Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis · Sigmund Freud
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?
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.