never gone very deep nor lasted very long.
It was enough to hear the young woman’s name mentioned, or to meet her
in the street, for a new attack of suspicion, agony, and reproaches to break
out.
This is the clinical picture of this excellent woman’s case. It did not
require much experience of psychiatry to perceive that, in contrast to other
neurotics, she described her symptoms too mildly—as we say, dissimulated
them—and that she had never really overcome her belief in the anonymous
letter.
Now what attitude does a psychiatrist take up to such a case? We know
already what he would say to the symptomatic act of a patient who does not
close the waiting-room doors. He explains it as an accident, without interest
psychologically, and no concern of his. But he cannot continue to take up
this attitude in regard to the case of the jealous lady. The symptomatic
action appears to be unimportant; the symptom calls for notice as a grave
matter. Subjectively it involves intense suffering, and objectively it
threatens to break up a family; its claim to psychiatric interest is therefore
indisputable. First the psychiatrist tries to characterize the symptom by

some essential attribute. The idea with which this lady torments herself
cannot be called nonsensical in itself; it does happen that elderly husbands
contract relationships with young women. But there is something else about
it that is nonsensical and incomprehensible. The patient has absolutely no
grounds, except the anonymous letter, for supposing that her loving and
faithful husband belongs to this category of men, otherwise not so
uncommon. She knows that this communication carries no proof, she can
explain its origin satisfactorily; she ought therefore to be able to say to
herself that she has no grounds for her jealousy and she does even say so,
but she suffers just as much as if she regarded her jealousy as well-founded.
Ideas of this kind that are inaccessible to logic and the arguments of reality
are unanimously described as delusions. The good lady suffers therefore,
from a delusion of jealousy. That is evidently the essential characteristic of
the case.
Having established this first point, our psychiatric interest increases.
When a delusion cannot be dissipated by the facts of reality, it probably
does not spring from reality. Where else then does it spring from? Delusions
can have the most various contents; why is the content of it in this case
jealousy? What kind of people have delusions, and particularly delusions of
jealousy? Now we should like to listen to the psychiatrist, but he leaves us
in the lurch here. He considers only one of our questions. He will examine
the family history of this woman and will perhaps bring us the answer that
the kind of people who suffer from delusions are those in whose families
similar or different disorders have occurred repeatedly. In other words, this
lady has developed a delusion because she had an hereditary predisposition
to do so. That is certainly something; but is it all that we want to know? Is it
the sole cause of her disease? Does it satisfy us to assume that it is
unimportant, arbitrary, or inexplicable that one kind of delusion should have
been developed instead of another? And are we to understand the
proposition—that the hereditary predisposition is decisive—also in a
negative sense; that is, that no matter what experiences and emotions life
had brought her she was destined some time or other to produce a delusion?
You will want to know why scientific psychiatry gives no further
explanation. And I reply: “Only a rogue gives more than he has.” The
psychiatrist knows of no path leading to any further explanation in such a
case. He has to content himself with a diagnosis and, in spite of wide
experience, with a very uncertain prognosis of its future course.

Now can psycho-analysis do better than this? Yes, certainly I hope to
show you that even in such an obscure case as this it is possible to discover
something which makes closer comprehension possible. First, I shall ask
you to notice this incomprehensible detail; that the anonymous letter on
which her delusion is founded was positively provoked by the patient
herself, by her saying to the scheming housemaid the day before that
nothing could be more awful than to hear that her husband had an intrigue
with a young woman. She first put the idea of sending the letter into the
servant’s mind by this. So the delusion acquires a certain independence of
the letter; it existed beforehand as a fear—or, as a wish?—in her mind.
Besides this, the further small indications revealed in the bare two hours of
analysis are noteworthy. The patient responded very coldly, it is true, to the
request to tell me her further thoughts, ideas, and recollections, after she
had finished her story. She declared that nothing came to her mind, she had
told me everything; and after two hours the attempt had to be given up,
because she announced that she felt quite well already and was certain that
the morbid idea would not return. Her saying this was naturally due to
resistance and to the fear of further analysis, In these two hours she had let
fall some remarks, nevertheless, which made a certain interpretation not
only possible but inevitable, and this interpretation threw a sharp light on
the origin of the delusion of jealousy. There actually existed in her an
infatuation for a young man, for the very son-in-law who had urged her to
seek my assistance. Of this infatuation she herself knew nothing or only
perhaps very little; in the circumstances of their relationship it was easily
possible for it to disguise itself as harmless tenderness on her part. After
what we have already learnt it is not difficult to see into the mind of this
good woman and excellent mother. Such an infatuation, such a monstrous,
impossible thing, could not come into her conscious mind; it persisted,
nevertheless, and unconsciously exerted a heavy pressure. Something had to
happen, some sort of relief had to be found; and the simplest alleviation lay
in that mechanism of displacement which so regularly plays its part in the
formation of delusional jealousy. If not merely she, old woman that she
was, were in love with a young man, but if only her old husband too were in
love with a young mistress, then her torturing conscience would be
absolved from the infidelity. The phantasy of her husband’s infidelity was
thus a cooling balm on her burning wound. Of her own love she never
became conscious; but its reflection in the delusion, which brought such

advantages, thus became compulsive, delusional and conscious. All
arguments against it could naturally avail nothing; for they were directed
only against the reflection, and not against the original to which its strength
was due and which lay buried out of reach in the Unconscious.
Let us now piece together the results of this short, obstructed psycho-
analytic attempt to understand this case. It is assumed of course that the
information acquired was correct, a point which I cannot submit to your
judgement here. First of all, the delusion is no longer senseless and
incomprehensible; it is sensible, logically motivated, and has its place in
connection with an affective experience of the patient’s. Secondly, it has
arisen as a necessary reaction to another mental process which has itself
been revealed by other indications; and it owes its delusional character, its
quality of resisting real and logical objections, to this relation with this
other mental process. It is something desired in itself, a kind of consolation.
Thirdly, the fact that the delusion is one of jealousy and no other is
unmistakably determined by the experience underlying the disease. You will
also recognize the two important analogies with the symptomatic act we
analysed; namely, the discovery of the sense or intention behind the
symptom and the relation of it to something in the given situation which is
unconscious.
This does not, of course, answer all the questions arising out of this
case. On the contrary, it bristles with further problems, some of which have
not yet proved soluble at all, while others cannot be solved owing to the
unfavourable circumstances met with in this case. For instance, why does
this happily-married lady fall in love with her son-in-law, and why does
relief come to her in the form of this kind of reflection, this projection of
her own state of mind on to her husband, when other forms of relief were
also possible? Do not think that it is idle and uncalled-for to propound these
questions. We have already a good deal of material at hand to provide
possible answers. The patient had come to that critical time of life which
brings a sudden and unwelcome increase of sexual desire to a woman; that
may have been sufficient in itself. Or there may have been an additional
reason, in that the sexual capacity of her excellent and faithful husband may
have been for some years insufficient for the still vigorous woman’s needs.
Observation has taught us that it is just such men, whose fidelity is thus a
matter of course, who treat their wives with particular tenderness and are
unusually considerate of their nervous ailments. Neither is it unimportant,

moreover, that the object of this abnormal infatuation should be her
daughter’s young husband. A strong erotic attachment to the daughter, with
its roots in the individual sexual constitution of the mother, often manages
to maintain itself in such a transformation. I may perhaps remind you in this
connection that the relation between mother-in-law and son-in-law has from
time immemorial been regarded by mankind as a particularly sensitive one,
which among primitive races has given rise to very powerful taboos and
precautions.[44] On the positive as well as on the negative side it frequently
exceeds the limits regarded as desirable in civilized society. Of these three
possible factors, whether one of them has been at work in the case before
us, or two of them, or whether all three together have taken part, I cannot
tell you; though only because the analysis of the case could not be
continued beyond the second hour.
I perceive now that I have been speaking entirely of things which you
were not yet prepared to understand. I did so in order to carry out the
comparison between psychiatry and psycho-analysis. But I may ask you one
thing at this point: Have you observed anything in the nature of a
contradiction between the two? Psychiatry does not employ the technical
methods of psycho-analysis, neglects any consideration of the content of the
delusion, and in pointing to heredity gives us but a general and remote
ætiology instead of first disclosing the more specific and immediate one.
But is any contradiction or opposition contained in this? Is not the one
rather a supplement to the other? Is the hereditary factor inconsistent with
the importance of experience and would they not both work together most
effectively? You will admit that there is nothing essential in the work of
psychiatry which could oppose psycho-analytic researches. It is therefore
the psychiatrists who oppose it, and not psychiatry itself. Psycho-Analysis
stands to psychiatry more or less as histology does to anatomy; in one, the
outer forms of organs are studied, in the other, the construction of these out
of the tissues and constituent elements. It is not easy to conceive of any
contradiction between these two fields of study, in which the work of the
one is continued in the other. You know that nowadays anatomy is the basis
of the scientific study of medicine; but time was when dissecting human
corpses in order to discover the internal structure of the body was as much a
matter for severe prohibition as practising psycho-analysis in order to
discover the internal workings of the human mind seems to-day to be a
matter for condemnation. And, presumably at a not too distant date, we

shall have perceived that there can be no psychiatry which is scientifically
radical without a thorough knowledge of the deep-seated unconscious
processes in mental life.
There may be some of you who perhaps are friendly enough towards
psycho-analysis, often attacked as it is, to wish that it would justify itself in
another direction also, that is, therapeutically. You know that psychiatric
therapy has hitherto been unable to influence delusions. Can psycho-
analysis do so perhaps, by reason of its insight into the mechanism of these
symptoms? No, I have to tell you that it cannot; for the present, at any rate,
it is just as powerless as any other therapy to heal these sufferers. It is true
that we can understand what has happened to the patient; but we have no
means by which we can make him understand it himself. You have heard
that I could not continue the analysis of this delusion beyond the first
preliminaries. Would you then maintain that analysis of such cases is
undesirable because it remains fruitless? I do not think so. It is our right,
yes, and our duty, to pursue our researches without respect to the immediate
gain effected. The day will come, where and when we know not, when
every little piece of knowledge will be converted into power, and into
therapeutic power. Even if psycho-analysis showed itself as unsuccessful
with all other forms of nervous and mental diseases as with delusions, it
would still remain justified as an irreplaceable instrument of scientific
research. It is true that we should not be in a position to practise it; the
human material on which we learn lives, and has its own will, and must
have its own motives in order to participate in the work; and it would then
refuse to do so. I will therefore close my lecture for to-day by telling you
that there are large groups of nervous disturbances for which this
conversion of our own advance in knowledge into therapeutic power has
actually been carried out; and that with these diseases, otherwise so
refractory, our measures yield, under certain conditions, results which give
place to none in the domain of medical therapy.

SEVENTEENTH LECTURE
THE MEANING OF SYMPTOMS

In the last lecture I explained to you that clinical psychiatry troubles
itself little about the actual form of the individual symptom or the content of
it; but that psycho-analysis has made this its starting-point, and has
ascertained that the symptom itself has a meaning and is connected with
experiences in the life of the patient. The meaning of neurotic symptoms
was first discovered by J. Breuer in the study and successful cure of a case
of hysteria (1880–82), which has since then become famous. It is true that
P. Janet independently reached the same result; in fact, priority in
publication must be granted to the French investigator, for Breuer did not
publish his observations until more than a decade later (1893–95), during
the period of our work together. Incidentally, it is of no great importance to
us who made the discovery, for you know that every discovery is made
more than once, and none is made all at once, nor is success meted out
according to deserts. America is not called after Columbus. Before Breuer
and Janet, the great psychiatrist Leuret expressed the opinion that even the
delusions of the insane would prove to have some meaning, if only we
knew how to translate them. I confess that for a long time I was willing to
accord Janet very high recognition for his explanation of neurotic
symptoms, because he regarded them as expressions of “idées
inconscientes” possessing the patient’s mind. Since then, however, Janet has
taken up an attitude of undue reserve, as if he meant to imply that the
Unconscious had been nothing more to him than a manner of speaking, a
makeshift, une façon de parler, and that he had nothing “real” in mind.
Since then I have not understood Janet’s views, but I believe that he has
gratuitously deprived himself of great credit.
Neurotic symptoms then, just like errors and dreams, have their
meaning and, like these, are related to the life of the person in whom they
appear. This is an important matter which I should like to demonstrate to
you by some examples. I can merely assert, I cannot prove, that it is so in

every case; anyone observing for himself will be convinced of it. For
certain reasons though, I shall not take these examples from cases of
hysteria, but from another very remarkable form of neurosis, closely allied
in origin to the latter, about which I must say a few preliminary words. This,
which we call the obsessional neurosis, is not so popular as the widely-
known hysteria; it is, if I may so express myself, not so noisily ostentatious,
behaves more as if it were a private affair of the patient’s, dispenses almost
entirely with bodily manifestations and creates all its symptoms in the
mental sphere. The obsessional neurosis and hysteria are the two forms of
neurotic disease upon the study of which psycho-analysis was first built up,
and in the treatment of which also our therapy celebrates its triumphs. In the
obsessional neurosis, however, that mysterious leap from the mental to the
physical is absent, and it has really become more intimately comprehensible
and transparent to us through psycho-analytic research than hysteria; we
have come to understand that it displays far more markedly certain extreme
features of the neurotic constitution.
The obsessional neurosis[45] takes this form: the patient’s mind is
occupied with thoughts that do not really interest him, he feels impulses
which seem alien to him, and he is impelled to perform actions which not
only afford him no pleasure but from which he is powerless to desist. The
thoughts (obsessions) may be meaningless in themselves or only of no
interest to the patient; they are often absolutely silly; in every case they are
the starting-point of a strained concentration of thought which exhausts the
patient and to which he yields most unwillingly. Against his will he has to
worry and speculate as if it were a matter of life or death to him. The
impulses which he perceives within him may seem to be of an equally
childish and meaningless character; mostly, however, they consist of
something terrifying, such as temptations to commit serious crimes, so that
the patient not only repudiates them as alien, but flees from them in horror,
and guards himself by prohibitions, precautions, and restrictions against the
possibility of carrying them out. As a matter of fact he never, literally not
even once, carries these impulses into effect; flight and precautions
invariably win. What he does really commit are very harmless, certainly
trivial acts—what are termed the obsessive actions—which are mostly
repetitions and ceremonial elaborations of ordinary everyday performances,
making these common necessary actions—going to bed, washing, dressing,
going for walks, etc.—into highly laborious tasks of almost insuperable

difficulty. The morbid ideas, impulses, and actions are not by any means
combined in the same proportions in individual types and cases of the
obsessional neurosis; on the contrary, the rule is that one or another of these
manifestations dominates the picture and gives the disease its name; but
what is common to all forms of it is unmistakable enough.
This is a mad disease, surely. I don’t think the wildest psychiatric
phantasy could have invented anything like it, and if we did not see it every
day with our own eyes we could hardly bring ourselves to believe in it.
Now do not imagine that you can do anything for such a patient by advising
him to distract himself, to pay no attention to these silly ideas, and to do
something sensible instead of his nonsensical practices. This is what he
would like himself; for he is perfectly aware of his condition, he shares
your opinion about his obsessional symptoms, he even volunteers it quite
readily. Only he simply cannot help himself; the actions performed in an
obsessional condition are supported by a kind of energy which probably has
no counterpart in normal mental life. Only one thing is open to him—he can
displace and he can exchange; instead of one silly idea he can adopt another
of a slightly milder character, from one precaution or prohibition he can
proceed to another, instead of one ceremonial rite he can perform another.
He can displace his sense of compulsion, but he cannot dispel it. This
capacity for displacing all the symptoms, involving radical alteration of
their original forms, is a main characteristic of the disease; it is, moreover,
striking that in this condition the ‘opposite-values’ (polarities) pervading
mental life appear to be exceptionally sharply differentiated. In addition to
compulsions of both positive and negative character, doubt appears in the
intellectual sphere, gradually spreading until it gnaws even at what is
usually held to be certain. All these things combine to bring about an ever-
increasing indecisiveness, loss of energy, and curtailment of freedom; and
that although the obsessional neurotic is originally always a person of a
very energetic disposition, often highly opinionated, and as a rule
intellectually gifted above the average. He has usually attained to an
agreeably high standard of ethical development, is over-conscientious, and
more than usually correct. You may imagine that it is a sufficiently arduous
task to find one’s bearings in this maze of contradictory character-traits and
morbid manifestations. At the moment our aim is merely to interpret some
symptoms of this disease.

Perhaps in view of our previous discussions you would like to know
what present-day psychiatry has to offer concerning the obsessional
neurosis; it is but a miserable contribution, however. Psychiatry has given
names to the various compulsions; and has nothing more to say about them.
It asserts instead that persons exhibiting these symptoms are “degenerate.”
That is not much satisfaction to us; it is no more than an estimate of their
value, a condemnation instead of an explanation. We are intended, I
suppose, to conclude that deterioration from type would naturally produce
all kinds of oddities in people. Now, we do believe that people who develop
such symptoms must be somewhat different in type from other human
beings; but we should like to know whether they are more “degenerate”
than other nervous patients, than hysterical or insane people. The
characterization is clearly again much too general. One may even doubt
whether it is justified at all when one learns that such symptoms occur in
men and women of exceptional ability who have left their mark on their
generation. Thanks to their own discretion and the untruthfulness of
biographers we usually learn very little of an intimate nature about our
exemplary great men; but it does happen occasionally that one of them is a
fanatic about truth like Émile Zola,[46] and then we hear of the many
extraordinary obsessive habits from which he suffered throughout life.
Psychiatry has got out of this difficulty by dubbing these people
“dégénerés superieurs.” Very well; but psycho-analysis has shown that
these extraordinary obsessional symptoms can be removed permanently,
like the symptoms of other diseases, and as in other people who are not
degenerate. I myself have frequently succeeded in doing so.
I shall only give you two examples of analysis of obsessional
symptoms; one is an old one, but I have never found a better; and one is a
recent one. I shall limit myself to these two because an account of this kind
must be very explicit and go into great detail.
A lady of nearly thirty years of age suffered from very severe
obsessional symptoms. I might perhaps have been able to help her if my
work had not been destroyed by the caprice of fate—perhaps I shall tell you
about it later. In the course of a day she would perform the following
peculiar obsessive act, among others, several times over. She would run out
of her room into the adjoining one, there take up a certain position at the
table in the centre of the room, ring for her maid, give her a trivial order or

send her away without, and then run back again. There was certainly
nothing very dreadful about this, but it might well arouse curiosity. The
explanation presented itself in the simplest and most unexceptionable
manner, without any assistance on the part of the analyst. I cannot imagine
how I could even have suspected the meaning of this obsession or could
possibly have suggested an interpretation for it. Every time I had asked the
patient, “Why do you do this? What is the meaning of it?” she had
answered, “I don’t know.” But one day, after I had succeeded in overcoming
a great hesitation on her part, involving a matter of principle, she suddenly
did know, for she related the history of the obsessive act. More than ten
years previously she had married a man very much older than herself, who
had proved impotent on the wedding-night. Innumerable times on that night
he had run out of his room into hers in order to make the attempt, but had
failed every time. In the morning he had said angrily: “It’s enough to
disgrace one in the eyes of the maid who does the beds,” and seizing a
bottle of red ink which happened to be at hand he poured it on the sheet, but
not exactly in the place where such a mark might have been. At first I did
not understand what this recollection could have to do with the obsessive
act in question; for I could see no similarity between the two situations,
except in the running from one room into the other, and perhaps also in the
appearance of the servant on the scene. The patient then led me to the table
in the adjoining room, where I found a great mark on the table-cover. She
explained further that she stood by the table in such a way that when the
maid came in she could not miss seeing this mark. After this, there could no
longer be any doubt about the connection between the current obsessive act
and the scene of the wedding-night, though there was still a great deal to
learn about it.
It was clear, first of all, that the patient identified herself with her
husband; in imitating his running from one room into another she acted his
part. To keep up the similarity we must assume that she has substituted the
table and table-cover for the bed and sheet. This might seem too arbitrary;
but then we have not studied dream-symbolism in vain. In dreams a table is
very often found to represent a bed. “Bed and board” together mean
marriage, so that the one easily stands for the other.
All this would be proof enough that the obsessive act is full of
meaning; it seems to be a representation, a repetition of that all-important
scene. But we are not bound to stop at this semblance; if we investigate

more closely the relation between the two situations we shall probably find
out something more, the purpose of the obsessive act. The kernel of it
evidently lies in the calling of the maid, to whom she displays the mark, in
contrast to her husband’s words: “It’s enough to disgrace one before the
servant.” In this way he, whose part she is playing, is not ashamed before
the servant, the stain is where it ought to be. We see therefore that she has
not simply repeated the scene, she has continued it and corrected it,
transformed it into what it ought to have been. This implies something else,
too, a correction of the circumstance which made that night so distressing,
and which made the red ink necessary: namely, the husband’s impotence.
The obsessive act thus says: “No, it is not true, he was not disgraced before
the servant, he was not impotent.” As in a dream she represents this wish as
fulfilled, in a current obsessive act, which serves the purpose of restoring
her husband’s credit after that unfortunate incident.
Everything else which I could tell you about this lady fits in with this,
or, more correctly stated, everything else that we know about her points to
this interpretation of the obsessive act, in itself so incomprehensible. She
had been separated from her husband for years and was trying to make up
her mind to divorce him legally. But there would have been no prospect of
being free from him in her mind; she forced herself to be true to him. She
withdrew from the world and from everyone so that she might not be
tempted, and in her phantasies she excused and idealized him. The deepest
secret of her illness was that it enabled her to shield him from malicious
gossip, to justify her separation from him, and to make a comfortable
existence apart from her possible for him. The analysis of a harmless
obsessive act thus leads straight to the inmost core of the patient’s disease,
and at the same time betrays a great deal of the secret of the obsessional
neurosis in general. I am quite willing that you should spend some time
over this example, for it unites conditions which cannot reasonably be
expected in all cases. The interpretation of the symptom was discovered by
the patient herself in a flash, without guidance or interference from the
analyst, and it had arisen in connection with an event which did not belong,
as it commonly does, to a forgotten period in childhood, but which had
occurred in the patient’s adult life and was clear in her memory. All those
objections which critics habitually raise against our interpretations of
symptoms are quite out of place here. To be sure, we cannot always be so
fortunate.

And one thing more! Has it not struck you that this innocent obsessive
act leads directly to this lady’s most private affairs? A woman can hardly
have anything more intimate to relate than the story of her wedding-night;
and is it by chance and without special significance that we are led straight
to the innermost secrets of her sexual life? It might certainly be due to the
choice I made of this example. Let us not decide this point too quickly; but
let us turn to the second example, which is of a totally different nature, and
belongs to a very common type, that of rituals preparatory to sleep.
A well-grown clever girl of 19, the only child of her parents, superior
to them in education and intellectual activity, was a wild, high-spirited
child, but of late years had become very nervous without any apparent
cause. She was very irritable, particularly with her mother, was discontented
and depressed, inclined to indecision and doubt, finally confessing that she
could no longer walk alone through squares and wide streets. We will not
go very closely into her complicated condition, which requires at least two
diagnoses: agoraphobia and obsessional neurosis; but will turn our attention
to the ritual elaborated by this young girl preparatory to going to bed, as a
result of which she caused her parents great distress. In a certain sense,
every normal person may be said to carry out a ritual before going to sleep,
or at least, he requires certain conditions without which he is hindered in
going to sleep; the transition from waking life to sleep has been made into a
regular formula which is repeated every night in the same manner. But
everything that a healthy person requires as a condition of sleep can be
rationally explained, and if the external circumstances make any alteration
necessary he adapts himself easily to it without waste of time. The morbid
ritual on the other hand is inexorable, it will be maintained at the greatest
sacrifices; it is disguised, too, under rational motives and appears
superficially to differ from the normal only in a certain exaggerated
carefulness of execution. On a closer examination, however, it is clear that
the disguise is insufficient, that the ritual includes observances which go far
beyond what reason can justify and even some which directly contravene
this. As the motive of her nightly precautions, our patient declares that she
must have silence at night and must exclude all possibility of noise. She
does two things for this purpose; she stops the large clock in her room and
removes all other clocks out of the room, including even the tiny wrist-
watch on her bed-table. Flower-pots and vases are placed carefully together
on the writing-table, so that they cannot fall down in the night and break,