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27 views5 pagesIssues Freud Dream
Freud’s dream work
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© © All Rights Reserved
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THE DREAM-WORK
Sigmund Freud
Ladies and Gentlemen, ~ When you have thoroughly grasped the dream-censorship
and representation by symbols, you will not yet, itis true, have completely mastered
the distortion in dreams, but you will nevertheless be in a position to understand most
dreams. In doing so you will make use of both of the two complementary techniques:
calling up ideas that occur to the dreamer tll you have penetrated from the substitute
to the genuine thing and, on the ground of your own knowledge, replacing the
symbols by what they mean. Later on, we shall discuss some uncertainties that arise
in this connection.
We can now take up once more a task that we tried to carry out previously with
inadequate means, when we were studying the relations between the elements of
dreams and the genuine thirgs they stood for. We laid down four main relations of the
kind: the relation of a part to a whole, approximation or allusion, the symbolic relation
and the plastic representation of words. We now propose to undertake the same thing
‘on a larger-scale, by compa-ing the manifest content of a dream as a mhole with the
latent dream as itis revealed by interpretation.
T hope you will never agzin confuse these two things with each other. If you reach
that point, you will probably have gone further in understanding dreams than most
readers of my Interpretation of Dreams. And let me remind you once again that the work
which transforms the latent dream into the manifest one is called the dream-ork. The
work which proceeds in the contrary direction, which endeavours to arrive atthe latent
dream from the manifest ons, is our mork of interpretation. ‘This work of interpretation
seeks to undo the dream-work. ‘The dreams of infantile type which we recognize as
obvious fullilments of wishes have nevertheless experienced some amount of dream-
work ~ they have been transformed from 2 wish into an actual experience and also, as
a rule, from thoughts into visual images. In their case there is no need for interpreta
tion but only for undoing trese two transformations. The additional dream-work that
occurs in other dreams is called ‘dream-distortion’, and this has to be undone by our
work of interpretation
Having compared the interpretations of numerous dreams, I am in a position to
give you a summary descriotion of what the dream-work does with the material of
the latent dream-thoughts. ' beg you, however, not to try to understand too much of
From Freud, S., 1973a, Intraductory Lectures on Peychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Pelican,
‘The Dream-Work 279
what I tell you, It will be @ piece of description which should be listened to with quiet
attention,
The first achievement of the dream-work is condensation. By that we understand the
fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an
abbreviated translation of it, Condensation can on occasion be absent; as a rule it is
present, and very often it is enormous. It is never changed into the reverse; that is to
say, we never find that the manifest dream is greater in extent or content than the latent
one. Condensation is brought about (1) by the total omission of certain latent elements,
(2) by only a fragment of some complexes :n the latent dream passing over into the
manifest one and (3) by latent elements which have something in common being
combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream.
If you prefer it, we can reserve the term ‘condensation’ for the last only of these
processes. Its results are particularly easy to demonstrate, You will have no difficulty
in recalling instances from your own dreams of different people being condensed into
a single one. A composite figure of this kind may look like A perhaps, but may be dressed
like B, may do something that we remember C doing, and at the same time we may
know that he is D. This composite structure is of course emphasizing something that
the four people have in common. It is possible, naturally, to make a composite struc~
ture out of things or places in the same way as out of people, provided that the vari-
ous things and places have in common something which is emphasized by the latent
dream. The process is like constructing a new and transitory concept which has this
common element 2s its nucleus. The outcome of this superimposing of the separate
elements that have been condensed togethe> is as a rule a blurred and vague image,
like what happens if you take several photographs on the same plate,
‘The production of composite structures like these must be of great importance
to the dream-work, since we can show that where in the first instance the common
elements necessary for them were missing, they are deliberately introduced — for
instance, through the choice of the words by which a thought is expressed. We have
already come across condensations and composite structures of this sort. They played
‘part in the production of some slips of the tongue. You will recall the young man
who offered to “hegleitdigen’ [begleiten (accompany) ~ ‘beleidigen (ingult)’] a lady.
Moreover, there are jokes of which the technique is based on a condensation like this,
But apart from these cases, it may be said that the process is something quite unusual
and strange, It is true that counterparts to the construction of these composite figures
are to be found in some creations of our imagination, which is ready to combine into
unity components of things that do not belong together in our experience — in the
centaurs, for instance, and the fabulous beasts which appear in ancient mythology or
in Bocklin's pictures. The ‘creative’ imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of irvent-
ing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another.
Bur the remarkable thing about the procedure of the dream-work lies in what follows,
‘The material offered to the dream-work consists of thoughts — a few of which may
be objectionable and unacceptable, but which are correctly constructed and expressed.
‘The dream-work puts these thoughts into another form, and it is a strange and Mheotaprenensioe face tat In making Mus translation (Cs rendering, as it were, into
another script or language) these methods of merging or combining are brought into
use. After all, a translation normally endeavours to preserve the distinetions made in
the text and particularly to keep things that are similar separate, The dream-work, quite
the contrary, tries to condense two different thoughts by seeking out (like a joke) an
ambiguous word in which the two thoughts may come together. We need not try to
understand this feature all at once, but it may become important for our appreciation
of the dream-work
But although condensation makes dreams obscure, it does not give one the
impression of being an effect of the dream-censorship. It seems traceable rather to some
mechanical or economic factor, but in any case the censorship profits by it.
The achievements of condensation can be quite extraordinary. It is sometimes
possible by its help to combine two quite different latent trains of thought into one
manifest dream, so that one can arrive at what appears to be a sufficient interpretation
of a dream and yet in doing so can fail to notice a possible ‘over-interpretation’
In regard to the connection between the latent and the manifest dream, condensa-
tion results also in no simple relation being left between the elements in the one and
the other, A manifest element may correspond simultaneously to several latent ones,
and, contrariwise, a latent element may play a part in several manifest once ~ there is,
as it were, a criss-cross relationship. In interpreting a dream, moreover, we find that
the associations to a single manifest element need not emerge in succession: we must
often wait tll the whole dream has been interpreted.
‘Thus the dream-work carries out a very unusual kind of transcription of the dream.
thoughts: it is not a word-for-word or a sign-for-sign translation; nor is it a selection
‘made according to fixed rules —as though one were to reproduce only the consonants
in a word and to leave out the vowels; nor is it what might be described as a repres-
entative selection — one element being invariably chosen to take the place of several; it
is something different and far more complicated.
‘The second achievement of the dream-work is displacement. Fortunately we have made
some preliminary examination of this: for we know that it is entirely the work of the
dream-censorship. It manifests itself in two ways: in the frst a latent element is replaced
not by a component part of itself but by something more remote ~ that is, by an allu-
sion; and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an important clement on
to another which is unimportant, so that the dream appears differently centred and
strange.
Replacing something by an allusion to itis a process familiar in our waking thought
as well, but there is a difference. In waking thought the allusion must be easily intel-
igible, and the substitute must be related in its subject-matter to the genuine thing it
stands for. Jokes, too, often make use of allusion. They drop the precondition of there
being an association in subject-matter, and replace it by unusual external associations
such as similarity of sound, verbal ambiguity, and so on. But they retain the precondition
of intelligibility: a joke would lose all its efficiency if the path back from the allusion
to the genuine thing could not be followed easily. The allusions employed for displacement
eee eee ee eee
with the element they replace by the most external and remote relations and are there-
fore unintelligible; and when they are undone, their interpretation gives the impres-
sion of being a bad joke or of an arbitrary and forced explanation dragged in by the
hair of its head. For the dream-censorship only gains its end if it succeeds in making
it impossible to find the path back from the allusion to the genuine thing,
Displacement of accent is unheard of as a method of expressing thoughts. We some-
times make use of it in waking thought in order to produce a comic effect. I can
perhaps call up the impression it produces of going astray if I recall an ancedote. ‘There
‘was a blacksmith in a village, who had committed a capital offence. The Court decided
that the crime must be punished; but as the blacksmith was the only one in the village
and was indispensable, and as on the other hand there were three tailors living there,
‘one of them was hanged instead.
‘The third achievement of the dream-work is psychologically the most interesting.
It consists in transforming thoughts into visual images. Let us keep it clear that this
transformation does not affect everything in the dream-thoughts; some of them retain
their form and appear as thoughts or knowledge in the manifest dream as well; nor are
visual images the only form into which thoughts are transformed. Nevertheless they
comprise the essence of the formation of dreams; this part of the dream-work is, as we
already know, the second most regular one and we have already made the acquaintance
of the ‘plastic’ representation of words in the case of individual dream-elements,
It is clear that this achievement is not an easy one. To form some idea of its diffi
culties, let us suppose that you have undertaken the task of replacing 2 political
leading article in a newspaper by a series of illustrations. You will thus have been thrown
back ftom alphabetic writing to picture writing. In so far as the article mentioned
people and concrete objects you will replace them easily and perhaps even advantageously
by pictures; but your difficulties will begin when you come to the representation of
abstract words and of all those parts of speech which indicate relations between
thoughts — such as particles, conjunctions and so on. In the case of abstract words you
will beable to help yourselves out by means of a variety of devices. For instance, you
will endeavour to give the text of the article a different wording, which may perhaps
sound less usual but which will contain more components that are concrete and cap-
able of being represented. You will then recall that most abstract words are ‘watered-
down’ conerete ones, and you will for that reason hark back as often as possible to the
original concrete meaning of such words. Thus you will be pleased to find that you can
represent the ‘possession’ of an object by a real, physical siting down on it.' And the
dream-work does just the same thing. In such circumstances you will scarcely be able
to expect very great accuracy from your representation: similarly, you will forgive
the dream-work for replacing an element so hard to put into pictures as, for example,
‘adultery’ [‘Ehebruch, literally, breach of marriage’), by another breach — a broken
leg [‘Beinbruct’|? And in this way you will sueceed to some extent in compensating
for the clumsiness of the picture writing that is supposed to take the place of the
alphabetic script. Nn gg
‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘however’, etc. ~ you will have no similar aids at your disposal;
those constituents of the text will be lost so far as translation into pictures goes. In
the same way, the dream-work reduces the content of the dream-thoughts to its raw
material of objects and activities. You will fecl pleased if there is a possibility of in
some way hinting, through the subtler details of the pictures, at certain relations not
in themselves capable of being represented. And just so does the dream-work succeed
in expressing some of the content of the latent dream-thoughts by peculiarities in
the form of the manifest dream — by its clarity or obscurity, by its division into several
pieces, and so on, The number of part-dreams into which a dream is divided uswally
corresponds to the number of main topics or groups of thoughts in the latent dream
A short introductory dream will often stand in the relation of a prelude to a following,
more detailed, main dream or may give the motive for it; a subordinate clause in the
dream-thoughts will be replaced by the interpolation of a change of scene into the
manifest dream, and so on. Thus the form of dreams is far from being without sig-
nificance and itself calls for interpretation. When several dreams occur during the
same night, they often have the same meaning and indicate that an attempt is being
made to deal more and more efficiently with a stimulus of increasing insistence. In
individual dreams a particularly difficult element may be represented by several
symbols ~ by ‘doublets’?
If we make a series of comparisons between the dream-thoughts and the manifest
dreams which replace them, we shall come upon all kinds of things for which we are
unprepared: for instance, that nonsense and absurdity in dreams have their meaning,
At this point, indeed, the contrast between the medical and the psychoanalytic view of
dreams reaches a pitch of acuteness not met with elsewhere. According to the former,
dreams are senseless because mental activity in dreams has abandoned all its powers of
criticism; according to our view, on the contrary, dreams become senseless when a piece
of criticism included in the dream-thoughts —a judgement that ‘this is absurd” — has
to be represented. The dream you are familiar with of the visit to the theatre (‘three
tickets for 1 florin 50") is a good example of this. The judgement it expressed was: ‘it
was absurd to marry so early"
Similarly, in the course of our work of interpretation we learn what it is that cor
responds to the doubts and uncertainties which the dreamer so often expresses as to
whether a particular element occurred in a dream, whether it was this or whether, on
the contrary it was something else. There is asa rule nothing in the latent dream-thoughts
corresponding to these doubts and uncertainties; they are entirely due to the activity
of the dream-censorship and are to be equated with an attempt at elimination which
has not quite succeeded,
Among the most surprising findings is the way in which the dream-work treats con-
traries that occur in the latent dream. We know already that conformities in the latent
‘material are replaced by condensations in the manifest dream, Well, contraries are treated
in the same way as conformitics, and there is a special preference for expressing them
Se eee ee a ee eee
capable of having a contrary may equally well be expressing either itself or its contrary
or both together: only the sense ean decide which translation is 10 be chosen. This
connects with the further fact that a representation of ‘no’ — or at any’ rate an unam
biguous one ~ is not to be found in dreams.
‘A welcome analogy to this strange behaviour of the dream-work is provided for
us in the development of language. Some philologists have maintained that in the
‘most ancient language contraries such as ‘strong-weak’, ‘light-dark’, ‘big-small are
‘expressed by the same verbal roots. (What we term ‘the antithetical meaning of primal
‘words’.) Thus in Ancient Egyptian ‘en’ originally meant ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. In
speaking, misunderstanding from the use of such ambivalent words was avoided by
differences of intonation and by the accompanying gesture, and in writing, by the addi
tion of what is termed a ‘determinative’ — a picture which is not itself intended to
be spoken, For instance, ‘ken’ meaning ‘strong’ was written with a picture of a little
upright man after the alphabetic signs; when ‘en’ stood for ‘weak’, what followed was
the picture of a man squatting down limply. It was only later, by means of slight
modifications of the original homologous word, that two distinct representations
were arrived at of the contraries included in it. Thus from ‘ken’ ‘strong-weak? were
dlrived ‘fen’ ‘strong’ and ‘an’ ‘weak’. ‘The remains of this ancient antithetical mean-
ing seem to have been preserved not only in the latest developments of the oldest
languages but also in far younger ones and even in some that are still ving
In Latin, words that remained ambivalent in this way are ‘ltus’ high’ and ‘deep’)
and ‘acer’ ‘sacred? and ‘accursed’
‘As instances of modifications of the same root I may mention ‘clamare’ (to ry)
‘calm’ (Sofily’, ‘quietly’, secretly’); ‘sccus’ dry’), ‘succus’ (Juice). And in German:
‘Stine [‘oice’,‘stumm’ ['dumb')
If we compare related languages, there are numerous examples. In Engl '
in German, ‘Loc [hole] and ‘Lice’ [gap]. In English, ‘to cleve’ in German, *lebe’
[to stick”.
‘The English word ‘without? (which is really “with-without’) is used today for ‘with
cout’ alone. ‘With’, in addition to its combining sense, originally had a removing one;
this is stil to be seen in the compounds “withdraw” and ‘withhold’. Similarly with the
German ‘wieder (‘together with? and ‘wider ‘against’
Another characteristic of the dream-work also has its counterpart in the develop-
‘ment of language. In Ancient Egyptian, as well asin other, later languages, the order
of the sounds in a word can be reversed, while keeping the same meaning. Examples
of this in English and German are: ‘Top/” [‘pot"]—‘pot’; ‘boa’—‘tub’; ‘hurry’Ruhe’
[crests “Baten” [*beam"]-*Kloben’ ['log’] and ‘club’; ‘wait’‘tdtaren’{‘tarry’], Similarly
in Latin and German: ‘capere'‘packen’ ("to seize” “ren'-‘Nier? (idney"]
Reversals like this, which occur here with individual words, take place in various
ways in the dream-work. We already know reversal of meaning, replacement of
something by its opposite. Besides this we find in dreams reversals of situation, of the
relation between two people — a ‘topsy-turey” world. Quite often in dreams itis the
hare that shoots the sportsman, Or again we find a reversal in the order of events, so that what precedes an event causally comes after it in the dream — like a theatrical pro-
duction by a third-rate touring company, in which the hero falls down dead and the
shot that killed him is not fired in the wings dll afterwards. Or there are dreams where
the whole order of the elements is reversed, so that to make sense in interpreting it we
‘must take the last one first and the first one last. You will remember too from our study
of dream-symbolism that going or falling into the water means the same,as coming
out of it ~ that is, giving birth or being born and that climbing up a staircase or @
ladder is the same thing as coming down it It is not hard to see the advantage that
dream-distortion can derive from this freedom of representation
‘These features of the dream-work may be described as archaic. They are equally
characteristic of ancient systems of expression by speech and writing and they involve
the same difficulties, which we shall have to discuss again later in a critical sense.
‘And now a few more considerations. In the case of the dream-work it is clearly a
matter of transforming the latent thoughts which are expressed in words into sensory
images, mostly of a visual sort. Now our thovghts originally arose from sensory images
of that kind: their first material and their preliminary stages were sense impressions,
or, more properly, mnemic images of such impressions. Only later were words attached
to them and the words in turn linked up inta thoughts. The dream-work thus submits
thoughts to a regressive treatment and undoes their development; and in the course of
the regression everything has to be dropped that had been added as a new acquisition
in the course of the development of the mnemic images into thoughts.
Such then, it seems, is the dream-work. As compared with the processes we have
come to know in it, interest in the manifest dream must pale into insignificance. But I
will devote a few more remarks to the latter, since it is of it alone that we have imme
diate knowledge.
It is natural that we should lose some of our interest in the manifest dream. It is
bound to be a matter of indifference to us whether itis well put together, or is broken
up into a series of disconnected separate pictures. Exen if it has an apparently sens
ible exterior, we know that this has only come about through dream-distortion and can
have as litle organic relation to the internal content of the dream as the facade of an
Italian church has to its structure and plan. There are other occasions when this farade
of the dream has its meaning, and reproduces an important component of the latent
