اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

DREAM AND REALITY

Page 134_141

following his separation from Breuer and during his occupation with the Interpretation of Dreams, was connected with the displacement of Breuer from his memory. In the first example (1898), in Freud's Pst/chopathology of everyday life (Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens ) , Freud was unable to recall the name of the Italian painter Signorelli, and obtained instead two substitutes, each of which began with the letter B. ( "Sigm." is the abbreviation Freud used for his given name.) False recollection appeared concerning a traveler whom Freud accompanied on part of a journey, and, as Freud confessed, this recollection was concerned with compulsive thoughts of death.

Regarding Freud's denial of Breuer, perhaps one would not exaggerate in saying that the entire Interpretation of Dreams tends to prove the nonexistence of Breuer and to leave Freud's far less painful father alive. For the appearance of Freud's late father in one of his dreams is not only understandable as a displacement of Breuer, but, according to ancient spiritual belief, it evidences the immortality of the soul in general and of Freud's own self in particular. After Breuer's "killing" and the death of Freud's father, it was as though Freud needed this dream to insure his own immortality. And, finally, one may recognize a third motive which probably implies an anxiety dream: namely, the basis for Freud's unsuccessful attempt to put the living Breuer out of the way. Here we encounter again an important principle of the psychological interpretation of spiritual dream content. Freud investigated the dreams in which his father appeared, only with regard to his own attitude toward his father, and neglected to interpret the father himself. In other settings Freud knew quite well that a dream may frequently substitute one person for another, and he often made full use of the significance of so-called "mixed persons." But when his father appeared in one of his dreams he was taken at face value, just as Freud made a similar exception in his attitude toward his dream of sexual intercourse with his mother. Had Freud been at all free to do so, he would have sensed that this ancient spiritual motive was utterly opposed to his psychological interpretation. But had he excluded his father from the interpretive role, Breuer would have appeared in most of his dreams. For thisreason Freud was obliged to discover in his unconscious the latent displacement emotions of resistance against his fatherall the while his own attitude lay within his own self, and not in the intellectual content of his manifest dream! In other words, when one actually puts Breuer instead of Freud's father into those dreams that refer to him, one may safely discount the hero's misrepresentation of his attitude and ascribe meaning to much of the manifest account of the dream.

In both a theoretical and therapeutic sense, we see here the birth of psychology from self-illusion. We say "theoretical," because the entire complicated associative and interpretive methodology, and even the creation of the dream itself, become possible and necessary only through a misunderstanding of the true facts of the case; and we say "therapeutic," because the unburdening displacement of affect from actuality to the past had to be justified in theory. For from therapeutic displacement, which operates only to unburden when it does not concern the right person, and is then psychologically false, Freud derived a general law of psychic causality which should allow for displacement backwards along the associative links. This was possible only because Freud excluded a certain direction of displacement from the general tendency to unburden: namely, the specific displacement of reality into the past, which Freud proclaimed as a principle of causal explanation. But even in the doctrine of regression, where Freud emphasized this special direction of displacement into the past, he excepts particular items on the basis of the same petitio principii which he had designated as the "causes" accountable for therapeutic displacement. Otherwise one cannot understand why recall of actual conflict with the father was not just as good a regression (consoling dis-placement of reality into the past) as it was a displacement in another direction, which masked itself as a return along the chain of causation.30 The Freudian Interpretation of Dreams is shown to be a therapeutic effort in the grand style which serves, however, not to improve reality in the sense of wish fulfillment, but to ratify the alteration, misrepresentation, and denial of reality by dreams and their interpretation. For Freud, Breuer was dead though alive. Therefore Breuer did not appear in his dream, and could not be recognized in its interpretation. Freud used his dream therapeutically, or as a consolation for his self-knowledge, because he excluded from it and thus "killed" the one he wished were dead (Breuer); and in Breuer's place there appeared only the deceased father who had not been killed.30a

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30 Actually, this possibility has been granted even by one of Freud's followers on the basis of my critique in The Trauma of Birth (Trauma der Geburt); see, for example, F. Alexander, Intcrnat. Zeitschr. f. psa., XI, 1925, 173 f.

30a. Similarly there appears to Macbeth not the ghost of Duncan whom he himself had killed, but only the ghost of Banquo whom he had ordered killed.

Just as the appearance of another person in a dream was a proof of immortality at the spiritual stage of history, his failure to appear was now a proof of death. Freud wanted to show that it was not the soul of the dead which appeared in dreams, as superstition claimed, but one's own soul manifested in the form of psychology (wishes). But psychology would only amount to a recognition of Breuer's significance instead of its denial. If so, then perhaps the entire Interpretation of Dreams was unnecessary, as well as that broader (psychological) interpretation which had to call again upon ancient spiritual belief (dead father) for help. But like ancient spiritual belief, this was therapy and not psychology.

Therefore, wish fulfillment in the Interpretation of Dreams lay in the dream's interpretation rather than in its content, whereas in the spiritual era such fulfillment lay in the dream apart from its content. In the present psychological era the dream is no longer transmuted into reality; instead, reality is transposed and confirmed by the dream. This explains both the complete inversion of the primitive method of interpretation, which created experience from a dream accepted as true, and the corresponding rise of psychological interpretation, which explains an illusory dream content on the basis of already justified experience. The realistic ideology of the psychological era corresponds to this view, as the animistic ideology of the spiritual era did to the other. But, as already noted, there is no one meaning and interpretation of the dream which is good for all time; the spiritual phenomenon of the dream is rather interpreted according to the currently ruling ideology which was once animistic, then sexual, and is now psychological. But interpretation always tends to maintain and confirm the ancient spiritual belief, in spite of all accommodations of its meaning to any new ideology. Originally the dream was only a proof of spiritual belief in both positive and negative senses (wish and anxiety dream), because it exhibited not only one's own body-soul but the souls of others (deceased) whom now one wished to be dead. During the sexual era, the dream served to alter reality in the sense of spiritual belief, or to concretize it in order to make it true and to prove the existence of the soul. Finally, in the psychological era, the dream is interpreted according to a realistic ideology in order to salvage a dwindling spiritual belief from the content of the dream. Yet one can understand these distinctions only if one remembers that dream content itself changes according to the currently ruling ideology; in the development of the individual, simple wish dreams and anxiety dreams become supplanted by fantasy and ideational dreams that correspond to the realistic ideology of the psychological era, just as childish dreams correspond to the animistic or sexual era. The simple wish dreams of the animistic stage signified reality; the anxiety dreams of the sexual era, in which the individual protected himself against procreative mortality, connoted the future in the sense of translation of spiritual belief into action; and the fantasy and ideational dreams of the psychological stage are explained by the past, to which there corresponds only the consolation that the ancient soul survives in the dream without any causal explanation of the phenomenon of the dream itself. 30b But this final interpretation of the dream content also fails to explain the dream because the tendency toward wish fulfillment is characteristic not only of dreams but of spiritual or mental affairs in general, and because this tendency inheres in all its manifestations, including spiritual belief. As already noted, the unique characteristic of the dream is sleep. Aristotle had already established this point for the purpose of his physiological explanation of dreams in relation to sleep. But, as the dream shows us, sleep is not just a physical phenomenon which makes the dream possible. There is also a psychological set or attitude of the sleeper toward his own sleeping body, which seems to me to constitute the essence of the dream.

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30b l find the correction in Werner Achelis' (Stuttgart, 1928) "philosophical dissertation" ( philosophischen Abhandlung) on "the problem of the dream" (das Problem des Traumes), in which he advocates a proposition based on Schopenhauer's world view: "All dreams are true dreams."

This is not just an attitude of the dreamer toward his sleeping body in general, but towardsleep as a deathlike state, and toward his powerless and prostrate body as one that has "slept away" (died). This attitude changes according to the kind and depth of the sleep and to the psychic mood of the dreamer, but it always retains a tendency to deny the similarity of the sleeping condition to death and to assure the sleeping self that it is still alive. I believe now that dreaming is derived from the tendency to frighten away the death anxiety which sleep produces, by assuring the sleeper that he still lives. In the dream this is mediated by thinking, feeling, and seeing, and especially by certain sensory and bodily organs activated, as in myth, by eating or other functions which I have accordingly designated before as "awakening symptoms/' The dreamer's interpretation of his sleeping self turns out, then, according to his mood and to the depth of his sleep. Primitively, he can insure his hunger or thirst in an hallucinatory fashion because such matters do not concern actual bodily needs, but only assure his existence, which dream thirst and dream water cannot do. The same also holds for many patently sexual dreams which symbolize life even according to psychoanalysis, and it certainly holds for the dream itself as a proof of the bodily soul. With the body-soul, man took his first significant step into a supernatural world, because it assured him not only that he still lived while he slept, but that he could sleep peacefully without dying. However, this disclosed the negative side of spiritual belief, because the appearance of other body-souls (including those of the deceased) could not always be reconciled with man's general immortality theory, and because this appearance was often regarded as evidence of man's own mortal nature. In other words, according to bodily (sleep) and psychic (moods) premises, not only the condition ofsleep itself but that of one's own appearance in a dream could be interpreted as reminders of death, which compelled the sleeper to awaken and thereby reestablish the fact of his existence. As the condition of sleep itslf shows, there are certain dreams whose feeling tone depends more on bodily states, and others whose feeling tone depends on the psychic mood which interprets the state of sleep. Dreams with strong bodily sensations, such as those of flying or falling, may depend on the condition of the sleeping body (heavy or light), but at the spiritual stage they are interpreted as immortality (flying) or mortality (falling), and at the psychological stage as wish-dreams or anxiety-dreams. Even when actual bodily stimuli are involved (as in hunger, thirst, sex, etc.), these dreams can always be interpreted as evidence of life in the sense of spiritual ideology, although the current mood ( death anxiety ) just as often made them conscious evidence of life. As may be readily seen, this view makes it possible to reconcile the various theories of dreams, including those which refer to bodily and psychic stimuli, and also various interpretive methods such as the spiritual, the sexual, the psychological, and that one designated by H. Silberer as 31 which sees dreams as figurative (symbolic) "functional," representations of spiritual functions. But the dream itself is an interpretive phenomenon, because the sleeping self is compelled to interpret all bodily and psychic stimuli according to spiritual belief. This interpretation is the dream. Proof that the self is not dead isgranted the individual in every instance, be it through the dreaming itself, which activates certain functions, through that special form of the dream which displays the soul as independent of the body and therefore immortal, or through awakening from a threatening anxiety dream which proves the real existence of the self. Other items appearing in the dream content are the active thought remnants and sensations of waking life, which appear when the sleeper partially awakens in order to prove that he is still alive, and are significant for the dream only to the extent to which they affect their own interpretation by the dreamer or are evoked from him for the purpose of an interpretation. However, a causal explanation of the dream is not possible, principally because the dream can only be further interpreted, so that we have interpretations, supplementary interpretations, and supra-interpretations without end. Psychoanalysis did not explain the dream, but only derived a psychology from it. Because this psychology interpreted the dream scientifically as a spiritual phenomenon, it was doomed both to fail as a theory and to indicate only a tendency to wish fulfillment. As a scientific psychology, psychoanalysis denied the soul and misplaced the gratification of wishes onto the content of the dream, instead of leaving it with the dream itself where it belonged. But as a depth psychology, psychoanalysis could not really dispense with spirituality, for Freud used his own spiritual experience (his father's death) and a psychological ideology to explain those dreams that arose from his psychic experience (Breuer). Whereas man once tried to use spiritual belief to confirm his spiritual self, he now tries to use this new psychology to preserve only his psychic individuality.

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31 The work of the author referred to, who died in 1923, appears in the Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische Forschungen (Yearbook for Psychoanalytic Research), 1909-1912, and in the Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse (Central Journal of Psychoanalysis), 1911-1914. The Psychology of Daydreams by the Belgian psychologist, J. Varendonck (who died in 1924), concerns the same area of problem.