Sigmund Freud was the pioneer who first tried to explore empirically
the unconscious background of consciousness.
He worked on the general assumption that dreams are not a matter of chance
but are associated with conscious thoughts and problems.
This assumption was not in the least arbitrary.
It was based upon the conclusion of eminent neurologists (for instance, Pierre Janet)
that neurotic symptoms are related to some conscious experience.
They even appear to be split-off areas of the conscious mind, which, at another time
and under different conditions, can be conscious.
Before the beginning of this century,
Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms
-hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior-
are in fact symbolically meaningful.
They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself
just as it may in dreams
and they are equally symbolic.
A patient, for instance, who is confronted with an intolerable situation
may develop a spasm whenever he tries to swallow:
He “can’t swallow it.”
Under similar conditions of psychological stress, another patient has an attack of asthma:
He “can’t breathe the atmosphere at home.”
A third suffers from a peculiar paralysis of the legs:
He can’t walk, i.e., “he can’t go on any more.”
A fourth, who vomits when he eats, “cannot digest” some unpleasant fact.
I could cite many examples of this kind, but such physical reactions are only one form
in which the problems that trouble us unconsciously may express themselves.
They more often find expression in our dreams.
Any psychologist who has listened to numbers of people describing their dreams
knows that dream symbols have much greater variety than the physical symptoms of neurosis.
They often consist of elaborate and picturesque fantasies.
But if the analyst who is confronted by this dream material uses Freud’s original technique of “free association”
he finds that dreams can eventually be reduced to certain basic patterns.
This technique played an important part in the development of psychoanalysis
for it enabled Freud to use dreams as the starting point from which
the unconscious problem of the patient might be explored.
Freud made the simple but penetrating observation
that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on talking about his dream images
and the thoughts that these prompt in his mind
he will give himself away and reveal the unconscious background of his ailments
in both what he says and what he deliberately omits saying.
His ideas may seem irrational and irrelevant
but after a time it becomes relatively easy to see what it is that he is trying to avoid
what unpleasant thought or experience he is suppressing.
No matter how he tries to camouflage it, everything he says points to the core of his predicament.
A doctor sees so many things from the seamy side of life
that he is seldom far from the truth when he interprets the hints that his patient produces
as signs of an uneasy conscience.
What he eventually discovers, unfortunately, confirms his expectations.
Thus far, nobody can say anything against Freud’s theory of repression and wish fulfillment
as apparent causes of dream symbolism.
Freud attached particular importance to dreams as the point of departure for a process of “free association.”
But after a time I began to feel that this was a misleading and inadequate use of the rich fantasies
that the unconscious produces in sleep.
My doubts really began when a colleague told me of an experience he had
during the course of a long train journey in Russia.
Though he did not know the language and could not even decipher the Cyrillic script
he found himself musing over the strange letters in which the railway notices were written
and he fell into a reverie in which he imagined all sorts of meanings for them.
One idea led to another, and in his relaxed mood he found that this “free association”
had stirred up many old memories.
Among them he was annoyed to find some long-buried disagreeable topics
things he had wished to forget and had forgotten consciously.
He had in fact arrived at what psychologists would call his “complexes”
that is, repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances
or even, in many cases, the symptoms of a neurosis.
This episode opened my eyes to the fact that
it was not necessary to use a dream as the point of departure for the process of “free association”
if one wished to discover the complexes of a patient.
It showed me that one can reach the center directly from any point of the compass.
One could begin from Cyrillic letters,
from mediations upon a crystal ball, a prayer wheel, or a modern painting
or even from casual conversation about some quite trivial event.
The dream was no more and no less useful in this respect than any other possible starting point.
Nevertheless, dreams have a particular significance even though they often arise from an emotional upset
in which the habitual complexes are also involved.
The habitual complexes are the tender spots of the psyche
which react most quickly to an external stimulus or disturbance.
That is why free association can lead one from any dream to the critical secret thoughts.
At this point, however, it occurred to me that (if I was right so far)
it might reasonably follow that dreams have some special and more significant function of their own.
Very often dreams have a definite, evidently purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention
– though, as a rule, the latter is not immediately comprehensible.
I therefore began to consider whether one should pay more attention to the actual form and content of a dream
rather than allowing “free” association to lead one off through a train of ideas
to complexes that could as easily be reached by other means.
This new thought was a turning-point in the development of my psychology.
It meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream.
I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself
believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.
The change in my attitude toward dreams involved a change of method;
the new technique was one of that I could take account of all the various wider aspects of a dream.
A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end
but the same is not true of a dream.
Its dimensions in time and space are quite different.
To understand it you must examine it from every aspect
just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over
until you are familiar with every detail of its shape.
Perhaps I have now said enough to show how I came increasingly to disagree with “free” association
as Freud first employed it:
I wanted to keep as close as possible to the dream itself
and to exclude all the irrelevant ideas and associations that it might evoke.
True, these could lead one toward the complexes of a patient
but I had a more far-reaching purpose in mind than the discovery of complexes
that cause neurotic disturbances.
There are many other means by which these can be identified:
The psychologist, for instance, can get all the hints he needs by using word-association tests
(by asking the patient what he associates to a given set of words, and by studying his responses).
But to know and understand the psychic life-process of an individual’s whole personality
it is important to realize that his dreams and their symbolic images have a much more important role to play.
Almost everyone knows, for example, that there is an enormous variety of images
by which the sexual act can be symbolized
(or, one might say, represented in the form of an allegory).
Each of these images can lead, by a process of association, to the idea of sexual intercourse
and to specific complexes that any individual may have about his own sexual attitudes.
But one could just as well unearth such complexes by day-dreaming on a set of indecipherable Russian letters.
I was thus led to the assumption that a dream can contain some message other than the sexual allegory
and that it does so for definite reasons.
To illustrate this point:
A man may dream of inserting a key in a lock, of wielding a heavy stick
or of breaking down a door with a battering ram.
Each of these can be regarded as a sexual allegory. But the fact that his unconscious
for its own purposes has chosen one of these specific images
-it may be the key, the stick, or the battering ram-
is also of major significance.
The real task is to understand why the key has been preferred to the stick, or the stick to the ram.
And sometimes this might even lead one to discover that it is not the sexual act at all that is represented
but some quite different psychological point.
From this line of reasoning, I concluded that only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream
should be used in interpreting it.
The dream has its own limitation.
Its specific form itself tells us what belongs to it and what leads away from it.
While “free” association lures one away from that material in a kind of zigzag line
the method I evolved is more like a circumambulation whose center is the dream picture.
I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it.
Time and time again, in my professional work, I have had to repeat the words:
“Let’s get back to your dream. What does the dream say?”
For instance, a patient of mine dreamed of a drunken and disheveled vulgar woman.
In the dream, it seemed that this woman was his wife, though in real life his wife was totally different.
On the surface, therefore, the dream was shockingly untrue
and the patient immediately rejected it as dream nonsense.
If I, as his doctor, had let him start a process of association
he would inevitably have tried to get as far away as possible from the unpleasant suggestion of his dream.
In that case, he would have ended with one of his staple complexes
-a complex, possibly, that had nothing to do with his wife-
and we should have learned nothing about the special meaning of his particular dream.
What then, was his unconscious trying to convey by such and obviously untrue statement?
Clearly it somehow expressed the idea of a degenerate female
who was closely connected with the dreamer’s life:
but since the projection of this image on to his wife was unjustified and factually untrue
I had to look elsewhere before I found out what this repulsive image represented.
In the Middle Ages, long before the physiologists demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure
there both male and female elements in all of us
it was said that “every man carries a woman within himself.”
It is this female element in every male that I have called the “anima.”
This “feminine” aspect is essentially a certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings
and particularly to women, which is kept carefully concealed from others as well as from oneself.
In other words, though an individual’s visible personality may seem quite normal
he may well be concealing from others -or even from himself-
the deplorable condition of “the woman within.”
That was the case with this particular patient:
His female side was not nice.
His dream was actually saying to him:
“You are in some respects behaving like a degenerate female” and thus gave him an appropriate shock.
An example of this kind, of course
must not be taken as evidence that the unconscious is concerned with “moral” injunctions.
The dream was not telling the patient to “behave better”
but was simply trying to balance the lopsided nature of his conscious mind
which was maintaining the fiction that he was a perfect gentleman throughout.
It is easy to understand why dreamers tend to ignore and even deny the message of their dreams.
Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown.
I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call “misoneism”
a deep and superstitious fear of novelty.
The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events.
But “civilized” man reacts to new ideas in much the same way
erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.
This can easily be observed in any individual’s reaction to his own dreams
when obliged to admit a surprising thought.
Many pioneers in philosophy, science and even literature have been victims
of the innate conservatism of their contemporaries.
Psychology is one of the youngest of the sciences,
because it attempts to deal with the working of the unconscious
it has inevitably encountered misoneism in an extreme form.