Susan Sugarman - Freud's Interpretation of Dreams - A Reappraisal-Cambridge University Press (2022)

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
Freud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams, and in particular

its thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, as his landmark contribution
and the scaffolding of his subsequent work. Susan Sugarman, after
carefully examining the text and scrutinizing a range of Freud’s other
works, shows that the dreams book is not and cannot be that scaf-
folding. For, not only does his argument on dreams falter, but his
reasoning elsewhere – in his case histories, his accounts of phenom-
ena of ordinary waking life, and even his avowedly speculative writ-
ing – displays a strength and precision his account of dreams lacks.
She concludes by exploring what is then left of the dreams theory and
Freud’s overall vision of the mind.
Susan Sugarman is Professor of Psychology at Princeton University,

USA, and a former Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim fellow. Her
most recent book is What Freud Really Meant: A Chronological
Reconstruction of his Theory of the Mind (Cambridge University
Press, 2016).
Published online by Cambridge University Press

Freud’s Interpretation
of Dreams
A Reappraisal
Susan Sugarman
Princeton University

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009244121
DOI: 10.1017/9781009244138
© Susan Sugarman 2023
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Names: Sugarman, Susan, author.
Title: Freud’s Interpretation of dreams : a reappraisal / Susan
Sugarman, Princeton University, New Jersey.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA :
Cambridge
University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022024934 | ISBN 9781009244121 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781009244138 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. Traumdeutung. | Dream
interpretation. | Dreams. | Psychoanalysis.
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For Abby and Stephen

Contents
Acknowledgments page x
INTRODUCTION 1
The Question 3
The Text and Its Puzzle 4
Dreams as Wish-Fulfillments 5
Freud’s Larger Project 7
Plan of This Book 8
Chapter Synopses 10
PART I THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1900)17
A Note on Freud’s Text 19
1 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapters I–IV:

Background, Method, and the Hypothesis of
Wish-Fulfillment20
Dreams as Meaningful Occurrences Similar to Symptoms 21
How to Interpret a Dream, and the Hypothesis
of Wish-Fulfillment 22
Additional Examples Suggesting That Dreams
Fulfill Wishes 26
How Dreams May Fulfill Wishes Even When
They Don’t Look Like They Do So 28
Interim Summary 37
vii

viii Contents
2 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapters V

and VI: If Dreams Fulfill Wishes, Then with What
Material, and How, Might They Form? 39
The Material and Sources of Dreams 40
The Mechanisms through Which the Latent Dream
Thoughts Assume Dreams’ Manifest Form 52
Appraisal: Freud’s Elaborative Chapters 58
3 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapter VII:

The Psychology of the Dream Processes 61
The Reliability of Interpretation 61
Distinguishing Features of Dreams 66
The Operation and Origins of Wish-Fulfillment 69
Primary and Secondary Process Thought 73
Summary79
4 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):

A Preliminary Appraisal 80
Recapitulation80
Reflection82
PART II FREUD’S OTHER WORKS87
5 The Analysis of Psychoneuroses: Elisabeth von R.

and the “Wolf Man” 89
Fräulein Elisabeth von R. 91
When a Neurosis and Its Cure Turn on a Dream:
The “Wolf Man” 104
The Interpretation of Dreams and Neuroses: An Appraisal 111
6 Phenomena of Ordinary Waking Life 114

Parapraxes 115
Jokes and the Appreciation of the Comic 121
Getting Lost in a Story 132

Contents ix
The Experience of the Uncanny 135

Freud on Ordinary (Waking) Mental Life and Dreaming 144
7 Speculative Works 146

“The Return of Totemism in Childhood” (1913) 146
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)156
Freud’s Speculative Works and the Dreams Treatise 163
CONCLUSION165
8 Freud on Dreams 167

Freud’s Argument on Dreams 167
Freud’s Analysis of Other Phenomena 171
The Larger Project 172
Freud’s Position 173
Sleeping and Waking 175
Freud on Dreams, Reimagined 175
References178
Index182

Acknowledgments
I thank Harry Daniels and the English Department at Oxford

University for the speaking invitation that resulted in this book,
preparation of which was supported by funds from Princeton Univer-
sity and a year’s leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princ-
eton. I am indebted to Rüdiger Bittner for his patient and judicious
reading of the text and Cindy Hyden, Joseph Avery, and Mari Jarris
for additional comments. Thank you to Janka Romero, Rowan Groat,
and the staff at Cambridge for easing the book into its final form.

Introduction
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Question
This book began when I was invited to contribute a paper on Freud

to a seminar series on nineteenth-century literature. The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, published in the latter part of 1899 and post-dated to
1900, both fit the requested timeframe and offered me the opportu-
nity to expand my thinking on Freud’s general theory. Having cen-
tered my recent efforts on his later metapsychological texts, I looked
forward to gaining further leverage on the theory by examining its
first purely psychological exposition.
Though it was The Interpretation of Dreams that launched
my interest in Freud’s writings, I had not read it closely in many
years and not, in any case, since I had completed detailed analyses
of Freud’s later theoretical works (Sugarman, 2016) and some of his
empirical investigations of ordinary waking mental life (e.g., Sugar-
man, 2010). Through those efforts, I had found in Freud’s theory an
elegant, methodical system, built from first principles, which Freud
modified throughout his career to include increasing nuance and
sweep. I had found in his empirical studies a tautness and efficiency
reminiscent of argumentation in linguistics, yet propelled by the aim
of extracting the psychological pulse of the experience in question.
I thus found myself unprepared for the reluctant discovery that
his avowed premier work did not measure up to the rest. Weaknesses
appear in his account of dreams that do not surface in his other efforts.
***
Freud, throughout his career, considered The Interpretation of

Dreams, and in particular his thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, his
landmark contribution (e.g., Freud, 1933). All else in the volume fol-
lows from that thesis, and he ever regarded both thesis and book as
3

4 Introduction
the scaffolding of his subsequent work. Yet, I found that Freud sets
an anchor in the text drawn from his previous examination of the
psychoneuroses, rather than create a new prototype for his future
endeavors. The shortcomings that arise in his account of dreams do
not appear in either that or his later work.
This book is about The Interpretation of Dreams, about what
it does and does not achieve and, in view of its achieving less than
Freud intended it to do, where that leaves his larger project.
The Text and Its Puzzle

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) both painstakingly builds the
case for a revolutionary theory of dreams and lays the foundation
for Freud’s general theory of the mind, the latter an undertaking he
believed necessary to account for dreams.
He identified as the real breakthrough of the treatise his discov-
ery that dreams fulfill wishes (1950, letter #137), a wish-fulfillment
embodying a condition of relief, whether expressly desired or other-
wise welcome. He found, when analyzing his own dreams and when
guiding his patients to analyze theirs, that he could identify a payoff
of some kind – a wish-fulfillment in his terms – among a dream’s
constituents, regardless of their ostensible appearance. The identi-
fied payoff, in turn, lent coherence to both the dream’s imagery and
the lines of thought the imagery had prompted. Recognition of the
payoff, along with the process of analyzing dreams in general, opened
a world of ideation outside people’s immediate awareness that was to
prove vital in the mitigation of mental illness.
The Interpretation of Dreams presents a puzzle, though. Do –
or, more to Freud’s point, must – dreams provide a mental tonic,
regardless of how obscure, in order to materialize? He extrapolates
to that position from dreamers’ waking analyses of their dreams.
Yet, regardless of how illuminating and even salutary those analy-
ses might prove, they do not establish on their own that the dreams
formed so as to bring about either the salutary upshot or any other
outcome they produce. Theoretically, dreams could arise in a more

The Question 5
arbitrary fashion and yet lend themselves to productive and auspi-

cious analyses, given that both dreams and their analyses come from
the same mind.
Others have long remarked that lack of necessary symmetry
between dream analyses undertaken after a dream has occurred and
the process that created it (e.g., Foulkes, 1964). They arrive at differ-
ent views of the consequences, some regarding Freud’s apparent leap as
relatively harmless to his account (e.g., Lear, 2005; Michael, 2007), and
others, as its undoing (e.g., Glymour, 1983; Grünbaum, 1992). The vari-
ation mirrors that regarding the implications for Freud’s account of the
neural circuity now thought to underlie dreaming: some writers find
Freud’s account still plausible (e.g., Solms and Turnbull, 2007), while
others believe it undermined (e.g., Domhoff, 2019; Hobson, 1988).
It is difficult to gauge the solidity of Freud’s conclusions without
a close reading of his account, which unfolds over 600-plus pages – to
see whether it, or any other consideration, closes the apparent gap in
the argument. Neither the account’s adherents nor its detractors pro-
vide that examination. They either speak in generalities or address
isolated facets of Freud’s construction.
The cortical regions now known to activate during dreaming,
which include both lower and higher areas (e.g., Domhoff, 2019;
Solms and Turnbull, 2007), likewise, neither confirm nor rule out
Freud’s vision. Though the altered neural function that supports
dreaming might appear to favor a more rudimentary depiction of
dreaming than his, dreaming, in his eyes and despite the complexity
of his portrayal, remains a primitive psychological process.
The integrity of The Interpretation of Dreams begs for thor-
ough investigation given the centrality to it of the claim that dreams
fulfill wishes and of the treatise to Freud’s larger project.
Dreams as Wish-Fulfillments
We hear little of Freud’s wish-fulfillment thesis today. Contemporary
psychoanalysis, where it engages dreams, looks for their underlying
narrative, be it wishes, fears, or other currency (e.g., Budd, 2004).

6 Introduction
Some perceive Freud himself as having moved, in his later writings,

away from ascribing wishes a dominant role in dreaming (e.g., Budd,
2004; McLeod, 1992).
Wishes, however, occupy the center of both his dream theory
and the connection of that theory to his larger program. Without a
motivating wish, he tells us in The Interpretation of Dreams, a dream
would not occur; there would be no need for it. That view becomes
the fulcrum of his Dora case history (1905a), which followed shortly
after the dreams book, and remains intact thereafter, despite other
developments in his understanding of dreaming.1 All else in The
Interpretation of Dreams follows from the claim that dreams form
from wishes, for instance Freud’s propositions that dreams contain
distortion and arise through mechanisms like condensation and dis-
placement. It makes sense to speak of processes like those, which
alter something, only if a dream’s real content differs from its out-
ward form, as it would do if all dreams fulfill wishes and some do not
look like they do.
Contemporary psychoanalysis, consistent with its lack of
interest in Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, also has little
use for his occupation in general with the question of how dreams
form. Dream analyses naturally generate both old and new connec-
tions, the new created for the first time in the analysis. The analytic
process utilizes all the material that comes forth, regardless of its
source, to arrive at as full a picture as possible of the currents of a per-
son’s mental life (e.g., Lear, 2005, p. 112). On the other side, it is the
story of dreams’ genesis that critics mindful of the lacuna in Freud’s
argument – in the extrapolation from the results of dream analysis to
dreams’ formation – find undermined (e.g., Grünbaum, 1992).
Freud (1900, Ch. VII.A), meanwhile, acknowledged and
exploited the same potential confluence of old and new associations
1 See, for example, Freud (1923), p. 111, on his differentiation of dreams originating
“from above” and those originating “from below” and p. 113 on the continued cen-
trality of wish-fulfillment to his vision of dreaming even after he concluded that some
dreams breach that function.

The Question 7
capitalized on in dream analysis, while at the same time holding fast

to his genesis theory. What is more, he constructs the same gene-
sis narrative he imposes on dreams, rooted in the prospect of wish-
fulfillment, in his investigations of mental happenings other than
dreams. Those efforts succeed, as I will show.
Freud’s Larger Project

With respect to the centrality of The Interpretation of Dreams to
Freud’s larger project, the idea that dreams might give us the reprieve
Freud describes – fulfill wishes – aligns with his axiom that our men-
tal processes observe a pleasure principle. Mental life trends away
from what causes us pain and toward what brings relief or pleasure;
the former, inhibiting, version of the principle dates to Freud’s ear-
lier, and soon abandoned, “Project for a scientific psychology” (1895),
and the full version, to The Interpretation of Dreams.2 The pleasure
principle, so defined, describes the motivational architecture we nat-
urally ascribe to human behavior. It is the “why” entailed in our ask-
ing why someone did something. It drives any psychotherapy, like
psychoanalysis, that tries to relieve sufferers of their symptoms by
ferreting out the work the symptoms accomplish: the pressure they
relieve, the pain from which they divert us.
Thus, the discovery of wish-fulfillment in dreams served, for
Freud, as both an impetus for and a demonstration of the bedrock of
his general theory, an awkward double role he expressly concedes
(1900, p. 511). His later formulations of the theory, in particular the
still more elemental construction he superimposed on the pleasure
principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), leave the pleasure
principle intact as the motor of our mental lives; he now allows that
extreme limiting conditions can impede it.3
The general theory, as Freud presented it after The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, is both powerful and persuasive (Sugarman, 2016).
2 The later version is elaborated further in Freud, 1911 and 1924.

3 See Chapter 7 of this volume.

8 Introduction
Significant shortcomings in the dreams treatise, on which Freud

imagined himself to have built all that followed it, would create a
curious, if not a precarious, circumstance for his larger program, one
that adds to the interest of scrutinizing the tract.
Plan of This Book

Accordingly, in Part I of this book, I examine Freud’s argument as it
unfolds in The Interpretation of Dreams, tracking his development
of his method of dream interpretation and of his thesis that dreams
fulfill wishes. I follow as he tests the thesis, first by showing addi-
tional instances of evident wish-fulfillment and then by examining
a widening array of dreams that appear to contravene the thesis. I
next watch as he, convinced of the thesis’s durability, explains by
what means dreams, regardless of their surface appearance, still ful-
fill wishes. I then reconstruct those portions of his final, theoretical
chapter from which he believes the wish-fulfilling nature of dreams
follows.
Finding inadequate grounds for Freud’s account, based on a pre-
liminary appraisal, I then examine, in Part II, whether the problem
extends to his work in general – which, were it to do so, might sug-
gest a form of endemic overstatement – or whether it pertains spe-
cifically to his handling of dreams. I consider first his narratives of
cases of psychoneurosis he treated both before and after he wrote The
Interpretation of Dreams, the earlier treatments his inspiration and
model for his investigation of dreams. I next explore other analyses of
Freud’s that intersect the account of dreams in different ways, those
analyses thus offering alternative templates against which to com-
pare the account of dreams.
In considering the last – analyses beyond those of dreams
and psychoneuroses – I examine first Freud’s explanations of other
phenomena of ordinary mental life and then representatives of his
expressly speculative writing. Additional phenomena of ordinary
mental life – like momentary glitches such as slips of the tongue,
joking, or our capacity to get lost in a book – consist, like dreams, of

The Question 9
specific, transient phenomena that must be analyzed of themselves.

Freud’s avowedly speculative pieces, which he himself describes as
just-so stories meant to evoke a psychological and not necessarily
material truth, allow us to evaluate The Interpretation of Dreams
as one of that category: as a just-so story meant to animate our
psychology.
In closing, I consider whether, or for which purposes, the weak-
nesses evident in the account of dreams matter and their conse-
quences for Freud’s overall program.
The goal of the book, therefore, is, not to explain dreams, but
to track Freud’s reasoning in determining the psychology necessary
to account for them. It is to reflect on, given the results of that effort,
how to think about Freud’s theory and the mind that sleeps, dreams,
and negotiates waking life.

Chapter Synopses
Part I. the interpretation of dreams (1900) 1

Chapter 1. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
Chapters I–IV: Background, Method, and
the Hypothesis of Wish-Fulfillment
This chapter watches Freud develop and deploy his approach to
dreaming. The chapter reviews, along with Freud’s first, historical
chapter, the first three of five chapters that develop his vision of
dreaming from observation.
Those chapters provide the core of Freud’s book’s argument.
Dreams can be inserted into dreamers’ waking thought through a
process of interpretation based in the dreamers’ retrieval of memories
and conjuring of impressions related to the elements of the dream.
The process, when followed as far as possible and capped with an
integration of the different lines of thought thus summoned, permits
the identification of a wish the dream has fulfilled: a state of affairs
dreamers would be happy to see come to pass. Freud imagines that
the wish forms in our mind in waking life, outside our awareness,
and instigates the dream at night. At least adult dreams rarely express
directly wishes of the sort to which interpretation leads, wishes we
would hesitate to express openly. Accordingly, Freud posits a process
of distortion that converts the wish-fulfillment into unobjectionable,
if bewildering, form.

1 In the chapter designations that follow, I use Arabic numerals for the chapters of this
book, for example, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. and Roman numerals to reference Freud’s
chapters in The Interpretation of Dreams, for example, Freud’s Chapters I, II, etc.
10

Chapter Synopses 11

Chapters V and VI: If Dreams Fulfill Wishes, Then
with What Material, and How, Might They Form?
Freud next elaborates consequences of the structure he has pos-
tulated, as he examines the material dreams use (his Chapter V)
and the mechanisms by which they reach their manifest form (his
Chapter VI). The former investigation allows us to see whether his
conception illuminates characteristics of dreaming he has not yet
considered, like its favoring of recent and indifferent impressions
or its incorporation of material from childhood. The latter effort –
his delineation of the means by which the underlying “latent,”
wish-fulfilling content of dreams changes into its manifest form –
assumes the theory without providing any additional grounds for its
evaluation.
His fifth chapter turns out, on inspection, also to assume the
theory. A novel contribution of the chapter is his delineation of a
wish to sleep, apart from the matters of our individual lives that he
believes dreams rectify. They guard sleep, he says. Granted that they
could serve such a function, though, we know so far only that they at
least do not routinely disrupt sleep in a significant way.
A further claim, in his sixth chapter, is that dreaming is a
primitive mental process. The webs of thought that may spur dreams
and the compression, displacement, and metamorphosis into plastic
imagery he envisions the thoughts undergo in forming a dream do
not implicate the involvement of higher mental function.

Chapter VII: The Psychology of the Dream Processes
In his final chapter, Freud tries to show that his dreams theory fol-
lows from larger principles about the way our minds work.
Wish-fulfillment, he argues, is a very old function, embodied
even by the nervous system, which operates to discharge excitation.
Dreaming, as psychically primitive, realizes that function, and only

12 Introduction
that function. It is set in motion by a wish that, if unattended, would

wake us. A dream, fulfilling such a wish, allows us to sleep on. It hal-
lucinates the fulfillment, hallucination a primitive mental mecha-
nism, akin to a reflex in motor behavior.
Chapter 4. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):

A Preliminary Appraisal
Freud shows that dreams, via the process of element-by-element anal-
ysis, can be inserted into the occupations of dreamers’ waking men-
tal life, of which dreams, as analyzed, represent an improvement for
the dreamer. It is less clear that dreams themselves accomplish that
outcome, that they fulfill a wish. Freud does not offer any grounds
independent of the analysis itself that dreams arise for that purpose.
Counterarguments he proposes, like that dream analyses could not
arrive at the conclusions they do without the tracks’ having been laid
down beforehand, do not salvage the argument.
To try to situate the apparent gap within Freud’s thought and
to investigate its implications for his larger program, the next three
chapters examine to what degree similar weaknesses appear in his
treatment of other subjects.
Part II. Freud’s Other Works

Chapter 5. The Analysis of Psychoneuroses:
Elisabeth von R. and the “Wolf Man”
Freud’s investigation of dreams drew heavily from his first psycholog-
ical effort, his treatment, initially with Josef Breuer, of patients with
psychoneuroses, which saw the birth of psychoanalysis. This chapter
examines how Freud extrapolates from analysis to genesis in the case
of neuroses and whether the extrapolation stands on firmer ground
than does the one he makes for dreams. It reviews his first complete
analysis, of a patient he called Fräulein Elisabeth von R., conducted in
1892 and thus before he completed his treatise on dreams, and then
a portion of his “Wolf Man” case history, completed later in 1914
(published 1918). The latter case turns on a dream and thus enables

Chapter Synopses 13
us to compare directly extrapolations to dream formation and to the

genesis of neuroses.
The ebb and flow of Elisabeth’s (hysterical) symptom corre-
sponded in detail with the quieting and intensification of a torment-
ing psychical conflict taking place outside her awareness. She felt a
deep attraction, unacknowledged, to her brother-in-law that, when it
did surface, she found thoroughly abhorrent. Exposure of the conflict
in analysis, combined with her negotiation of her feelings, coincided
with the dissipation of her symptoms and her return to full psycho-
logical health.
Although Freud treated the “Wolf Man” as an adult, the por-
tion of the analysis he reports focuses on the onset of the patient’s
neurosis in the wake of a terrifying dream he had the night before his
fourth birthday. Retrospective analysis of the dream opened lines of
thought whose consideration coincided with the amelioration of his
illness, twenty years later.
The convergence of Elisabeth’s improvement with her recogni-
tion of her emotional conflict lends support to the idea that the con-
flict acted in the genesis of her symptoms. The correspondence of the
exposure of particular themes in the Wolf Man’s analysis with the
abatement of his symptoms likewise lends credence to the hypothe-
sis that those matters had a role in his ailment. No comparable exter-
nal support exists for Freud’s vision of the genesis of dreams. That
the analysis of a dream helped to expose the undercurrents of the
Wolf Man’s illness does not demonstrate that the dream was itself
comprised of those undercurrents.
Chapter 6. Phenomena of Ordinary Waking Life

Freud’s investigation of mental life took him beyond psychoneuroses
and dreams to other phenomena of waking life. Though well aware of
psychological happenings requiring no special explanation, he identi-
fied some occurrences on which he thought he might productively
bring to bear the view of the mind nurtured by his treatment of neu-
roses and formalized in his account of dreams.

14 Introduction
Those occurrences consist of short-term behaviors and

experiences that, although common, elude straightforward expla-
nation, thus licensing Freud to explore the applicability of the
mechanisms he had ascribed to other instances of non-ordinary
functioning. Examples include the mental glitches he called para-
praxes – small involuntary errors, like slips of the tongue and the
forgetting of names, and jokes and the appreciation of the comic, as
well as more passive experiences like getting lost in a book and the
feeling of the uncanny.
The chapter considers Freud’s treatment of each of those sub-
jects, with particular attention to the way he develops his argument
for each. Except in the instance of parapraxes, no analysis, in con-
junction with the experiencer, exists of the occurrences on which
Freud wants to bring his apparatus to bear. He instead must make the
theoretical argument that something like the kind of explanation he
is proposing is warranted.
In each of the writings covered, Freud builds a more compelling
case than he does with his theory of dreams that processes along the
lines he proposes are needed to produce the result in question.
Chapter 7. Speculative Works

Freud also wrote some admittedly far-fetched speculative works
addressing what he considered to be fundaments of the human
psyche. Chapter 7 considers two of his most speculative pieces, “The
Return of Totemism in Childhood,” the fourth essay of his Totem
and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
“The Return of Totemism in Childhood” maps out a hypothet-
ical origin of human social life, based on a close analysis of totem-
ism and extrapolations about its basis from the underpinnings of the
partly parallel behavior of children with animal phobias. Ambiva-
lence undergirds both, on Freud’s inspection. Throughout the text
Freud examines his suppositions and, in the end, offers an enlighten-
ing, if hypothetical, account of totemism, the evolution of religion,
and a prehistoric piece of modern mentality.

Chapter Synopses 15
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, starting from an exception

Freud believes he has found to his otherwise ubiquitous pleasure
principle, postulates an even more fundamental tendency, repetition
compulsion. Extrapolating from the latter and from his conception
of instincts (Triebe), he derives the dueling and intermixing life and
death instincts, on whose basis he now stipulates the build-up of
activity and its denouement as the most basic stratum of mental –
and indeed all – life. The steps through which he reaches the view are
clear, if – avowedly – extreme at times, for instance in the analogy he
draws between the human compulsion to repeat and the life cycle of
the first life to have appeared on earth.
Both writings, despite their fantastical nature, contain a coher-
ence and completeness The Interpretation of Dreams lacks.
Conclusion
Chapter 8. Freud on Dreams
Neither Freud’s extrapolation backward from the endpoint of the
analysis of dreams to their origin nor his attempt to derive the
account from general theory appears to support the conclusions he
reaches about dreaming. The gap in his argument seems not to have
an equal in his other lines of writing. We may conclude the following:
1. The Interpretation of Dreams, despite Freud’s claims for it, cannot form
the bedrock of his other treatises. They either remain free-standing
or, in the case of the analyses of psychoneuroses that preceded
The Interpretation of Dreams, they anchor the rest, including The
Interpretation of Dreams, which, however, contains a flaw the other
works lack.
2. His larger project, consequently, is little affected by the weakness of
the tract. His accounts of other phenomena stand without it, and the
grand theory he elaborated, beginning with the last chapter of The
Interpretation of Dreams, does not need it.
3. We need not, on those accounts, abandon the practice of interpreting
dreams, including in the way Freud did it, to gain insight into people’s
inner lives or to help remediate them.

16 Introduction
4. As per Freud’s grand theory, we may still be driven by a pleasure

principle, even if dreams do not carry out wish-fulfillment, a particular,
narrow embodiment of the principle.
We can only speculate about how Freud came to think he had

explained dreams, when his vision rests on an argument that has a
gap. He may have been blindsided by his insistence that all mental
processes are purposive: aiming toward something.
Purposiveness may be incompatible with sleeping, and by exten-
sion dreaming. The result, supported by the greater cogency of his
accounts of mental phenomena other than dreams, is that the entire
apparatus Freud maps out in The Interpretation of Dreams and else-
where may pertain only, though still illuminatingly, to waking life.

Part I The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900)

A Note on Freud’s Text
Freud produced eight editions of The Interpretation of Dreams over

a period of 30 years, the last in 1930, nine years before his death.
The changes appear largely in footnotes and in the insertion of illus-
trative content in his sixth chapter, on the mechanisms he inferred
to explain how a dream’s meaning, as constructed through analysis,
could manifest as it does. Freud made many of his emendations in
response to comments from colleagues, patients, and other respon-
dents on earlier editions.1 I treat the material from the different edi-
tions as one, thus following his eighth edition, as the changes do not
affect the main axes of the account. I also set aside emendations to
the dream theory Freud made in other writings, as they do not impact
the points of concern here; I include in Chapter 7, Freud’s 1920 dis-
cussion of dreams he believes go “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

1 See Marinelli and Mayer (2003) for elaboration.

1 The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Chapters I–IV
Background, Method, and the
Hypothesis of Wish-Fulfillment
We may divide Freud’s text into two sections for the purposes of this
inquiry: one in which Freud builds the case for his account of dreams
from data and the other in which he argues from general theory. His
middle five chapters (Chapters II–VI) do the former; they extrapo-
late to the nature of dreaming from reports of his own and others’
dreams – the latter mostly his patients’ dreams – and analyses of the
dreams. His final chapter (Chapter VII) carries out the latter agenda;
it postulates a general theory he believes supports his account of
dreaming. His first chapter situates his investigation in the history of
previous study of and speculation about dreams.
This chapter reviews, along with Freud’s first, historical chap-
ter, the first three of his middle chapters (Chapters II–IV) that develop
his vision of dreaming from observation – of dream reports and dream
analyses. Those three chapters introduce his method of dream inter-
pretation and construct and test the generality of his thesis that
dreams fulfill wishes. I have separated them from the two following
chapters (Chapters V and VI) of the text’s middle – empirical – sec-
tion, because the latter two chapters assume his thesis and explore
extensions of it. In the present chapter, then, we will watch Freud
develop and deploy his approach to dreaming.
I ask readers’ patience with this and the following reconstruc-
tions. We want to know exactly how Freud reaches the conclusions he
does, where he may veer off course, as he appears in retrospect to have
done, and what he offers as possible justification or compensation for the
move. I will reserve my commentary on the account, however, for (my)
Chapter 4, letting Freud build his case on his terms in the meantime.
20

the interpretation of dreams (1900), Chapters I–IV 21
Dreams as Meaningful Occurrences Similar to

Symptoms (Freud’s Prefaces and Chapter I. The
Scientific Literature on Dreams, up to 1900)
The aim of the book, Freud says in his opening chapter, is to dem-
onstrate a technique for interpreting dreams, whose use shows that
every dream is a psychical happening with a meaning that can be
assigned a place in the dreamer’s waking thoughts. The meaning is
obscured, he believes, by processes in the mind that he will extrapo-
late and on whose basis he will deduce the psychical forces that pro-
duce dreams and operate more broadly in our mental life (p. 1).
A lengthy review depicts the transition from mystical to sci-
entific thinking about dreams and then the further development of
scientific views. The mystical views, dating at least to Antiquity,
understood dreams as bearing meaning – in a direct way and wanting
only translation – and the scientific views as the manifestation only
of somatic processes. Freud finds flaws in both views. Dreams are
neither directly symbolic occurrences nor somatic ephemera; they
are, as he intends to show, psychological phenomena produced by
each individual mind.
Dreams, he suggests, have the character of abnormal psycho-
logical phenomena, like hysterical phobias, obsessions, and delu-
sions, but they are not pathological. However, given the resemblance,
dreams assume theoretical interest, because, if we can explain
dreams, Freud thinks, we might be able to explain and treat patho-
logical conditions (p. xxiii).
The observation of a resemblance between dreams and psycho-
pathology has a long history, dating at least to Kant (1764). Some of
the particular commonalities earlier writers noticed recur in Freud’s
account, for instance: a flow of ideas according to association, rather
than logic; people’s overvaluation of their mental exertions; and a
split in the personality. A few authors anticipate Freud’s view on the
function of both dreaming and mental illness as driven by the fulfill-
ment of wishes (e.g., Griesinger, 1861, p. 106; Radestock, 1879, p. 219).

22 the interpretation of dreams (1900)
Nonetheless, the apparent parallels notwithstanding, mental disorders

remain too imperfectly understood to allow purchase on the problem
of dreams, Freud believes. More likely, he thinks, the study of dreams
will illuminate pathology (Freud, 1900, pp. 89–92).
How to Interpret a Dream, and the Hypothesis

of Wish-Fulfillment (Freud’s Chapter
II. The Method of Interpreting Dreams:
An Analysis of a Specimen Dream)
The idea that dreams admit of interpretation aligns more with older
views, as far back as ancient ones that saw in them signs sent from
higher powers, than with the scholarship of Freud’s time. The scien-
tific theories of Freud’s day, in denying that dreams are mental acts
at all, necessarily preclude the idea of assigning them a meaning. Lay
opinion, by contrast, leaves open, as it has throughout history, the
possibility that dreams have a meaning, whether sent by external
forces or arising from within. People harbor an obscure feeling that
every dream has a meaning, though the meaning remains hidden.
The conviction has endured that we can retrieve the mean-
ing, in consequence of which two popular methods of extracting it
have developed, one assigning a meaning to the dream as a whole
and the other decoding it element by element according to a fixed
key. Joseph’s explanation of Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean kine fol-
lowing and eating seven fat kine exemplifies the holistic method:
seven years of plenty would give way to seven years of famine, which
would consume the bounty of the flush years. Following the decod-
ing method, we might find, in consulting a “dream book” regarding
a dream containing a letter and a funeral, that “letter” translates to
“trouble” and “funeral” to “betrothal.” We would then link the new
words together and transpose them to the future tense, producing the
translation that the betrothal is headed for trouble (pp. 96–98).
However, neither the holistic nor the decoding method lends
itself to a scientific analysis of dreams, Freud says. The holistic
method has a limited range of application, restricted to dreams with

an apparently coherent flow of ideas, and resists methodical formula-

tion. The decoding method depends entirely on the trustworthiness
of the interpretative key, whereas the potential for extensive variabil-
ity in meaning, already recognized in the second century by Artemi-
dorus, puts that reliability beyond reach. Freud’s method overcomes
both sets of problems (pp. 97–100).
Freud’s Method
The method Freud developed for interpreting dreams draws from the
technique he and his mentor Josef Breuer evolved for treating psycho-
pathology, through which an unravelling of symptoms back to their
origins coincided with the symptoms’ extinction. The procedure,
which originally made use of hypnosis, grew into strictly a waking
talk therapy in which patients committed to telling Freud everything
that came to their mind in connection with the matter at hand, for
instance a given symptom (p. 100).
Patients, it turns out, spontaneously described their dreams
during their analytic sessions. It was a natural segue from there to
subject the dreams, bathed in obscurity like the patients’ symptoms,
to the method of interpretation being used for the symptoms. Thus,
Freud prompted patients to bring forth associations to the imagery
of their dreams, just as he had sought their thoughts related to their
symptoms (p. 101).
For the procedure to yield results, patients had to develop
given practices. They had to pay close attention to the ideas flow-
ing through their minds. Crucially, they had to eliminate any criti-
cism or censoring of the thoughts and to relay anything that occurred
to them, regardless of how irrelevant, unimportant, meaningless, or
even offensive it might seem. Relaxation furthers both desiderata, by
contrast with the vigilance of reasoning and reflection, which will
reject or cut short some thoughts even before the thinker fully per-
ceives them; thus patients needed as far as possible to relax. Freud
likens the desired state to the one we reach as we fall asleep, or slip
into hypnosis (p. 102).

It is easier, in the case of dreams, he found, to implement the

necessary analytic state – to allow thoughts to come unbidden, note
them, and disregard any resistance to them – if the analysis proceeds
element by element, rather than considering the dream as a whole.
Thus, his technique aligns more with the old decoding methods than
with the holistic ones (p. 104).
The selection of material to include in his book presented a
quandary. The explication of a dream depends on a live process of
analysis with the dreamer, which rules out dreams reported in the
literature or the historical record and dreams reported to him by
acquaintances. His patients’ dreams, on the other hand, for which
he had extensive analyses, ran the risk of skewing the investigation,
given the potential complications of pathology and the need to elabo-
rate each case history to establish the full import of the dreams. He
wanted, on the contrary, to use the investigation of dreams to gain
purchase on the psychology of neuroses. Therefore, he launches his
treatise with his own dreams, which he has subjected to the kind of
analysis he asks of his patients when examining their dreams and
symptoms and for which he has access to the possibly provoking
events (pp. 104–105).
Nonetheless, Freud ends up drawing significantly on his
patients’ dreams, of which he had analyzed over 1,000 by the time
he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (p. 104). He likewise occa-
sionally engages others’ published and unpublished dreams, while
granting the caveat about the lack of background material. He uses a
dream of his, the first among those he interpreted in detail, to dem-
onstrate his analytic technique (p. 105).
Freud’s Dream of Irma’s Injection

Freud’s dream, by way of preamble, occurred the night after he
received a visit from his friend and family doctor, Otto, who had been
staying with Freud’s patient Irma’s family, also friends of his. Freud
had managed to relieve Irma of some, but not all, of her symptoms. To
try to progress further, he had presented her with a tentative solution

of her illness, which she had rejected, after which they stopped the
treatment. When Otto told Freud, during his visit, he had found Irma
better, but not entirely well, Freud had an uneasy feeling he later
ascribed to a fleeting impression of a reproof in Otto’s statement. He
wrote out the case history later that evening, thinking he would give
it to a third doctor, a mutual friend of his and Otto’s, to justify him-
self (p. 106). He gives a detailed recounting of the dream, of which I
convey the gist.
In the dream, Freud, receiving guests in a large hall, among them

Otto and other colleagues, encounters Irma. He reproaches her for
not having accepted his solution yet and tells her that if she still
gets pains, it is her fault. He also concludes with alarm, based on
the complaints she describes in the dream and with confirmation
from the colleagues, that she might be having some organic
trouble. Additionally, according to the dream, Otto had given her
an injection shortly before, when she was feeling unwell. The
composition of the injection was such, based on the formula the
dream presents, that it ought not to be given so cavalierly, and
the syringe was likely unclean. (p. 107)
Freud, proceeding element by element down to the smallest

particular in his analysis of the dream, offers the chain of associations
he made to each constituent. He situates each constituent within his
recent experiences and then plumbs further for additional trains of
thought leading to broader preoccupations of his mind.
Thus, the hall in which he was receiving guests in the dream
resembled the place where he and his family were spending the sum-
mer. They were expecting guests imminently, Irma among them, to
celebrate Freud’s wife’s birthday. With respect to having reproached
Irma for not having accepted his proposed solution, he reflects, on
the one hand, that he might have said something along those lines in
the past, though had since decided it was poor practice to announce a
solution to patients. He now, on the other hand, sees in the allegation
that the return of Irma’s pains was her own fault – in the light of her

rejection of his proposed solution – an exoneration of himself as the

cause of her still-compromised condition (p. 108).
Many details of the dream, once traced, like that reproach, to
utterances and events of the recent past and then reflected on for
further connections, appear to point toward the same end, that Freud
was not to blame for the persistence of Irma’s illness. For instance,
had her pains arisen from an organic cause, as per the dream, rather
than the psychosomatic one Freud suspected in waking life, their
elimination would have exceeded his powers as a psychoanalyst. Or,
had they resulted from Otto’s having given her a careless injection of
an unsuitable drug, and with a dirty needle, then Freud would have
again found himself exonerated. Even details that seemed to refer to
people other than Irma or conditions other than those of her illness
appeared to lead, sooner or later, to attestations to Freud’s conscien-
tiousness as a practitioner or to his unimpeachable treatment of Irma
in particular (pp. 108–118).
The dream, he concludes, fulfilled desires provoked in him by
the previous evening’s occurrences: Otto’s observation that Irma was
not yet cured and Freud’s writing out of the case history. The dream
gave him revenge on Otto by throwing the reproach he detected in
Otto’s remark back on him. It otherwise acquitted him of any respon-
sibility for Irma’s condition and affirmed his conscientiousness in his
professional and social dealings (pp. 118–120).
Dreams, should the analysis generalize, have a meaning; they
are not the expression of fragmentary brain activity. When fully ana-
lyzed, through the dreamer’s associated thoughts, they can be seen to
fulfill wishes, that is, to present states of affairs as the dreamer would
be happy to find them (p. 120).
Additional Examples Suggesting That Dreams

Fulfill Wishes (Freud’s Chapter III. A
Dream Is the Fulfillment of a Wish)
Dreams beyond Freud’s Irma dream indeed appear to fulfill wishes
(p. 123).

Many dreams fulfill wishes undisguisedly. For example, Freud

says he can provoke a dream of enthusiastic, bountiful drinking in
himself by eating salty food, like anchovies, in the evening. Torment-
ing thirst produces a wish to drink while he sleeps, and the dream
shows him the wish fulfilled. The dream, in delivering that fulfill-
ment, serves a practical purpose as well. By appeasing Freud’s thirst,
it allows him to continue sleeping, rather than waking up to address
his need. He calls that kind of dream a dream of convenience (p. 125).
Additional examples include a recurrent dream of his that
occurred when, while younger, he worked late into the night and had
trouble waking in the morning: He dreamt he was up by his wash-
stand, thus obviating the need to get up. A nephew of Breuer’s, then
a medical student and a late riser, had arranged to have a servant at
his lodging rouse him in the morning. One morning, when he did not
respond, she called to him by his name: “Herr Rudi!” He promptly
saw a sign over a hospital bed, “Rudolf Kaufmann,” and said to him-
self that he was in the hospital already and needn’t get up to go there,
whereupon he continued sleeping.1 A pregnant woman dreamt she
had her period, thus allowing her the freedom she would soon not
have (pp. 125–126).
The simplest undisguised dreams of wish-fulfillment occur
in children, including the iconic one Freud recounts of his daugh-
ter Anna when she was nineteen months old. Having been denied
food during the day because she was ill, she spoke that night in her
sleep: “Anna Fweud, stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet,
pudden!”; her nurse had ascribed the illness to Anna’s having eaten
too many strawberries. A nephew of Freud’s, at twenty-two months,
similarly, dreamt he had eaten all the cherries of a basket he had
been asked to present to Freud on his birthday. Several other children
dreamt of either missed treats or sites they had looked forward to
seeing on a family excursion and were denied. Freud’s daughter, then
1 Freud first reports the anecdote in a letter to Fliess in 1895 (Letter 22, March 4: SE, I,
p. 213 and n. 3 on that page).

8½, dreamt that a 12-year-old boy to whom she had taken a fancy was
one of the family (pp. 127–131).
Language and folklore embody the intuition that dreams fulfill
wishes. “What do geese dream of?” “Of maize” runs one among an
international collection of similar sayings (pp. 131–132). There is the
declaration, finally, “I should never have dreamed of such a thing,”
or, “Only in your dreams might that happen” (p. 133).
How Dreams May Fulfill Wishes Even When

They Don’t Look Like They Do So (Freud’s
Chapter IV. Distortion in Dreams)
We do not experience every dream as fulfilling a wish, however;
many distress or displease us. The latter may nonetheless fulfill
wishes, Freud says, as becomes evident when we separate the dream
we experience and the thoughts to which our reflection on it lead us,
or its manifest and latent content, respectively, according to him.
The claim of wish-fulfillment pertains to the latter (pp. 134–135).
Freud finds it instructive, in illustrating how a dream’s pre-
sumptive latent content can fulfill a wish when the manifest content
does not do so, to consider a case in which the manifest content of
a dream is indifferent, rather than either good or bad. Why, he asks,
would dreams with an indifferent exterior that, according to their
latent content, turn out to fulfill wishes not simply express their
meaning without disguise? For example, his dream of Irma’s injec-
tion, which, on analysis, he believed divested him of any responsibil-
ity for the persistence of her disorder, presented with fairly neutral
content. He was giving a party, with Irma and some of his colleagues
among the guests. The doctors examined Irma and noticed some
modest abnormalities. They considered some explanations – an
organic condition, a dirty needle, and so forth. Why would the dream
not just have presented Freud outright with the wanted affirmation
of his stature (p. 136)?
The answer could not be a general incapacity of dreams to
express dream thoughts directly, because some do. Freud uses another

dream of his to suggest a different explanation (p. 136). The dream,

although brief in itself, leads Freud on a lengthy, tortuous analysis,
a substantial portion of which I recount here. I do so because Freud
returns to the dream often in his text. Additionally, in following
Freud’s account of this dream, we can witness a relatively complete
dream analysis.
The connections he draws and the persistence with which
he pursues them may strain credulity, until we recognize that all
he is doing is reporting the waking connections he made moment
to moment to the elements of the dream. We can separate that
exercise from what he extrapolates from it, the latter the subject
of later discussions here. His extrapolations aside, the idea that
his waking mind – suitably relaxed per analytic procedure – should
discover many associations to a few dream elements, and to those
associations, and so on, should not surprise us. Many currents of
thought intersect in our minds, especially regarding matters of
importance to us. Likewise, we should not be surprised to find
that we will easily find our way to those matters when ambling
freely among our thoughts, as the process of free association sets
us up to do.
Indifferent Dreams as Wish-Fulfillments:

The Dream of the Bearded Uncle
Two professors with no personal stake in the action had recom-
mended Freud for the post of professor extraordinarius (roughly assis-
tant professor in the English-American system), an eminent position,
a short time before Freud had his dream. Though he had welcomed
the news, he had resigned himself to not succeeding, because of the
failure of others qualified to attain the post. On the evening before
he had the dream, he received a visit from a friend, R, who had been
denied the promotion. The friend had since pursued the prospect
more aggressively, visiting the ministry occasionally to advance his
cause, and had just come from one such call, during which he had
learned that his religion put him at a disadvantage. The news, though

unsurprising, strengthened Freud’s resignation, because he suffered

the same disadvantage.
The dream, which occurred the next morning as he awoke,

consisted of two thoughts, each followed by a picture. He
discusses only the first thought-picture pair, which bears on
his present purpose. He understood, in the thought section of
the dream, that his friend R was his uncle and that he felt great
affection for him. Then, in the picture portion, he saw R’s face
drawn out lengthwise. A yellow beard surrounding it stood out
distinctly. (p. 137)
Freud, initially prepared to dismiss the dream as nonsense,

recognized that if a patient did the same, he would suspect a resis-
tance to some disagreeable content. He thus set about analyzing it
(p. 138).
With respect to the ascription that R was his uncle, his first
thought was that he had only one uncle, Josef, to whom an unhappy
story attached. Josef, in his eagerness to make money, had taken part
in an illegal scheme for which he was punished. Freud’s father, grief-
stricken, said later that Josef was not so much bad as a simpleton.
Thus, Freud infers, in seeing R as his uncle in the dream, he was say-
ing that R was a simpleton, a description he found false and highly
disagreeable. He adds, in a footnote, that he in fact had five uncles,
some admirable and close to his heart. His waking memory had at
first evidently narrowed to just the one unsavory character in con-
nection with the dream (p. 138).
The image of the uncle/R with an elongated face and fair beard
evoked the further thought that R’s beard, originally dark, had started
to turn gray, the gray pronounced because of the contrast with the
darker color. Both R’s beard and Freud’s were passing through the
same stages of transition from black, to reddish brown, to yellowish
brown, and then gray. The face in the dream was simultaneously
Josef’s and R’s, lending support to the idea that Freud meant R to be
a simpleton like his uncle (pp. 138–139).

The point of the comparison escaped Freud. His uncle was a

criminal, whereas R was upstanding, except for when he was fined
for knocking a boy down with his (R’s) bicycle, a commonality that
would trivialize the comparison. However, he now remembered a
conversation from a few days earlier with another colleague, N, who,
like Freud, had been recommended for a professorship. N had con-
gratulated Freud on his nomination. Freud had refused the felicita-
tions on the ground that N, also Jewish and who had been turned
down, should know the low worth of the recommendation. N had
answered jokingly that, whereas a concrete grievance had once been
made against him – a woman had once started legal proceedings, a
bald attempt at blackmail, against him, resulting in dismissal of the
case – Freud had a clean record (p. 139).
The Wish-Fulfillment
Freud, with that reminiscence, could infer who the criminal was and
how to interpret the dream and establish its purpose. His uncle Josef
represented the two colleagues, R and N, who had been denied pro-
fessorships, one, according to the dream, as a simpleton and one as
a criminal. It remained to answer why the dream would have rep-
resented them that way. If they had been turned down for religious
reasons, as indeed they were, Freud surmises, then he would fail to
receive the appointment as well. However, if he could ascribe their
rejection to nonsectarian shortcomings, then his chances remained
alive. Thus, the dream seemed to be saying, he needn’t be deterred by
R’s denominationally motivated rebuff (pp. 139–140).
Freud, still curious about the flippancy with which the dream
had degraded his two esteemed colleagues in order to keep open his
own chance at the professorship, decided the dream might merit fur-
ther analysis. He did not, in fact, consider R a simpleton and had also
disbelieved N’s story about the blackmailing; he revered both men.
Likewise, however, he also had never believed that Irma, of his ear-
lier dream, had become dangerously ill through receiving an injection
of Otto’s. Rather, he had come to understand, per his analysis of that

dream, that dreams express a wish that something might be so. Thus,
in that dream, he wished that Otto might be responsible for Irma’s
condition, so that he, Freud, might not be so. The dream of his uncle
went a step further and made use of actual facts to effect its degrada-
tion of respected others. One of the professors of his own faculty had
in fact voted against R, and, N, with his joking reference to having
been sued in court, gave Freud a basis to criminalize N, both facts
allowing him again to evade his own disagreeable prospects (p. 140).
The Distortion
He continued, nonetheless, to believe the dream admitted of further
explication. He now recalled that, in the dream, he had felt great fond-
ness for the uncle-and-R character. He had never felt any affection for
his uncle, whereas he had felt an affinity for R and had esteemed
him for years. However, if he had expressed in real life the degree of
affection he felt for R in the dream, R would have disbelieved him.
The affection he felt in the dream struck him, in the light of those
considerations, as disingenuous and exaggerated. At the same time,
he had diminished R’s intelligence by a comparable degree, having
fused him with Uncle Josef (p. 140).
It now occurred to Freud that the still impenetrable affection
he felt in the dream did not attach to the thoughts behind the dream –
the thoughts regarding the promotion and the dream’s figures – but
stood in contradiction to them. As such, it may have acted to conceal
the dream’s true intent (p. 141).
Reflecting further, he recalled how he had deferred longer than
usual interpreting the dream and had initially dismissed it as non-
sense – and how, recurring to his experience treating patients, he had
come to suspect that a repudiation like that was less a judgment than
an expression of emotion (p. 141).
Extending that reasoning to his dream, he inferred that he
put off interpreting it because he didn’t want to interpret it, and he
didn’t want to interpret it because he was struggling against some-
thing in it. With the interpretation now complete, he infers he was

struggling against the assertion imputed by the dream that R was a

simpleton. In the dream, he effected the affection to cover the slan-
der in the way that we sometimes exude affection to cover hostility
(pp. 141–142).
The dream, on that interpretation, becomes one of disguised
wish-fulfillment. The fulfilled wish is a state of affairs – R’s being
a simpleton and N’s being a criminal – that made it less likely than
everyone had thought that being Jewish had robbed R and N of
their advancement and therefore might damage Freud’s prospects.
But he also could not countenance the depiction of R as a simple-
ton and masked that implication with effusion. He describes the
process as one of censorship giving way to distortion as a circum-
vention (p. 142).
Wish-Fulfillment and Censorship as

the Shaping Forces of Dreams
Overall, then, two psychical forces shape dreams. One constructs the
wish, which finds expression in the dream, while the other censors
and distorts the expression of the wish (p. 143). We can extrapolate
further about the nature of the second process, the censorship, in the
light of the relation between dreams’ latent and manifest content.
Dreamers do not perceive, and aren’t conscious of, the latent con-
tent of their dreams – the so-called dream thoughts and the dream’s
wish – until analysis brings them forward. They do consciously
experience and consciously remember dreams’ manifest content:
the uncle/friend composite, the beard, and the feeling of affection
for him; the party at which Irma circulates and meets Freud and his
colleagues. The characteristic of censorship we can extrapolate from
the comparison is that censorship is a process that allows content to
enter consciousness (p. 144).
That line of reasoning allows a further inference regarding
the nature of consciousness. An idea becomes conscious through a
specific psychical act. The act is distinct from and independent of
the process of forming an idea, just as, in Freud’s telling, his wish

to assure himself of his prospects for promotion despite his friends’

failure reached his consciousness as an image of something else.
Consciousness so conceived is a sense organ that perceives data that
arise elsewhere. It does not create the data, the mental happenings
we might detect in it; it is an attribute that may attach to those hap-
penings (p. 144).2
Distressing Dreams as Wish-fulfillments

If the overt, manifest, content of dreams indeed reflects the distortion
of a wish the mind has censored from direct expression, then, the dis-
tress experienced in some dreams might disguise a wish also, perhaps
a wish we don’t want to face. The dream so understood would still
fulfill the wish, but would simultaneously fulfill a second wish, the
wish to block the first wish’s expression (pp. 145–146). Although it
might seem we can’t have it both ways – we are either wishing, or
we are not – Freud sees it as endemic to the human personality that
we have different interests vying for realization. The juxtaposition
of wishing and denying the wish, or wishing not to so wish, counts
among the instances of that dynamic.
Still, many dispute that dreams really have a concealed mean-
ing that represents the fulfillment of a wish, not least his patients,
who obligingly report dreams they believe contravene the theory. It
is within those dreams that Freud finds evidence of dueling wishes.
One woman patient dreamt, for example, that she wanted to
give a supper party, but had only a little smoked salmon in the house.
She thought she would go buy something, but recalled it was Sunday,
and the shops were closed. She tried to phone caterers, but the phone
was out of order. So she had to abandon the wish to give a supper
party (p. 147).
Freud, conceding the dream’s apparent lack of wish-fulfillment,
asked the woman to recount the events of the previous day, which

2 Freud develops that construal of consciousness in Chapter VII, Section F, of his
volume (1900, pp. 615–617).

usually contain dreams’ instigator. Her husband, an honest and

able wholesale butcher with whom she was very much in love, had
commented the day before that he was getting too fat and would
start trying to lose weight. He would rise early, exercise, maintain a
strict diet, and accept no more invitations to supper. She, in return,
after joking with him, asked him not to give her any caviar. Que-
ried by Freud, she explained that she had wished for a while that she
could have a caviar sandwich every morning, but had begrudged the
expense. Although she knew her husband would let her have it if
she asked him for it, she asked him not to give her any, so she could
continue teasing him about it (p. 147).
Freud found that explanation unconvincing. The woman had
felt moved in waking life to create an unfulfilled wish for herself –
the wish for the caviar – and then her dream had denied her another,
the supper party. It wasn’t clear why she had felt pressed to deny
herself a wish in either context. Freud asked her for further thoughts.
After a pause, which Freud construed as a possible sign of resistance,
the woman related that on the previous day she had visited a woman
friend of whom she admitted she felt jealous because her husband
often extolled the friend. She expressed relief that the friend is very
thin, and her husband prefers a rounder figure. To Freud’s question of
what she and the friend talked about, she remarked the friend’s wish
to grow stouter. The friend had also asked when she could expect
another meal with the woman (Freud’s patient) and her husband,
because they “‘always feed people so well’” (p. 148).
Freud was now able to extrapolate a potential solution to the
dream. It is as though, he says, when the friend inquired after a din-
ner invitation, the patient said to herself, “‘A likely thing! I’m to ask
you to come and eat in my house so you may get stout and attract my
husband still more! I’d rather never give another supper party.’” The
dream, under that construal, fulfilled one wish – that the dreamer’s
friend not grow stouter and take the dreamer’s husband away – while
ostensibly frustrating another wish, to give a dinner party. That frus-
tration was not merely a cover for another wish. It was a means to its

fulfillment. Lest we find the idea that people grow stouter at parties
a far-fetched basis on which the dreamer might have grounded her
wish, the idea appeared in her husband’s avowed decision to forego
dinner invitations to lose weight and could have gained momentum
there (p. 148).
Freud’s tentative construction wanted confirmation, he
thought. He asked the patient about the significance of the smoked
salmon, the one food she had to offer and the one unaccounted for
element of the dream. Smoked salmon, it turns out, was the friend’s
favorite dish (p. 148).
In a parallel vein, a young doctor who had sent off his honestly
filled out tax return showing his paltry earnings dreamt that evening
that the authorities were imposing a heavy fine on him – for under-
reporting his income. The dream, though distressing, at least repre-
sented that he was a doctor of large income (p. 157).
Other dreams that frustrate a dreamer’s evident wishes fulfill
a masochistic desire, Freud has found. Masochism may emerge, in
dreams or in waking life, in a purely mental form, in which peo-
ple seek humiliation and mental torture in lieu of physical pain; a
counter-wish dream is well suited to the purpose (p. 159; see also
1924 for commentary on the waking version). Masochism, by defini-
tion a pleasurable experience, satisfies the requirement that dreams
fulfill a wish, in this case a wish to suffer.
Freud wants, for now, only to make it plausible that even
dreams with distressing content may fulfill wishes, wishes that are
not immediately apparent and on whose account either suffering or
the denial of a wish is called for (p. 159). Anxiety dreams, or night-
mares, in which distress takes the form specifically of fright, likewise
fulfill wishes and engage distressing content and emotion either to
satisfy a defense against the wish they fulfill or as distortion meant
to mask it; Freud gives details in his Chapters VI and VII. Thus, they
form no greater an exception, once properly analyzed, to the thesis
that dreams fulfill wishes than do dreams with other kinds of distor-
tion (pp. 160–161).

They fit the profile of neurotic anxiety, Freud thinks, in which

the anxiety a sufferer, say someone with a phobia, feels is only appar-
ently explained by the circumstances to which it appears to respond.
Although it is true that people without the phobia may reasonably
exercise some caution when they encounter the objects or circum-
stances that arouse phobias in others – for instance, large public
spaces, windows, dogs, horses – the anxiety of victims of phobia
vastly exceeds what others experience. On analysis, Freud was able
to show that phobias have a deeper, concealed cause. The anxiety
connected with that cause has attached to a more benign substitute,
one from which escape is possible, like a horse or a public square.
Likewise, in anxiety dreams, he wants to argue, the terror attaches
only superficially to the manifest imagery; it really issues from a
threat, connected with the dream’s originating wish, unavailable to
view (pp. 160–161).
Distortion, Freud concludes, is a product of censorship that
mobilizes when the wish a dream aims to fulfill confronts us with a
danger or other unwanted result that makes us pull back from satis-
fying the wish. The creation of a distorted fulfillment effects a com-
promise: we satisfy the wish and hide it from ourselves.
Interim Summary
Chapters II–IV of The Interpretation of Dreams provide the core of
the book’s argument. Dreams can be inserted into dreamers’ wak-
ing thought through a process of interpretation based in dreamers’
retrieval of memories and conjuring of impressions related to the
elements of the dream. The process, when followed as far as possible
and capped with an integration of the different lines of thought thus
summoned, permits the identification of a wish of the dreamer’s the
dream has fulfilled: a state of affairs dreamers, when not on their
guard, would be happy to see come to pass. Freud imagines that the
wish on which the interpretive process converges forms in our mind
in waking life, outside our awareness, and instigates the dream at
night. At least adult dreams rarely express directly wishes of the

sort to which the analytic process leads, wishes we would hesitate

to express openly. Accordingly, Freud posits a process of distortion
that converts the wish-fulfillment into unobjectionable, if bewilder-
ing, form.
The remainder of Freud’s text, nearly three-quarters of its
pages, assumes and builds on those propositions.

(1900), Chapters V and VI
If Dreams Fulfill Wishes,
Then with What Material, and
How, Might They Form?
Freud, treating as settled his thesis that dreams fulfill wishes and have
two layers of content, next elaborates consequences of the structure he
has postulated, as he examines the material dreams use (his Chapter
V) and the mechanisms by which they reach their manifest form (his
Chapter VI). In examining the former, he gives us a basis for evaluating
whether his conception can illuminate aspects of dreaming beyond
those on which he builds the conception. His excursion into the
latter – the means by which the underlying “latent,” wish-fulfilling
content of dreams changes into its manifest form – assumes the theory
without providing any additional material for its evaluation.
Although I am reserving my overall appraisal of Freud’s argu-
ment for (my) Chapter 4, I consider, within this chapter, the extent
to which Freud, in the chapters of his considered here, adds to, as
opposed to presupposes, the theory of his earlier chapters.
Freud holds fast, in the discussions we will review, to the desig-
nation of the latent content of dreams – the so-called dream-thoughts
as revealed by analysis – as the true dream. Dreams, he says, always
concern something that matters to us, typically something that has
given us pause during the preceding day. The concern remains active
at night to the point that it – or more exactly its wish-fulfillment –
seeks a path to consciousness, the pathway there arbitrary, depen-
dent on the vehicles available: for instance, a monograph of little
interest Freud saw in a shop window. Likewise, he gradually rose
to a sitting position on a horse in a dream that had him riding one,
because, according to him, his need to be rid of a pain that would
39

have made riding impossible produced imagery that would have pre-
cluded his having had the pain.
Those arguments, rather than bolster his thesis that dreams
contain two layers, one of which fulfills a wish, presuppose the the-
sis. The latent layer is assumed and then sought; the (benevolently)
interpreting mind, rather than the anesthetic of sleep, is presumed to
dispatch the pain in the horse dream, for example.
The Material and Sources of Dreams

(Freud’s Chapter V)
Dreams make use of particular kinds of content, Freud observes,
which he thinks his theses illuminate better than previous accounts
have done, because he can unify diverse features of dreaming under
one conception. The features include dreams’ preference for recent,
largely unnoticed impressions, images of concurrent somatic stimuli,
and impressions from early childhood we have long since forgotten
in waking life and consider trivial when reminded of them; he can
also explain typical dreams – those dreamt by many people. P
revious
writers, giving those different characteristics piecemeal treatment,
generated hypotheses inadequate to account for the whole. For exam-
ple, some writers’ conception of dreaming as the unburdening of use-
less impressions of daytime leaves unexplained why useless material
from long ago would appear (pp. 163–164).
Recent and Indifferent Material (Freud’s Chapter V(A))

The two dreams Freud analyzed at length earlier make evident use
of recent and indifferent content. The dream of Irma’s injection drew
upon the plans for a party Freud and his wife were about to give; the
dream of his uncle with the yellow beard, who in the dream looked
like one of Freud’s friends, followed a visit from the friend. In another
dream, Freud had written a monograph on an indistinct species of plant
after having fleetingly noticed a monograph in a shop window (p. 165).
Freud suspects that manifest dreams appropriate such experi-
ences not yet “slept on” (p. 169) to allow more controversial material

the interpretation of dreams (1900), Chapters V and VI 41
to reach consciousness. He subjects his dream of the botanical mono-

graph to a fuller analysis to investigate that possibility.
The Dream of the Botanical Monograph
He dreamt he had written a monograph on a certain plant. He was

turning over a folded colored plate in the book, which lay before
him. Each copy of the book contained a dried specimen of the
plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium.
On analyzing the dream, he connected the monograph with the one

he had seen in a bookstore display that morning, on The Genus Cycla-
men, of little interest to him at the time. He recalled, after some
immediate associations to cyclamens, that he had himself written a
monograph-like treatise on a plant, the cocoa plant (1884e), including
on its medicinal uses, which had drawn the attention of the scientist
Karl Koller to cocaine’s anesthetic properties. He recollected that,
soon after, Dr. Koller had administered cocaine anesthesia to Freud’s
father, who had suffered an attack of glaucoma, while Freud’s friend
Dr. Königstein performed the surgery, with Freud in attendance.
Thus, Dr. Koller had remarked, the case united all three scientists
who had contributed to the introduction of cocaine … Freud now
remembered that he had walked home the previous evening with
Dr. Königstein conversing about a matter of mutual interest, during
which a Professor Gärtner (Gardener) and his wife, both of whose
“blooming” looks Freud complimented, joined them.
The folded colored plate of the dream evoked several memo-
ries, including: his enthusiasm, when a medical student, for learning
things from monographs, whose colored plates enthralled him; tear-
ing up a book with colored plates with his sister at his father’s behest
when he was 5; running up a large bill at the bookseller’s, while a
student, for excessive purchases … (pp. 169–173).
Many threads of Freud’s comprehensive, though only par-
tially reported, analysis led to his conversation the night before
with Dr. Königstein. The accumulated reflections converged on the

interpretation that Freud, as he was doing in the dream of Irma’s

injection, was trying to justify himself professionally against loom-
ing doubts, of which he has so far not apprised us. “After all,” he
hears the dream telling him, “I’m the man who wrote the valuable
and memorable paper (on cocaine),” on account of which he might
allow himself to carry on with what he was doing (p. 173).
With respect to dreams’ use of recent material, the dream, he
notes, drew on two experiences of the preceding day, that is, if we
take into account both the manifest dream and what emerges about
it in his later reflection. One contributing experience, his sighting
of the monograph in the shop window, had been momentary and
indifferent. The second, his animated, hour-long conversation with
his friend Dr. Königstein, held psychical significance. Only the first,
indifferent, impression appeared in the manifest dream. The second
and more important event, his conversation with Dr. Königstein,
appeared only in the analysis of the dream: the thoughts that came to
mind as he reflected on the dream.
Freud, now firm that the material called forth during dream
analysis discloses lines of thought that fomented the dream, con-
cludes that the concerns of waking thought – our real concerns rather
than passing trivialities – are pursued in dreams. We bother to dream,
he says, only of things that have given us cause for reflection in the
daytime (p. 174).
Recent and Indifferent Material as a Distortion

On that view, the indifferent encounter of the pair of incidents to
which he traces the dream served to distort the more important and
more fraught content he “censored” from appearing. The distortion
connected the endpoints – the monograph in the shop and the con-
versation with Dr. Königstein – through the series of intermediate
associations just noted (p. 175).
Had those intermediate links proved insufficient to establish
the connection, a different manifest dream would have resulted, he
suggests. The conversation would have attached to another indifferent

impression from the same day, the latter forming the (manifest)
content of the dream. However, because the monograph appeared in
the dream, we must suppose it suited the passage to expression best
(pp. 175–176).
In other words, according to Freud, dream formation begins
from a line of thought active in the dreamer’s mental life that, striv-
ing for a means of expression, finds one and emerges in the form of a
dream. The existence of a prominent enough line of thought is what
determines whether a dream will occur and gives it its underlying
meaning. The actual form of the dream, its manifest content, is sec-
ondary to that. The manifest dream may have one set of elements or
another, drawing on incidental events of the previous day, whereas
its latent content will be the same.
Infantile Material as the Source of Dreams

(Freud’s Chapter V(B))
Dreams may include material dating to childhood, a characteristic
noted by writers before Freud. The material may prove difficult to
confirm, though, given that often no one outside the dreamer remains
to attest to its accuracy, and dreamers themselves may have no wak-
ing memory of it. Freud does, however, report a few instances con-
firmed by outside report. Additionally, recurrent dreams sometimes
turn out, on analysis, to date to childhood. For example, a man who
reported a yellow lion that appeared in many of his dreams eventu-
ally traced it to a china ornament that was his favorite toy in child-
hood (pp. 189–190).
The preceding references to childhood material all concern
dreams’ manifest content, occurrences expressly experienced by
the dreamer while dreaming. However, childhood memories and
impulses may find their way also into dreams’ presumptive latent
content, content that surfaces only during the analysis of the dream.
An instance of that kind arose in Freud’s analysis of his dream about
the botanical monograph. The manifest element of turning over of
the leaves of a book took him, during the analysis, to the memory of

his father’s having given him and his sister a book to tear up when
they were little. Other links in the analysis pointed to that memory
as well. Though he does not reveal the dream’s ultimate meaning, he
hints that it concerns that childhood scene (p. 191). Childhood may
supply not only latent dream thoughts behind the dream, he suggests
further, but the dream’s instigating wish itself (pp. 192ff).
Freud shows, through a litany of examples, how, even when
dreamers’ recent experiences appear to offer a fairly complete inter-
pretation of a dream’s manifest content, analyses readily lead back to
experiences of dreamers’ childhood. He admits, nonetheless, that it
remains difficult to demonstrate conclusively that dreams draw on
old memories. That dreamers’ reflections on their dreams may take
them to the distant past does not necessarily mean that the mate-
rial they come upon contributed to the formation of the dream. The
generating role of childhood experiences is more clearly evident in
hysteria, Freud says. He will attempt stronger demonstration of its
influence on dreams in his final chapter (VII.C, pp. 553ff; Chapter 3
here) (p. 218).
The Somatic Sources of Dreams (Freud’s Chapter V(C))

Both lay and scholarly opinion often ascribe dreams to somatic fac-
tors, like the perception of external stimuli such as a doorbell or the
registering of internal processes like indigestion or eliminative needs.
Few in Freud’s time pointed to either the inadequacy of such expla-
nations (he cites Calkins, 1893, as an exception) or the possibility of
psychical sources of dreams, the latter the innovation he introduces.
The activity of somatic sources, alone, Freud protests, does not
explain either why dreams present the sources in distorted form – as
when a ringing alarm clock turns into the clanging of church bells
(pp. 27f) – or the extensive variation that exists in the way the same
stimulus manifests in different dreams (pp. 221–224).
The sleeping mind, moreover, can recognize the actual nature
of objective stimuli. We are more likely to be awakened by the utter-
ing of our own name than by an indifferent stimulus and thus may

have less an incapacity to interpret them than a lack of interest in

them (Burdach, 1838). Lipps (1883), echoing the point, likened the
mind of the sleeper to the sleeper in a popular anecdote. When asked
whether he was asleep, the sleeper said, “No.” When the questioner
continued, “Then lend me ten florins,” the sleeper replied, “I’m
asleep” (Freud, pp. 223–224). If we can recognize the stimuli accu-
rately some of the time, then why don’t we always?
Somatic stimuli, additionally, do not compel people to dream,
though they may appear in people’s dreams when they do dream.
Sleepers may either wake from them or not respond to them at all in
their sleep and discover only after they wake that, for instance, their
leg, whose frigidity they now feel, has come uncovered (p. 224). More
generally, somatic stimuli are always present, including during sleep,
when, the consensus has it, we are more susceptible to them than
when we are awake; yet, we do not dream all night (p. 226).
Freud’s theory addresses all those lacunae. It allows for the
instigation of dreams by a variety of sources, which can include
somatic stimuli, as well as day residues and more distant memories.
Dreams choose among stimuli of any of those kinds, according to him,
depending on how well the stimuli facilitate our wish-fulfillments
and the disguises necessary to accomplish them. Whether we dream,
in turn, is determined by the presence of a wish. He examines
additional dreams containing evidence of the incursion of somatic
stimuli to document those trends, expanding his conception of wish-
fulfillment in the process (pp. 227–228).
Freud’s Dream of Riding on a Horse

He begins with a dream of his own:
He is riding a “highly intelligent” horse, at first hesitantly and

uncomfortably, as though he’s reclining on it. He encounters one
of his colleagues sitting high on a different horse, who points to
something, probably Freud’s bad seat, a kind of bolster covering
a long distance along the horse’s back. Freud becomes gradually

more firmly and comfortably positioned on the horse, on which

he has risen to a sitting position, feeling quite at home … He
eventually ends up at his hotel, where an attendant accosts him
with a note he had written to himself with the words “No food,”
doubly underlined. (pp. 229–230)
Although the dream would not seem to betray the intrusion of a

sensory stimulus, Freud says he had in fact been suffering boils on his
bottom that made every movement excruciating and resulted in a fever-
ish torpor and loss of appetite. The one activity he would have had the
greatest difficulty carrying out was riding a horse, the difficulty exacer-
bated even further by the fact that he doesn’t ride and has never wished
to do so. He now, analyzing the dream, imagines it to have responded to
his discomfort, a somatic stimulus, by wishing it away (p. 230).
Observing that the large, bolster-like saddle he rode in resem-
bled the compress he applied to his affected area when he went to
bed, he ventures that, after the dressing had given him a few hours’
peaceful sleep, the pain encroached and threatened to wake him. The
dream soothed him back to sleep with the idea that there was no
need to wake up, because he didn’t have a boil; he was riding on a
horse, which would be impossible with a boil in the location his boil
occupied. The dream, in his view, thus mimicked the delusion of a
mother who has lost her child and sees him alive, or of a merchant
who has suffered a total loss and sees his business thriving (p. 230).
Additionally, the imagery the dream used to deny the pain – rid-
ing the horse – was not only the diametric opposite of his condition,
it also evoked additional interests active in his mind. On analyz-
ing the dream, he associated the horse and other elements with his
treatment of a “highly intelligent” patient whose care he had since
handed over to a colleague, the one who appeared in the dream “rid-
ing high” on a horse. The colleague liked to “ride the high horse over
[Freud]” ever since the colleague took over the case. Freud’s “feeling
quite at home up there” echoed the position he had occupied in the
patient’s home before he relinquished the case. As to his riding a

horse, a leading physician in the city had once remarked of Freud’s

position in the patient’s house, “‘You struck me as being firmly in
the saddle there.’” Additional lines of interpretation carried Freud
back as well to some scenes of his childhood, the treatment of a dif-
ferent patient, and some sexual thoughts (pp. 231–232).
The Wish to Sleep

The horse-riding dream, along with others Freud cites, points to the
existence of an additional layer of wish-fulfillment in dreams. Beyond
the personal wishes dreams satisfy, every dream also furthers the wish
to sleep. Additional dreams illustrative of that imperative include
another dream Freud had, while staying in the Tyrol, that contained
only the statement that the Pope, who he had in fact read had a mild
illness, was dead. He learned only later that he had slept through the
cacophonous pealing of the bells that morning. Napoleon is reported
to have fused the noise of an exploding bomb into a dream of a battle
already in progress, before waking up from the noise (Garnier, 1872, 1,
p. 476). A barrister dreamt of a G. Reich of Husyatin, a town in Galicia,
who he had encountered during a bankruptcy case. The name Husya-
tin kept forcing itself on his notice until he woke up and found his wife
having a coughing fit; “coughing” is husten in German (p. 233).
In each of those cases, Freud maintains, the dream allowed the
dreamer to keep sleeping, rather than waking up. It converted the
encroaching stimulus into a part of a situation the dreamer could
wish for or that would at least remain compatible with sleeping.
Napoleon could sleep on because the noise he heard was coming
from the middle of a battle, not from a threat that might provide the
occasion for his waking and starting one. Such dreams follow the pat-
tern of dreams of convenience, like that of the medical student who
dreamt he was in a bed at the hospital and didn’t need to get up to go
there (pp. 125, 233; p. 27 earlier, here).
Somatic stimulation arising during sleep, Freud concludes,
unless of unusual intensity, plays a part in the formation of dreams
similar to that played by recent and indifferent impressions remaining

from the preceding day. It provides a potential conduit for psychi-

cally important content to reach expression. It is the drift of that
content that, in the absence of highly intense somatic innervations,
will determine whether somatic stimuli of low and moderate inten-
sity will be drawn into a dream. Without a deciding factor, like the
nature of the wishes striving for expression, Freud says, we cannot
explain why the ever-present somatic stimuli of lower intensity do
not always appear in dreams (pp. 237–238).
Typical Dreams (Freud’s Chapter V(D))

The types of dream content Freud has discussed so far – recent and
indifferent material, indifferent recollections from childhood, and
somatosensory innervations – can be firmly tied to individual dream-
ers’ experience and vary from person to person. Freud appeared at his
washstand, the medical student in a hospital bed. However, some
content appears in many people’s dreams, with no clear antecedent
in their waking experience and, upon analysis, with similar mean-
ing; hence the additional category “typical” dreams. If typical dreams
have the same meaning for everyone, then presumably they arise from
the same sources and may thus throw light on those sources (p. 241).
Such dreams, Freud finds, often do not lend themselves to the
usual analytic procedure. Either dreamers fail to produce associa-
tions to the dream imagery, or the associations they do produce prove
obscure and unhelpful. He has had some success in analyzing the
typical dreams that occur in his neurotic patients and draws on that
material here. In the category of typical dreams appear, among other
types, embarrassing dreams of being naked and dreams of the death
of people of whom the dreamer is fond (pp. 241–242).
Embarrassing Dreams of Being Naked

The typical dream of this type depicts dreamers as their present selves,
but in a state of undress, often somewhat obscure, in response to which
they feel a degree of shame disproportional to the circumstance; when
the dream occurs without shame, it exhibits considerable variation,

which requires individual analysis – those cases no longer count as

typical dreams. Additionally, the people in whose presence dreamers
of the typical dream feel shame are usually strangers, with indeter-
minate features. Those bystanders do not object to or even notice the
undress. They exhibit indifferent or possibly solemn and stiff expres-
sions. It would be more usual, in waking life, for onlookers to express
surprise, derision, or indignation (pp. 242–243).
The combination of the embarrassment of the dreamer and the
indifference of the onlookers appears to follow a pattern of contradic-
tion frequently found in dreams, according to Freud’s analyses: one
pole of the conflict represents something the dreamer wants, and the
other realizes the dreamer’s derogation of the wish. Freud, applying
that template to this case, and generalizing from analyses of typi-
cal exposure dreams of his neurotic patients, suggests the onlookers’
impassiveness might express a wish, drawing from memories of
early childhood, that we be able to exhibit ourselves without nega-
tive repercussions. We enjoyed that condition back then, when we
felt no shame in our nakedness. Indeed, Freud observes, dressing and
being undressed have a nearly intoxicating effect on many children,
who laugh, jump about, and slap themselves.1 Children also show
the desire to exhibit, for instance, when they lift up their shirts and
expose their middles. Our dreams may allow us to reproduce that and
other freedoms, as Freud has already suggested in his discussion of
the infantile sources of dreams (Chapter V.B, see “Infantile Material
as the Source of Dreams” here) (Freud, 1900, pp. 244–245).
The shame we feel in the typical exposure dream would, on
that account, present our sense that we should not, and in the nor-
mal run of things would not, enjoy the exposure we have achieved.
Our inability to move or to change the situation might, accord-
ingly, either serve as punishment for the transgression, as the shame
does, or serve to prolong the wanted exposure – or both, as a further

1 Preyer (1881), in his closely observed study, places being undressed, or the release
from clothing, high on a list of reliable and greatly appreciated sources of pleasure in
the first year (Vol. 1, p. 141).

distillation of the conflict. Inhibition, Freud will address later (Ch.

VI, pp. 335ff), often appears in dreams to express a conflict of the will,
a negation of the theme the dream is playing out (pp. 245–246).2
Dreams of the Death of Persons of Whom the Dreamer Is Fond

Dreams of the death of people of whom we are fond come, like dreams
of undress, in a typical and idiosyncratic variety. Typical dreams of a
loved one’s death, like their counterparts in dreams of undress, come
with negative affect, in their case grief. Idiosyncratic dreams of loved
ones’ death have variable meanings, in many of which the death is
incidental or even instrumental to some other end.
An example of the latter is the dream of a patient of Freud’s in
which she was impassively attending the wake of her beloved nephew
(pp. 152–153). The dream, on analysis, turned out to allow her to see
the man she loved, with whom her association had been forbidden
but who had appeared earlier at the wake of a different nephew and
who she was expecting to encounter the following evening. Thus, its
aim was to satisfy another longing, for which the death of the little
boy – which horrified her when she awoke – served as a means. The
other longing gave no call for grief, of which the dreamer felt none in
the dream (p. 248).
The typical version of the dream of the death of a loved one,
in which the dreamer experiences grief, does fulfill the wish that the
loved person may die. The wish, however, rather than expressing a
contemporary impulse, may date to the dreamer’s early life and only
becomes aroused by some remotely connected content. Adult behav-
ior, as well as common observation of children, gives evidence that
such an earlier wish can have existed (p. 249).
Hostility between siblings, for example, though evident even in
adulthood, especially asserts itself in childhood, even among children

2 Freud, following Ferenczi (1910), suggests, in a footnote added in 1911, that the expo-
sure dreams of women may differ in some details from the exposure dreams of men,
which are the ones Freud describes in the text.

of good character. It traces, Freud says, to the total egoism of small

children, who feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to sat-
isfy them, especially against rivals. We don’t call them bad for that –
at most we might speak of naughty acts because they haven’t yet
developed the concern for others that will awaken altruistic impulses
and morality. They find themselves threatened, terrifyingly, with a
loss of parental love when a new sibling arrives and want to elimi-
nate the source (pp. 250, 255).
Death wishes against the parents themselves may emerge
from the many ambivalences that develop in those relationships
(pp. 255–256). It is well to remember, regarding death wishes toward
either siblings or parents, that children’s idea of death approximates
closely to simple elimination and lacks the intolerable ideas of it that
frighten adults, for example, the corruption of the body, freezing in
the cold grave, and being condemned to eternal nothingness (p. 254).
The animosity children feel toward the object of their rage is none-
theless terrifying to them, given the dread they simultaneously feel
at the loss of objects they also love.
People can still, even after they develop altruism and morality,
display their primary character if they fall victim to psychoneuroses,
especially hysteria. The hysterical character, on analysis, strongly
resembles that of a naughty child, Freud says. Obsessional neuro-
sis, by contrast, imposes a super-morality over what turns out, on
analysis, to be fresh stirrings of the primary character. Either out-
come shows that that primary character – the raw egoism with its
brutal hostility against loved ones – persists into adulthood, regard-
less of the altruistic and moral inclinations that might overlay it. For
that reason, many people, healthy and ill alike, who would grieve
profoundly if they lost their parents or siblings, may unconsciously
harbor evil wishes against them dating from their early life, and the
wishes may on occasion manifest in a dream, either directly or in
disguise through censorship (pp. 250–251).
Typical dreams, then, in Freud’s view, may draw on common
aspects of early experience and yet follow the format of all adult

dreams in their responsiveness to censorship, which produces a

sometimes overwhelming negative aspect. However, in Freud’s tell-
ing, the negative affect, once again, shows a second purpose, in the
case of the dreams of exposure and of the death of loved ones, the
wish not to have the first wish. Thus, dreams remain wish-fulfilling
despite their appearance to the contrary, on Freud’s account, and
some wishes have ancient roots.
The Mechanisms through Which the Latent

Dream Thoughts Assume Dreams’ Manifest
Form (Freud’s Chapter VI. The Dream-Work)
If dreams possess both a latent and a manifest content, then some
process must convert the former into the latter. All we know of a
dream initially is its manifest content. Dreamers, via the procedure
of free association, can work their way to the thoughts that, accord-
ing to Freud, lie behind the dream. His sixth chapter asks how those
thoughts, now assumed to be the latent content of the dream, trans-
form into the brief and cryptic content of the manifest dream. Freud
calls that process, in effect the reverse of the exercise of analysis, the
dream-work (p. 277). Because even the idea that such a process occurs
depends entirely on the validity of his basic construction, which will
form the focus of my later discussion, I reconstruct only a few high-
lights of his lengthy chapter to give an idea of its direction.
The Work of Condensation (Freud’s Chapter VI(A))

The mass of associations at which dreamers arrive when considering
the elements of their dreams vastly exceeds the often brief and mea-
ger manifest dream itself. Freud believes it is not far-fetched to think
that the myriad associations generated in an analysis participated in
the formation of the dream. He means by that that the thoughts were
already active during the state of sleep and contributed to the dream’s
formation. Although some thoughts arise for the first time in analy-
sis, even those turn out, on examination, to connect thoughts linked
in some other way in the ideation that more convincingly appears to

lie behind the dream. Additionally, people analyzing their dreams,

after working through a string of thoughts that seem unrelated to
the dream, suddenly come upon an idea that appears to intersect the
dream’s content and opens a vital path toward interpreting it. Freud
suspects, on the basis of such observations, that most thoughts that
emerge during analysis were already active during the formation of
the dream, about which he will say more later (pp. 279–280, also p.
311 and Chapter VII.A, pp. 526f and 532).
If so many thoughts figure in a dream, then a process of con-
densation must occur that reduces them into the few elements of
the manifest dream. Because only a small portion of the thoughts
apparently behind a dream – the thoughts recovered during analysis –
make their way into the manifest dream, we might suppose the con-
densation arises by omission. What is important, though, is which
elements appear. Those, Freud observes, seem able to connect with
numerous dream thoughts – the thoughts evoked at different stages
of a dream’s analysis.
In his highly compact dream of the botanical monograph, for
example, the idea of something botanical bridged to: acquaintances of
Freud’s who figured in the dream thoughts; his wife’s favorite flowers
and his dereliction in bringing them home to her, his work including
a monograph on cocaine, an episode in his secondary school in which
he believed he was disparaged by a teacher concerning his fitness to
help out in a herbarium, and a provoking exam in botany. Many ele-
ments in that series, as well as others, converged on his conversation
with Dr. Königstein the day before, which he believes instigated the
dream (pp. 282–284).
In some dreams condensation manifests even in the surface of
the dream, lending support to the idea that such a process occurs.
For instance, although Irma, of Freud’s dream, appeared with her
actual features, she assumed a position by a window at one juncture
that immediately conjured a different woman, who, Freud’s analysis
suggested, he wished he could exchange for Irma. In his dream of his
uncle with the yellow beard, the uncle figure expressly possessed

some of the features of one of Freud’s colleagues; both men, along

with other figures they evoked, found a place in the thoughts to
which Freud was led when he analyzed the dream (pp. 293–295).
Condensation can be seen still more clearly in the neologisms
dreams produce of both words and names. Freud once dreamt a sentence
he says clearly referred to a paper a colleague had sent him that he had
read the day before; he believed the author, who was the colleague, had
overestimated a recent physiological finding and treated it too emotion-
ally. He dreamt: “It’s written in a positively norekdal style,” norekdal
being a neologism. Freud thought the term a possible parody of the Ger-
man superlatives of “colossal” and “pyramidal,” but that interpretation
left the origin of the word unclear. He then observed that “norekdal”
combined the names Nora and Ekdal, both characters in two well-
known plays of Ibsen’s, A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck. Sometime
earlier, he had read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the author whose
work he criticized in the dream. Omitting any analysis of the dream, he
reports it for its vivid demonstration of surface condensation (p. 296).
To the criticism that such renditions may render dreams too
clever and amusing, Freud says the necessary cramping of content
results from a mechanical constraint rather than from intellectual
activity. What emerges, he says, in both his patients’ dreams and his
own, is a string of bad jokes and puns, an analogy he subsequently
traces to a common mechanism in his 1905 Jokes and Their Relation
to the Unconscious (p. 296; see Chapter 6 here).
The Work of Displacement (Freud’s Chapter VI(B))

Elements that stand out in a manifest dream may not, once an analy-
sis is completed, occupy a prominent place in the dream thoughts,
and, the center of the dream thoughts may occupy but a minor cor-
ner of the manifest dream, if it is represented at all. For example, in
Freud’s dream of the botanical monograph, the reference to “botan-
ical” formed the hub of the manifest dream content, whereas the
dream thoughts he arrived at by analysis centered on conflicts con-
cerning professional relations and obligations among colleagues and

on sacrifices Freud was making for the sake of his hobbies (pp. 169ff).
Likewise, his dream of the uncle with the yellow beard, who occu-
pied the entirety of the manifest dream, had no obvious connection
with Freud’s ambitious wishes regarding the professorship he would
have liked to attain. He envisions the operation of a process of “dis-
placement” of emphasis in the formation of a dream’s manifest con-
tent from its latent content, or dream thoughts (pp. 305–306).
Both condensation and displacement enable censorship. They
serve to camouflage the dream thoughts and do so for the purpose of
defense. We protect ourselves from our impulses, which, if allowed
to operate unconstrained, would earn us either repercussions from
the outside or our own self-loathing (pp. 307–308).
Other apparent adjustments to the underlying (latent) con-
tent arise more from structural constraints imposed by the nature
of dreaming than from motivated distortion, for instance the plas-
tic, largely visual representation of manifest dreams. That modality
precludes a depiction of logical or causal relations like “either-or”
or negation – the idea that something is not or cannot be the case –
or the idea that one occurrence made another happen (pp. 313–348,
sections C and D). Such structural constraints can, however, aid the
process of disguise, as can the apparent use of symbols, like houses
or boats for females, towers or hats for the male genitals, or rescue
dreams for birth (pp. 350–426, section E).
Freud, in postulating the three processes, condensation, dis-
placement, and representation, thus returns to his basic, and as yet
unexamined, framework, that dreams fulfill wishes encased within
the bi-level structure of dreaming he outlines, of manifest and latent
content. He could not have stipulated such processes without assum-
ing that structure.
Additional Properties of Dreams (Freud’s

Chapter VI, Sections F–I)
The remaining sections of Freud’s chapter address assorted charac-
teristics of dreams, of which a few pertain, alternately, to the mental

primitiveness of dreams (sections F, G, and I) and his wish-fulfillment

thesis (section H) and thus have bearing here.
Intellectual Activity in Dreams (Freud’s Chapter VI,

Sections F and G)
Freud, with copious examples drawn from his own and colleagues’
dream analyses, denies the existence of actual intellectual activity in
dreams. Impressions that appear to contain it, like calculations, the
making of speeches, and the reasoning from premise to conclusion,
all arise from the concatenation of remembered fragments of previ-
ous activities; each, he believes, connects to a portion of the underly-
ing content of the dream. Although even simple thought processes
like association may drive the selection of some of the content, we do
not actively associate in our dreams; we at most picture such activ-
ity. Likewise with maneuvers like doubting and negating. If we expe-
rience them in a dream, we are picturing an operation, not carrying
one out. They are there for the purpose of representing something.
The only mental activities we carry out in dreams – and that
activity, again, is something that produces the dream and is not the
dream itself – are condensation, displacement, and the transforma-
tion of content into representable form. None of those is an operation
of waking thought, except possibly in psychotic states (pp. 405–459).
Affects in Dreams (Freud’s Chapter VI, Section H)

Affect, meanwhile, when it occurs in dreams, which it often does
not, is real. It is always located somewhere among the dream
thoughts, though the reverse does not hold: affect present in the
dream thoughts does not necessarily appear in the dream. When it
does occur in the dream, it may accompany content other than the
ideation it is attached to in the dream thoughts, on account of either
the distortion undergone by the dream thoughts or the affect’s dis-
placement onto a different portion of the dream. Either result serves
the purpose of disguising the latent content of the dream, distortion
to make the underlying content unrecognizable and displacement of
the affect to disguise its true source (pp. 460–463).

The dream of the young woman who saw her little nephew
lying dead in his coffin (pp. 152ff, 248, see “Dreams of the Death of
Persons of Whom the Dreamer Is Fond” here) exemplifies the latter
method. While dreaming, she felt neither pain nor grief; she felt calm,
by contrast with the horror and distress she felt on waking for hav-
ing dreamt such a scene. The analysis she completed suggested her
affective state belonged not to the death of a beloved relation, but to
her expectation of soon seeing the man she loved, who had appeared
earlier at the wake of the nephew’s brother. Her affect aligned with
her wish and not with its disguise (p. 463).
Wish-Fulfillment in Dreams: A Reprise. The analysis of that
dream and others with negative and even disgusting content remind
us, Freud says, that dreams, no matter their content, always fulfill
wishes. He reflects on a putrid dream of his own, also calm, show-
ing his own urine washing away lumps of his feces that he thinks
embodied his disgust at a lecture he had just given, the disgust exac-
erbated by his inability to escape an attendee who detained him
afterward. The feeling of disgust with which he left his lecture could
not have produced a dream by itself, he says, because what is dis-
tressing cannot form a dream, unless it disguises a wish-fulfillment
(pp. 468–470).
However, his unwanted companion had, in the course of heap-
ing praise on Freud, though it ill-fitted his mood at the time, declared
how Freud had cleansed the Augean Stables 3 of errors and prejudices
with his theory of neuroses. Freud, in other words, was a great man.
Later in the evening, for reasons he does not divulge, he developed an
opposite mood of strong and even overcharged self-assertiveness that
expunged his bad temper (p. 470).
Freud surmises that both moods found their way into the
dream, his disgust and feeling of inferiority, on the one hand, and
his self-aggrandizement, on the other, each inhibiting the other and

3 The reference is to Hercules’ cleaning of King Augeas’ stables in one day, under order
of Eurystheus. Hercules, to perform his feat, dug trenches to two rivers that conse-
quently rushed through the stables and flushed them out.

leaving behind only indifference. The content – the feces and urine –
though perhaps consonant with his disgust at his lecture, also evoked
the idea of Hercules’ cleansing the Augean stables. Freud, in that sce-
nario, was Hercules, or he was Gulliver extinguishing the great fire
in Lilliput, another image of greatness (p. 470).
When, by contrast, dreams turn out to be inescapably bruising,
the torment is serving a purpose. It may serve a punitive purpose,
as nightmares may do, when the wish the dream is fulfilling also
arouses our fear or indignation. It may, alternatively, satisfy a mas-
ochistic streak, or it may, as Freud suggests of another of his dreams,
introduce humility to temper ambition perceived as having gone too
far (pp. 475–476).
Secondary Revision (Freud’s Chapter VI, Section I)

Freud postulates “secondary revision” as a final factor – after conden-
sation, displacement, and the need for plastic representation – con-
tributing to the nature of dreams, and to that of only some dreams.
To the extent dreams have any narrative structure at all, he believes
we impose it as we approach waking. Our waking mind demands
cohesion and order, whereas the dream machinery he has described
thus far produces only the constituents that compose the whole we
call a dream. The idea that narrative structure arises separately pre-
dates Freud. Investigators both before and after him saw, and still see,
the cohesion as something apart (pp. 488–506).
Appraisal: Freud’s Elaborative Chapters

We emerge from Freud’s elaborative chapters without independent
validation of his account of dreaming – as a bi-level attempt to satisfy
a wish.
The Material and Sources of Dreams (Freud’s Chapter V)

He assumes outright throughout his fifth chapter that dreams contain
a (wish-fulfilling) latent content, rather than arguing along the lines
that making that assumption would help us explain characteristics of

dreaming that would elude us otherwise. He simply brings the view

to bear on everything he considers.
Thus, he holds, recent and indifferent material, by virtue of
its detachment from existing webs of thought and lack of emotional
charge, can serve as a conduit for more delicate, latent content to find
its way, so to speak, into a dream. It is chosen, as it were, by a process
originating in the presumptive latent underpinnings.
Encroaching sensory stimuli, likewise, are wished away, via
imagery that intersects issues of more enduring import. Addressing
the dream in which he gradually rises to a sitting position as he rides
a horse, he extrapolates that the dream began with his incipient sense
of pain from boils on his bottom and progressed toward a denial of
the pain. He makes no effort, in his argument, to deflect the inverse
explanation of the imagery: that the dream – his rising increasingly
in the saddle – might have been reflecting the diversion from his
pain afforded by sleep, rather than serving itself as the means of the
diversion.
He expresses greater hesitancy, at this juncture in the text,
regarding childhood material. He allows that those childhood mem-
ories that appear in a dream’s analysis may not have had a hand in
the formation of the dream. Their involvement is clearer elsewhere,
he thinks, in the formation of hysterias, for example (p. 44, this
chapter), a prospect we will consider in Chapter 5 here. By the time
he reaches his Chapter VII (Chapter 3 here), he will adopt the stronger
stance that dreams not only engage childhood wishes, but would not
form without them. But that argument, when he gets to it, remains
weaker than does the one he makes for hysterias, because he extrapo-
lates his assertion about dreams from his findings on neurosis, rather
than establishing the case for dreams on its own footing.
Typical dreams, those dreamt by many people, present an
anomaly among the litany of specimens on which Freud builds his
dream theory. Usually our dreams assume an idiosyncratic form
traceable to residues of the previous day and other fragments of
our experience we can retrieve by reflection or association. Typical

dreams generate few, if any, productive associations. Using such

analyses as he was able to elicit from some of his patients to such
dreams, Freud ascribes those dreams to common, more archaic expe-
rience, thus accounting for their apparent similarity of connotation
and detachment from people’s ongoing lives. Embarrassing dreams of
being naked, for example, he believes, revive the pleasure of undress
of our early childhood, long since superseded by our dread of such
exposure – hence the embarrassment of the dream.
Although the recurrence of some dreams across the population
does beg for explanation, what we need to determine at this juncture
is whether the dreams require, and therefore support, the assump-
tion of Freud’s explanatory apparatus for dreaming. The recurrence
of content across dreamers would seem to implicate common experi-
ence, preserved in some fashion in the mind and capable of becoming
evoked in dreaming. We do not, for that, have grounds to suppose
either a hidden meaning, as per Freud’s proposed division between
latent and manifest content, or an agenda of wish-fulfillment. Nor do
we have grounds to refute them.
A genuinely novel contribution of Freud’s fifth chapter is his
delineation of a wish to sleep, apart from the matters of our individ-
ual lives that he believes dreams satisfy. They guard sleep, he says.
Granted that they could serve such a function, though, we know so
far only that they at least do not routinely disrupt sleep.
The Simplicity of Dreaming (Freud’s Chapter VI.

The Mechanisms of Dream Formation)
Although Freud’s sixth chapter presupposes the theoretical apparatus
we have yet to evaluate, it leaves us with an important claim to bear
in mind as we continue with his narrative. It is that dreaming is a
primitive mental process. The webs of thought that may spur dreams
and the compression, displacement, and metamorphosis into plastic
imagery he envisions the thoughts undergo in forming a dream do
not implicate the involvement of higher mental function.

(1900), Chapter VII
The Psychology of the Dream Processes
All the chapters of his treatise so far, Freud says, center on showing
that dreams can be assigned a meaning – specifically one of wish-
fulfillment – and describing how that can be so in the case of dreams
that appear neither meaningful nor wish-fulfilling. Now he turns his
attention to the general psychology that supports that account and dis-
tinguishes dreaming from waking mental life. Although he once again
presupposes the claims of the earlier chapters, he is adding something
new in providing a wider context for them. Accordingly, the new con-
ception will claim to explain: why dream interpretation provides a reli-
able pathway to dreams’ source; why that source is always a wish; and
how the mind that dreams can exercise censorship, which assumes a
duality within the mind, as yet unaccounted for.
The Reliability of Interpretation (Freud’s

Section A. The Forgetting of Dreams)
The interpreting of dreams depends on our recovery of them – their
manifest content – after we wake up. The question naturally arises of
whether the narrative we recover is the one we dreamt. People won-
der, paradoxically, both whether their dream took as disconnected
and hazy a form as they remember and whether it took as connected
a form (p. 512). Freud finds those considerations, along with their
inconsistency, unimportant, when the object is, as his is, to under-
stand dreams’ source.
Even if we distort our dreams when we recall them, he says, the
deformation simply continues the distortion that shapes the dream
in the first place; it thus may have little bearing on our reconstruc-
tion, via analysis, of the dream’s meaning. The content we recall,
61

regardless of whether a distortion of what we actually dreamt,

remains associatively linked to the material it replaces and all the
layers beyond it. It thus provides a perfectly suitable point of depar-
ture for an analysis (pp. 514–515).
Doubt
It follows from that consideration that any doubt we feel about the
content we ascribe to our dream has no real basis. Any material we
recall, regardless of whether we question or amend it in the next
moment, has something to do with the web of thoughts related to the
dream. We are, in experiencing doubt, resisting, beyond the censor-
ship already embodied by the displacements and substitutions con-
tained in the dream, the penetration into consciousness of material
that troubles or frightens us; the same happens in analyses of hys-
teria. The doubt consequently attaches to even the limited content
that has slipped past the censor into the dream (pp. 515–516).
The fact that dreamers’ doubt during recall attacks the weaker
and more indistinct elements of their dream only supports the idea
that the doubt expresses resistance, in Freud’s view. In the light of
displacement, which shifts the intensity of a prominent component
of the dream thoughts onto something insignificant in the mani-
fest dream (see Chapter 2 here, on “The Work of Displacement,” on
Freud’s Chapter VI.B), we may infer that the less distinct elements
in the manifest dream actually derive from the more important, pro-
scribed dream thoughts. Thus, the doubt, in attaching to the indis-
tinct elements, likely expresses resistance to those more important
thoughts. That is why, Freud says, dream analysis should not ignore
any element, least of all the indistinct ones (p. 516).
Doubt, then, in signaling a resistance, functions like any other
interruption of the progress of analytic work. Freud admits, though,
that he is expressing a technical rule. Genuine interruptions can
occur. Even so, the degree and nature of the interruption that unfolds
may depend on resistance to the analysis. The assumption that doubt
or other interruptions signify resistance, like the working assumption

the interpretation of dreams (1900), Chapter VII 63
that the denial of a thought – “That couldn’t have been my mother

in the dream” (see Freud, 1925) – is tantamount to an admission
of it, is a rule of thumb for practice. To follow the rule opens up the
possibility of exposing further content that might otherwise remain
concealed (p. 517).
Forgetting and Obscurity

The forgetting of dreams falls into the same category of psychological
maneuver as doubt, Freud says, coming to his main topic of the sec-
tion. It, too, derives from psychical censorship and the resistance it
produces. Although it is true that we forget dreams more and more as
time passes after we wake, we overestimate the extent of our forget-
ting, as a rule. We likewise overestimate the extent to which gaps in
a dream limit our knowledge of it. It is often possible, Freud reports,
that we can restore by means of analysis all we have apparently lost
of the dream’s content. At least we can reconstruct from even a sin-
gle remaining fragment of the dream all the dream thoughts, if not
the dream, which matters less. The effort wants only close attention
and self-discipline (p. 517).
Evidence exists of the tendentious forgetting of dreams, he
thinks, in analyses in which patients, after reporting they dreamt and
can remember none of it, reach an impasse in their analysis of mate-
rial outside the dream. Freud, suspecting the incursion of resistance
to a disagreeable thought, prods the patients to confront the thought.
In the course of that effort, they often suddenly remember the forgot-
ten dream. The same thing can happen when, after reaching a given
point in the analytic work, patients either recall dreams they dreamt
several days earlier and had forgotten or find their way to interpreta-
tions of other dreams whose meaning had eluded them when they
first reported them (p. 520).
Freud concedes, despite his insistence that every detail of every
dream is determined by a current of thought, or “overdetermined” by
more than one such current, that some dreams may elude even the
most attentive interpretive efforts. It is in the nature of dreams that

they remain to some degree obscure. Often a passage in even a thor-

oughly interpreted dream eludes a satisfying accounting. It appears
to intersect a tangle of dream thoughts the dreamer can unravel no
further. To continue to prod it adds nothing to the understanding of
the dream content. Freud calls that part of the dream its navel, the
spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream thoughts
to which interpretation leads in general cannot, by their nature, have
definite endings. Coming from the labyrinthine meshwork of our
thought, they necessarily branch out in every direction and across
time (pp. 524–525).
In the light of the resistance and other obstacles that may
interfere with our recalling our dreams, we might well wonder how
a dream can form at all. In the most extreme, and hypothetical, case,
we forget a dream so thoroughly it is as good as never having occurred.
We may extrapolate from that consideration, Freud suggests, that the
dream would not have occurred at all if our resistance to it had been
as strong during the night as it was during the day. Given, however,
that we do recall at least having dreamt, even if not the dream itself,
our resistance must lose some of its power during the night. There-
fore, he concludes, it is the relaxation of resistance that makes the
formation of dreams possible (pp. 525–526).
False Hits from Interpretive Technique

Critics at Freud’s time raised the further question, regarding the
reliability of his method, of how the process of analysis he and his
patients followed could lead to the actual source of a dream. The
process requires an abandonment of all directed thinking and a focus
instead on single elements of the dream at a time and the involun-
tary thoughts they evoke. The objectors found it improbable that we
could arrive at the thoughts from which a dream arose – which is to
say the dream thoughts – in that way. Every idea can be associated
with something. It would seem unlikely that such an aimless and
arbitrary exercise would happen to bring us to the very set of ideas
that provoked the dream (pp. 526–527).

Nonetheless, Freud observes, an interpretation that has touched

the vital underpinnings of a dream leaves an impression noticeably
different from that left by tangents and incomplete analyses. It leads,
among other results, to an opening out of surprising connections with
the different elements of the dream. What is improbable, he says, is
that any such exhaustive account of a dream would be reached with-
out its tracking psychical connections already laid down (p. 528).
Further, his procedure for interpreting dreams aligns precisely
with the procedure by which he and his patients resolve their hysteri-
cal symptoms. In the case of symptoms, the method achieves confir-
mation by the coincident disappearance of the symptoms. Patients,
with the symptoms’ roots laid bare and reexperienced, no longer have
need of the defense and substitutive satisfaction the symptoms pro-
vided (p. 528) (see later here, Chapter 5).
It is incorrect, moreover, Freud says in coming to a central
claim of his treatise, that we are following a purposeless stream of
thoughts when, in the course of interpreting a dream, we abandon
reflection and allow involuntary thoughts to come forward. We are
always driven by purposive ideas, he says, which is to say ideas driven
by an aim or interest, whether they pass at the tip of our awareness or
outside it. The same holds even in states of psychical confusion. Even
the deliria of confusional states may have meaning and may appear
to lack it only because of gaps in them (as per Leuret’s suggestion,
1834, p. 131, cited in Freud, p. 529). Although a disorganized play
of ideas might occur in destructive organic cerebral processes, any
pattern that looks like that in the psychoneuroses can be explained
as the effect of censorship on a train of thought pushed forward by
purposive ideas that have stayed hidden; Freud notes confirmation of
that account by Jung, for schizophrenia (Jung, 1907, cited in Freud, p.
530) (pp. 529–530).
Even associations showing superficial connections, like asso-
nance or verbal ambiguity, which might suggest a lack of influence of
purposive ideas on the association, have been shown in many analy-
ses to overlie a deeper, substantive link. Thus, the real reason for the

prevalence of superficial associations, Freud says, is not the absence

of purposive ideas, but the pressure of censorship on them (p. 530).
In the light of the omnipresence of purposive ideas, the psy-
choanalysis of neurosis, and of dreams, relies on two theorems. One
is that when conscious purposive ideas are abandoned, whether
in an altered state like dreaming or in the voluntary loosening of
directed thought in psychoanalysis, concealed purposive ideas take
control of the flow of thought. The second is that superficial associa-
tions, when they occur, replace suppressed deeper ones. Thus, when
Freud instructs patients to abandon reflection of any kind and tell
him whatever comes into their heads, he is operating firmly on the
assumption that patients won’t be able to abandon the purposive
ideas behind their illness (p. 531).
He allows that not every association produced during an analy-
sis of a dream need have had a place in the generation of the dream
during the night. But, he insists, whatever does surface in the analy-
sis will ultimately lead to the dream thoughts. Fresh material from
the daytime can insert itself into the interpretative chains, or the
increased resistance of waking life can prompt new detours to the
dream thoughts. Regardless of how circuitous the interpretive path
becomes, it can still reach the germ of the dream (p. 532).
Distinguishing Features of Dreams

(Freud’s Chapter Introduction
and Section B. Regression)
To engage problems of interpretation supposes that we are con-
sidering dreams with distortion, such that their meaning must be
extracted. But even adults have some dreams whose meaning is clear
on the surface. A heartrending dream opens Freud’s chapter, intended
to show that even when a dream’s interpretation readily suggests
itself, dreams remain distinct from a waking thought, thus allowing
him to focus on the characteristics – beyond an obscurity of mean-
ing – that make them so. The dream was reported to him by a patient
who had heard it recounted in a lecture she had attended.

A father, who had been watching his child’s sickbed for many
days and nights until the child died, left the bedside to rest in
the adjoining room while the body lay in state surrounded by
candles and guarded by an old man who sat muttering prayers.
After a few hours’ sleep, the father dreamt the child was standing
beside his bed whispering to him reproachfully as he jostled his
arm, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” The father awoke and,
noticing a glare from the next room, rushed in and saw that the
old man had fallen asleep and that the wrappings and one of the
child’s arms were burning, ignited by a fallen candle. (p. 509)
Freud affirms the lecturer’s interpretation of the dream: that the

light coming through the door led the father to conclude, as he would
have done if awake, that a candle had fallen and set something on
fire. The father might even have felt concern, when he went to bed,
that the watchman might drop off. The child’s words, meanwhile,
Freud adds, might have arisen from the father’s memory of actual
utterances made by the living child; for example, the boy might have
once said “I’m burning” in response to a fever, and “Father, don’t you
see” at the start of a comment in another emotionally charged situ-
ation (pp. 509–510).
Yet, Freud asks, why would the father have dreamt at all, rather
than waking immediately to douse the flames? The dream holds the
answer. In it, the child behaved as a living one: he warned his father
of the danger, and he came to the father’s bed and caught him by the
arm, as he may have done in the past. The dream, in presenting the
child as alive, may have fulfilled the wish that he be so. For the sake
of the fulfillment of that wish, the father prolonged his sleep by a
moment (p. 510).
Thus, the dream, though lacking in the usual distortions, dem-
onstrates two essential properties of dreams, according to Freud,
their wish-fulfillment and their hallucinatory quality: They not only
express a dreamer’s wishes, they also provide actual sensory experi-
ence of the wishes’ fulfillment.

That the wish-fulfillment and hallucinatory quality comprise

essential and yet distinct properties of dreaming can be seen in the
following demonstration. If we leave aside wish-fulfillment for the
moment, we see that only one feature distinguishes thinking and
dreaming in the preceding case. The thought exemplified by the dream,
absent wish-fulfillment, would have run: “There is a glare coming
from the room where the body is lying. Perhaps a candle has fallen
over, and my child is burning.” Although the dream was prompted
by those reflections, it represented their content as actually occur-
ring and being perceived. The thought became objectified as a scene
the dreamer himself was experiencing, and it was transformed into
visual images and heard speech. Likewise, although we might have
expressed the thought behind Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection as, “If
only Otto were responsible for Irma’s Illness,” the dream presented
the wish as fulfilled: Otto was responsible for Irma’s illness (p. 534).
Nonetheless, a wish-fulfillment in the present also typifies
daydreams. Freud could have had a conscious fantasy that Otto was
responsible for Irma’s illness; Otto could have overlooked a symp-
tom, given her a bad injection, and so forth (p. 534).
Daydreams do not, however, share the second distinguishing
characteristic of dreams, the presentation of their content in sensory
images. Granted, not every element of every dream appears as a sen-
sory image – some occur as thoughts – and, hallucinations occur in
waking life as well. Nonetheless, hallucinatory presentation remains
characteristic of dreams (p. 535).
Freud, in a lengthy schematic digression, resolves that,
whereas most mental processes begin with a sensory innervation and
proceed toward the motor region of the mind – including thinking
and remembering – dreams do the reverse. They begin in thought
and resolve into sensory impressions (pp. 536–543). Given that that
discussion assumes that dreams do begin as thoughts, a premise we
will be questioning (Chapters 5 and 9 here), we will move directly to
his attempt to situate hallucinated wish-fulfillment into a general
psychology.

The Operation and Origins of Wish-Fulfillment

(Freud’s Section C. Wish-Fulfillment)
It was, and remains, difficult for many people to accept Freud’s prop-
osition that all dreams fulfill wishes. After elaborating his position
a bit more, he develops an ontogenetic and phylogenetic scenario
designed to support it.
Adults and Children

We already know that some dreams, occurring mostly in children,
exhibit transparent wish-fulfillment, whereas others, the majority of
adult dreams, appear not to do so. Freud has concluded, based on his
accumulated analyses of his own and his patients’ dreams, that adult
dreams also fulfill wishes and do so in disguise on account of censor-
ship (pp. 550–552).
Unfulfilled wishes during the daytime, a mainstay of young chil-
dren’s dreams, arising, for instance, when they are denied a treat or an
activity in which they had hoped to partake, are unlikely to provoke an
adult dream. With the control we progressively exert on our instinctual
life by our thought activity, Freud says, adults are increasingly inclined
to eschew the formation or retention of the intense wishes children
know – granting the exception of adults who retain an infantile frame
of mind. Such wishes could at most contribute to the instigation of an
adult’s dream and would have to find reinforcement from some other
concern, if they are to appear in a dream (pp. 552–553).
Still, he imagines, the wishes adult dreams do address, like his
concern with his professional standing in his treatment of Irma (see
Chapter 1 here), ultimately intersect infantile aspirations: to be noticed,
appreciated, to be omnipotent, let us say. The instigating wish – to affirm
his professional standing – is unconscious; he was not expressly seek-
ing others’ approval. But unconscious wishes themselves have infantile
origins, Freud maintains, as suggested by the psychoanalysis of neurotic
patients, in whom the recovery of unconscious wishes regularly leads to
childhood material, which, in turn, helps to resolve the illness.

From that affiliation – between unconscious wishes and child-

hood experiences – Freud concludes that all dreams, whether chil-
dren’s or adults’ or of the healthy or the ill, incorporate an infantile
wish. In adults, the wish originates in the unconscious. In children,
in whom no division, and hence no censorship, exists between pre-
conscious (and conscious) and unconscious thought, or in whom the
division is progressively forming, an unfulfilled conscious wish from
waking life may instigate a dream (pp. 553–554).1
The Necessity of Wish-Fulfillment in Adult Dreams

Thus, Freud surmises, conscious waking thoughts, for example
the father’s grief over his lost child or his worry about the body’s
safety, may play the same kind of role in the formation of adult
dreams as do sensations we experience while asleep. They must
converge with an unconscious wish in order to produce a dream.
As for waking thoughts other than wishes that persist into sleep,
although we may withdraw energy from our waking thoughts as
a rule, unsolved problems, tormenting worries, and overwhelm-
ing impressions may carry over, preconsciously, into sleep. Such
sources may continue to struggle for expression during the night.
When they are potent enough, we either remain awake or wake up
(p. 554).
Should we manage to sleep while those (preconscious) thoughts
agitate, however, then their path toward discharge, to conscious
expression and consideration, is precluded by the state of sleep,
which paralyzes the power of movement and conscious reflection. If
they become conscious anyway during the night in the normal way,
1 Freud (see, e.g., 1915) uses the term ‘conscious’ to refer to what we are consciously
aware of at the moment, ‘preconscious’ to refer to content that, though not conscious
at the moment, we could easily access, and ‘unconscious’ to refer to material that
is neither conscious nor accessible except through work, for example, the work of
psychoanalysis. For most purposes, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud uses con-
sciousness and the preconscious interchangeably, with the meaning that the content
in question is accessible to consciousness, regardless of whether expressly considered
at the moment.

then we are simply not asleep. Their only way forward, while we
remain asleep, is into a dream (pp. 554–555).
They can only find their way into a dream if they connect to
a wish, as per Freud’s argument in earlier chapters. Thus did the
father’s worry about his child’s body, and the idea that the body was
burning, materialize in a dream that, through that very representa-
tion, satisfied a wish: The boy was alive once again.
Freud cites a dream of his in which his concern over the health
of his friend Otto carried into a dream, seeming to contradict the
expectation that adults’ dreams must draw on a wish to form (pp.
269–271). Seeing his friend ill in the dream would not have fulfilled
any wish of Freud’s. However, although Otto bore signs of illness in
the dream, the symptom the dream gave him – Graves, disease – was
not the one Freud had observed. It was the symptom of a man Freud
had encountered earlier, unrelated to Otto, of which encounter Freud
was reminded when trying to analyze the dream. Freud, on several
grounds, extrapolated that he himself had identified in the dream
with yet another acquaintance, also in the earlier scene, a professor
who, like Freud, had followed an independent path in his work and
attained his position late in life. At the time, Freud, able only to aspire
to such a post, had, through the identification, enabled the fulfillment
of his aspiration to be a Professor, which, in turn, he says, intersected
the predominant childhood wish for unlimited power (pp. 555–556).
An additional dream shows an incursion into a dream of even
more drastic distress and, yet, according to Freud’s analysis of it, the
inclusion of a wish-fulfillment. The dream, again his own, carries
over, thinly disguised, his worries about his son at the front of whom
he had not had news for over a week. He eventually identified, in
content submerged beneath the dream’s realization of the dreaded
demise of the son, the hostile sentiment that the son got what “serves
him right,” which, in turn, could be seen as satisfying the envy of the
old for the young. The wish that the old not be vanquished was cer-
tainly something Freud, consumed by his worry about the safety of
his beloved son, could not admit to (pp. 558–560).

He concludes from many examples that a whole class of

dreams, though possibly instigated by alarm aroused during the pre-
ceding day, cannot form through that input alone. Only a leaven-
ing wish, typically hinted at by odd nuances – Graves disease in the
dream of Otto just noted; the calling “at once” of Dr. M in Freud’s
dream of Irma’s injection (Chapter 1 here) – would preserve dreamers’
sleep through any distress they might feel. Freud might yet become
Professor Extraordinarius (pp. 560–561).
It emerges from that picture that it is the residues of the day
that disturb sleep, not dreams, which guard sleep by seemingly ful-
filling wishes, rather than leaving them to agitate. It remains to be
seen why the unconscious offers during sleep only and specifically
the motive force of a wish to be fulfilled and a fulfillment in the form
of a hallucination. Freud answers with a speculative story about how
the mind could have begun.
How the Mind Might Have Begun

The mind reached its present form only after a long development,
Freud suggests.2 Its earliest and simplest function would have been
to keep itself as free as possible of stimuli, in keeping with the pri-
mary task of the nervous system – to discharge excitation. Granted,
no real organism could survive with only that function. The mind’s
first structure followed the plan of the reflex, which ensured that any
impinging stimuli would have been immediately discharged along a
motor path.
Further development would have ensued when the exigencies
of life interfered with that simple function. The agitation of hunger,
for example, an internal stimulus, would have prompted a discharge
in movement – helpless kicking and screaming – which, however,
would have left the stimulus unaltered; the pain would have per-
sisted. Eradication of the pain would have come about only with the

2 Freud outlines his hypothetical scenario of the mind’s beginnings twice (pp. 565–567
and 598–604). I draw on both narratives, though emphasize the earlier one, which
appears at the present juncture in Freud’s text.

experience of satisfaction, the ingestion of food, provided by outside

help in the case of babies and unrecognized as such by them (p. 565).
The perception of the experience of satisfaction, Freud says,
leaves behind a memory – a “mnemic image” – that remains associ-
ated from then on with a memory trace of the excitation produced by
the need, the hunger. As a result of that link, the next time the need
arises, a psychical impulse will emerge to reexperience instantly the
satisfaction now associated with the need. That impulse is a wish. The
experience of satisfaction is the fulfillment of the wish (pp. 565–566).
The shortest path to the fulfillment of a wish is that from the
excitation produced by the associated need to the complete expe-
rience of the need’s fulfillment, thus, from the hunger pang to the
experience of satisfaction. Freud imagines a primitive state of the
mind in which that path was actually traversed. Wishing resolved
in hallucinating. The mind reflexively satisfied its need, rather than
letting the pain of it linger. That hypothetical state could not have
lasted long. The absence of real satisfaction of needs would have pro-
duced pain elsewhere in the system. The need would have persisted,
unless the image of satisfaction were maintained constantly, as hap-
pens in hallucinatory psychoses and hunger fantasies, which devote
their entire psychical activity to the clinging to the object of their
wish (p. 566).
Thus, the system was forced to develop further. It had to halt the
regression, as Freud calls it, from need to the evocation of the experi-
ence of satisfaction set in motion by the need, before the regression
proceeded beyond the memory of satisfaction all the way to the hallu-
cination of it. It is only then that we would have been able to develop
other paths to the fulfillment of the need, for example crying and flail-
ing for the purpose of calling attention to our condition (p. 566).
Primary and Secondary Process Thought

(Freud’s Sections E and F)
That effort, to halt the regression and divert the excitation aroused
by the need to other purposes, represents a different kind of endeavor

from reflexive hallucination of the desired state. Freud calls the lat-
ter, more primitive, type of operation primary process, alternately
the first system. It aims only toward the free discharge of excitation
and is embodied by the wish. The later-emerging type of operation,
embodied by restraint, is secondary process, or the second system. It
inhibits the discharge and mutes the excitation of the first process.
It allows exploratory activity using a minimal release of energy – in
other words, thought – to test out possible courses of action. The
exploration concluded, the second system releases the inhibition of
activity and excitation it had imposed and allows them to discharge
in movement (pp. 567, 598–600).
Interplay of the Two Processes

The two processes do not fully integrate, however. Even with the
ascendance of secondary process, we retain a tendency to flee impres-
sions that portend pain. Thus, we not only secure and repeat attempts
at flight from what pains or displeases us; we also attempt to shed all
memory of painful excitation and its stimulus, to avoid any experi-
ence of unpleasure. The effortless and regular avoidance by memory
of any content that had once provoked distress is the first prototype
and first example of repression – the withdrawal of consciousness
from a painful idea. Indeed, the avoidance of what is distressing, even
when the impression is not forcibly blocked – that is, repressed – from
consciousness, remains a hallmark of normal mental life (p. 600).
Were the tendency to avoid any unpleasure – the primary pro-
cess – to dominate the entire mind, then the second system could not
perform its function of regulating our strivings and actions so as to
attain real and reliable satisfaction of our wishes. To carry out that
function it needs free access to all our memories, not just the pleas-
ant ones. It cannot get it by simply disavowing the pleasure principle,
on whose account we strive to avoid that which pains or displeases
us. The second system, like the first, clearly runs on the pleasure
principle: it is the satisfaction of wishes for which it is trying to pro-
duce a real result.

Therefore, the second system must, in admitting disturbing

memories, which help it navigate to that result, find a way to inhibit
the release of unpleasure from them; the means of inhibition must
itself place no extra strain on the system, which would only pro-
duce a new kind of unpleasure. The solution seems to be that the
second system allows a beginning development of unpleasure from
the memory so that the system will know whether to incorporate it
or circumvent it in the solution it is trying to develop (pp. 600–601).
It thus comes about that the second system navigates toward
the reproduction of the experience of satisfaction by exploring, with
a minimal release of unpleasure, the potential steps to the satisfac-
tion, while holding at bay any tendency on the part of the first system
simply to produce the perceptual experience directly – that is, hal-
lucinate. Thus, the second system, which deploys thought instead,
keeps the desired experience in mind as a memory, or idea, as it sifts
through possible paths toward the real experience. A system with
that objective must scrupulously avoid processes like condensations
of ideas, compromise formations, displacements of intensity, and
substitutions of one idea for another – all byproducts of the first sys-
tem. Those processes would, in deforming and distorting the ideas,
throw the search for a path forward off track. Nonetheless, Freud
cautions, our thinking always remains susceptible to disruption by
the pleasure principle: to a diversion from its aim motivated by the
avoidance of unpleasure (pp. 601–602).
Clarification of “Primary”: The Picture of Development

The designation “primary” for primary process thought refers to the
priority of those processes in both importance and chronology. In fact
no organism exists that operates exclusively with primary process;
the idea of such an apparatus is therefore a theoretical fiction. Still,
whereas primary processes operate in the mind from the start, sec-
ondary processes develop, unfolding only during our life course and,
accordingly, assuming dominance only gradually, possibly not until
the prime of life, Freud suggests.

Because secondary process thought, which dominates our

waking life, materializes only incrementally, unconscious wishful
impulses, the objects of primary process – and, Freud believes, core
of our being – elude either understanding or control by our precon-
scious thought. The most that a preconscious thought can do is direct
the wishful impulses along a path that will allow them expression.
Nonetheless, our unconscious wishes influence all our later mental
trends, which must either fall in with the wishes or divert them to
higher aims, that is, sublimate them (pp. 603–604).
Freud clarifies that the irrational mental processes he has
described as primary process, condensation, displacement, etc., are
not falsifications of normal secondary processes – in other words,
intellectual errors – but primitive modes of activity that have been
freed from inhibition. Thus, they are primary in the sense of being
easier, as well as important and first. They are both what we revert
to when all inhibition is gone and, by hypothesis, the modus ope-
randi of unconscious, and especially repressed, thought. Secondary
process, by contrast, especially when deployed to inhibit the activity
or results of primary process activity, requires effort (p. 605).
Why Dreams Only Fulfill Wishes

We can understand within that framework why dreams only fulfill
wishes, on Freud’s reasoning. Only wishes set our mental apparatus
in operation, as embodied most primitively by the reflex and then by
needs; secondary process thought, for all its innovation, only serves
as a roundabout route to wish-fulfillment – we find a more durable
way to eliminate the pain of hunger.
But secondary process adds an ingredient to that fulfillment
that cannot factor into dreams. It is built on the admission of pain
into the mind. We cannot go in search of better means to an end
unless we take stock that in fact all is not well. An operation that
only hallucinates away pain has no place for that admission. To let
it in would be tantamount to a reflex’s “letting in” pain. A reflex,
of which Freud conceives hallucination as a mental equivalent, is

inherently a mechanism that discharges excitation, and thus returns

the organism to equilibrium. Hallucination and reflex action are, on
his account, the most primitive acts of which we are capable. Dream-
ing, which consists of hallucinating, is such an act, a return to our
most primitive mental functioning, both ontogenetically and phylo-
genetically (p. 576).
Dreams, as Freud quotes Nietzsche, embody a primeval relic of
humanity that we can hardly reach anymore by a direct path.3 Freud,
admitting the speculative nature of this portion of his discussion,
suspects the analysis of dreams will lead to knowledge of psychical
prehistory, what is psychically innate in us – dreams and psychopa-
thologies having preserved more mental antiquities than we might
have imagined (pp. 548–549).
Dreams and Neuroses

Both dreams and neurotic symptoms exhibit the interplay of primary
and secondary process thought he has outlined, Freud thinks. Both
arise from unconscious wishful impulses receiving reinforcement
from repressed infantile wishes and, while pressing toward expres-
sion and meeting psychical censorship delivered by the secondary
system, they become revised and distorted accordingly. Nonetheless,
dreams do not represent pathology. They do not presuppose any dis-
turbance of people’s psychical equilibrium and do not leave any loss
in efficiency of functioning in their wake, both of which qualities
typify neuroses.
Even so, the mechanism that produces neurosis comes from
the normal architecture of the mind, not from the impact of a patho-
logical disturbance on it. That architecture includes the following:
two psychical systems; the censorship that monitors the passage
of impulses from one to the other; and the inhibition and overlay-
ing of the activity of one system by the activity of the other. Freud
3 Freud appears to be referring to Nietzshe’s Human, All Too Human, 1878, #13 and
#223. I thank Rüdiger Bittner for the citations.

conceives that schematic as an approximation, subject to revision as

additional facts accumulate (p. 607).
Dreams, within that framework, show us that material that is
suppressed4 persists in the healthy, as well as the ill, and remains
capable of exerting influence on waking life. Dreams form one of the
manifestations of that material. The material does not find expression
in waking life and eludes any kind of internal perception, because its
contradiction with secondary process thinking makes it incapable of
passing the censor. However, during sleep, with the censor somewhat
relaxed, some of the suppressed material can edge forward through the
construction of compromises in its content (pp. 607–608).
It is on account of the foregoing template that Freud asserts his
iconic line that the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to the
knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. He reiterates
for emphasis that the conditions, like dreaming and psychoneuroses,
on whose basis he has arrived at that view do not presuppose disinte-
gration of the mind; the same applies to parapraxes, like slips of the
tongue, which he is shortly to write up (1901). The conditions can
be explained on a dynamic basis, with reference solely to the cur-
rents of thought active in the mind, whose interplay remains hidden
from view when we are functioning normally. With respect to the
dynamic, the compounding of the mind out of two systems allows it
to function with greater delicacy – allowing processes like censorship
and resistance for instance – than would be possible with only one
system (pp. 608–609).
4 Freud remarks in a footnote (p. 606) his somewhat inconsistent usage of “repressed”
(verdrängt) and “suppressed” (unterdrückt) in describing the material that is inacces-
sible to consciousness. “Repressed” connotes a clearer connection to the unconscious,
and typifies the etiology of neuroses, leaving the possible suggestion that dreams, for
which Freud appears, here at least, to refer to “suppression,” form more from content
that is held back but not implanted in the unconscious. The dream wishes he ascribes
to his dream of Irma’s injection and of his uncle with the yellow beard would seem
of that kind. In the dream of Irma, he was trying to disavow his responsibility for
her condition; in the dream of the uncle with the yellow beard, he was trying to see
a pathway for himself to the professorship he aspired to. Although he might have
demurred in admitting either interest, neither surprised him, and he did not appear to
have to work hard to uncover either one.

Summary
Freud’s grand-theoretical statement situates the axes of his dream the-
ory and method of interpretation within more general considerations.
Dreams fulfill wishes, according to the wider conception,
because they reflect our most primitive, and hypothetically earliest,
mental operation, the reflex, in its turn an embodiment of the pri-
mary function of the nervous system to discharge excitation. Hal-
lucination, of which dreams are often constituted, represents the
mental equivalent of the reflex, specifically the shortest path to the
satisfaction of a need, needs being incapable of achieving satisfaction
by actual (motor) reflex. That path is blocked, in waking life, by the
gradual ascendance of secondary process thought: judgment, reality
testing, reasoning, deliberate action, and their aids, like perception
and memory.
Thus, dreams fulfill wishes, given that dreams are supposed
to exhibit our primordial mental function, and that function entails
wish-fulfillment. We do not readily recognize those wishes, because
our waking life is dominated by secondary process thought, which
demands and facilitates operations like resistance to and censorship
of the wishes, resulting in their distortion, even when we dream. We
can find our way to them, nonetheless, because any distortion occur-
ring between our dreams and our report of them is part of the process
that formed the dream in the first place. We need not fear arbitrari-
ness in our interpretations because nothing mental is arbitrary, it all
has a purpose.
The next chapter, together with Chapter 8, will examine both
whether Freud indeed does demonstrate the wish-fulfilling function
of dreams and the solidity of his method of interpretation – and to
what degree his general theory, treated in this chapter, can fill any
gaps in the demonstration.

(1900)
A Preliminary Appraisal
Freud’s interest in and approach to dreams developed from his

treatment of patients suffering hysteria, a disease often manifest-
ing in involuntary, maladaptive sensory-motor responses with no
known organic base. He and his mentor Joseph Breuer found they
could relieve patients’ symptoms by prodding the patients to retrieve
memories associated with the behaviors (Breuer and Freud, 1895). The
memories did not manifest expressly in the symptom, and patients
initially had no idea with what content, if any, their symptoms had a
connection. First Breuer, and then Freud, enabled patients to discover
such connections by asking them, when under hypnosis and therefore
not under the influence of conscious thought, for memories evoked by
the symptoms. Later Freud devised a means of using patients’ waking
associations to retrieve the material (see Chapter 5 here).
Because the memories did not surface on their own in wak-
ing life, Breuer and Freud inferred that mental processes occurring
outside patients’ awareness were responsible for their behavior. The
behavior, in turn, when properly understood, had a meaning and
served a purpose. In that context, and as the treatment progressed
from association under hypnosis to a conscious talking therapy,
patients began spontaneously to disclose their dreams, which, with
Freud’s guidance, they subjected to the same process of analysis.
Dreams, then, came into Freud’s and his patients’ sights as the tip of
a whole thought structure, most of it concealed.
Recapitulation
Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, after determining via the
new analytic method that some of his dreams relieved him of con-
cerns about his professional competence, offers the hypothesis that
80

the interpretation of dreams (1900) 81
dreams fulfill wishes (1900, Ch. II). He concludes, based on analyses

of additional dreams (1900, Ch. III), that all dreams do so, having
pointed out earlier in the text that the work was based on his analy-
ses of over 1000 dreams, most his own and his patients’. Additionally,
children’s dreams, the predecessors to our later dreaming, sometimes
contain plainly visible wish-fulfillment.
Some dreams, however, defy the thesis of wish-fulfillment,
manifesting with distressing or indifferent content (1900, Ch. IV).
Those dreams, on closer analysis, turn out to fulfill other purposes,
including, in the extreme case of anxiety dreams, a repudiation of the
wish with which the dream otherwise appears, on analysis, to align.
Freud’s concept of dreaming expanded in accordance with those
observations. Every dream fulfills a wish, sometimes more than one.
But the wishes are basic, infantile, Freud concludes, or they are dan-
gerous in the context of other considerations. Thus, we distort them.
Freud calls the operation censorship and, accordingly, distinguishes
two layers to the usual adult dream, a manifest content and a latent
content. The latent content consists of what he calls the dream
thoughts, the concerns and considerations, like Freud’s uncertainty
about his professional standing, that the fulfilled dream wish – to be
cleared of any malfeasance in Irma’s case – settles.
If dreams have a visible, manifest, content, on the one hand,
and a concealed meaning, on the other, then some process must
transform the concealed into the manifest content (1900, Ch. VI).
In the light of the often bizarre character of dreams and their brevity
compared with the volume of the purportedly underlying thoughts
to which analysis leads, the transforming mechanisms must differ
from those we observe in normal waking thought. Freud postulates,
among others, the condensation of underlying thoughts into a single
element and the displacement of psychical emphasis from an impor-
tant piece of latent content onto an insignificant feature of the mani-
fest dream. Emotion, correspondingly, though it may come through
in manifest dream elements, is likely to be attached to content other
than its original one.

Dreams fulfill not only their immediate wishes, but also the
wish to sleep (1900, Chs. V and VII). If dreams fulfill their immediate
wishes, then the wishes, thus discharged, cannot linger to disturb
our sleep. It would be incompatible with the wish to sleep if dreams,
a normal part of everyone’s sleep, were so designed as to agitate us
regularly into wakefulness.
That dreams fulfill wishes follows also from the consideration
that the basic function of the nervous system is to discharge stimuli,
in other words, bring about a pleasurable state. As hallucinatory,
they exhibit the mental equivalent of the reflex and hence our most
primitive mental operation, an operation Freud is ready to stipu-
late as the hypothetical start of our mental development (1900, Ch.
VII.C). Hallucinations, on his account, discharge excitation by pro-
viding the shortest possible path to the satisfaction that is wanted.
Thus, dreams fulfill wishes, because that is the most primitive
operation our minds conduct, and dreams embody primitive mental
function.
Reflection
The Interpretation of Dreams contains perhaps the most closely
observed narrative we have of human mental life. We can only marvel
at the persistence with which Freud, in what he has called an analy-
sis or interpretation of dreams, tracks his own and others’ thoughts
and the incisiveness with which he dissects and reassembles them.
The value of the exercise is evident not least in the material it adds
to diagnostic and therapeutic treatment and the insight it may add to
healthy people’s understanding of themselves (pp. 620–621).
There is something attractive in Freud’s idea that a dream, like
a symptom, which is also inscrutable on the surface, fulfills a wish in
at least the sense that it presents reality as we would like to see, or to
have seen, it. The idea aligns with a long history of human intuition
that dreams fulfill wishes, granted Freud’s caveat that they reveal a
psychic, and not an external, reality; they do not prognosticate. Their
analysis affords a way for us to know our own minds.

It is less clear that a dream fulfills a wish: that it arises for the
purpose of doing so and cannot arise unless a wish appears for it to
fulfill. Beginning in (his) Chapter II, where he introduces his method
and analyzes his dream of Irma’s injection, Freud extrapolates from
his identification of a wish on which different threads of a dream’s
analysis converge that the dream came into being to satisfy the wish.
Different portions of Freud’s dream – in which he remarks Irma’s
recalcitrance in accepting his solution to her illness, recognizes a pos-
sible organic cause to her distress, and learns that Otto has given her
a faulty injection – all attest to his innocence of any misconduct in
her case and thus, he suggests, attest to his wish to be so exonerated.
The worries with which he went to bed could well have pro-
vided a breeding ground for that aspiration. It is also possible that
some of the elements of the dream, not least Irma and Otto them-
selves, lingered in his mind as a result of his visit with Otto and his
investment in Irma’s well-being. However, it is a step further to say
that the dream coalesced around the wish to be free of the doubts
he was experiencing, or that, prompted by the doubts, which might
otherwise have awakened him, the dream swept them away with a
scene that made them unnecessary.
A lacuna at that juncture in the account is troublesome, because
the rest of the account depends on our acceptance that dreams fulfill
wishes and arise for that reason. We can speak of dream distortion,
or a latent and manifest content, only if dreams are fulfilling wishes
or disclosing some other content and do not immediately appear to
be doing so. Dream-work, as Freud has defined it – in which several
ideas become compressed into one element, or emotion belonging to
one content appears with another, etc. – occurs only if a latent and
manifest content exist to connect.
Freud makes several observations, most within his seventh
chapter, which we might use to address those objections: A special
feeling of conviction attends analyses when they are complete, and
completion includes a unifying wish, or unifying wishes. All mental
processes, except possibly in cases of severe organic corruption, are

driven by purposive ideas. All mental processes obey the pleasure

principle in avoiding displeasure and, where possible, cultivating
pleasure. All mental function, built originally on the pattern of the
reflex, which in turn exhibits the function of the nervous system, is
designed at bottom to discharge excitation – and dreaming, in par-
ticular, preserves primitive mental functioning. Dreaming, if it is to
be compatible with sleeping, must not – as a rule – excite us to wake-
fulness and must, on the contrary, act to preserve sleep.
Those propositions, even if accepted, do not translate specifi-
cally to a wish-fulfilling role for dreams. They leave room for other
possibilities, which need only observe the constraint that dreams act
routinely not to wake us all the way up. The idea that dreams’ wish-
fulfillment simply aligns with the purposive nature of all mental pro-
cesses raises the further question of whether all mental processes are
driven by purposive ideas.
Freud provides two more specific grounds for accepting his
ascription of wish-fulfillment to dreams:
One is that the dreams of young children transparently fulfill
wishes, for instance deriving from missed opportunities, like treats
denied, from the previous day. That circumstance would establish
a prototype for adult dreams, which, on Freud’s theorizing, would
assume distorted form because of developments in the complex-
ity and delicacy of the mind. However, although the form of that
argument is compelling, the case is weakened by the plentitude of
non-wish-fulfilling dreams in childhood, which, if they fulfill wishes
despite their outward appearance, fall subject to the same problems
of interpretation just noted for adult dreams.
The second ground is that neurotic symptoms show the struc-
ture that Freud is proposing to extend to dreams, which would make
it plausible that the two might share an origin. Both have an obscure,
nonvoluntary component, and both lend themselves to analysis
and consequent self-insight in the consulting room. That ground is
potentially compelling as well, especially if we can place the analy-
sis of symptoms on firmer ground than we have been able to do so

far with dreams. That task completed, however, we would still need
to establish a parallel between symptoms and dreams strong enough
to warrant extrapolating from one to the other with respect to their
originating motivation.
It is possible that the gaps Freud has left in the dream theory
could be filled, including with some of the scaffolding he supplies.
He himself attempts no such defense. The only null hypothesis he
considers is the broad and extreme one that dreams are the meaning-
less detritus of a physiological process that, though composed of psy-
chological parts, is not psychologically determined (Freud, 1900, Chs.
I and V). He has shown that dreams can, upon analysis, be inserted
into the waking mental life of the dreamer. It is less clear what that
means they are.
Chapter 8 will resume that exploration. First, and in prepara-
tion, Chapters 5–7 examine to what degree the apparent incongruity
in Freud’s argument about dreams extends to his treatment of other
subjects.

Part II Freud’s Other Works

5 The Analysis of Psychoneuroses
Elisabeth von R. and the “Wolf Man”
Freud’s first psychological effort, his treatment, initially with

Joseph Breuer, of patients with psychoneuroses, saw the birth of
the discipline and practice of psychoanalysis. The iconic ideas that
even strange psychological occurrences serve a purpose and that
unconscious thoughts and impressions, some dating to our early
life, undergird our character and behavior took root in that work.
Patients undergoing psychoanalytic treatment remain the point of
entry into the world of psychoanalysis in introductory works Freud
wrote after he had brought the method to bear on a widening pallet
of phenomena.1
We are already acquainted, from the foregoing chapters, with
Freud’s belief that dreams and psychoneuroses arise from similar forces
and yield their secrets to the same method of analysis. The analysis of
either one, moreover, may have a salutary effect on their producer.
What we want to know now is how Freud extrapolates from analysis
to genesis in the case of neuroses and whether the extrapolation stands
on firmer ground than does the one he makes in the case of dreams.
In this chapter, I examine Freud’s first complete analysis, of a
patient he called Fräulein Elisabeth von R., conducted in 1892 and
thus before completion of his treatise on dreams, and then a por-
tion of his “Wolf Man” case history, completed in 1914 (published
1918) and hence after The Interpretation of Dreams; the latter case
turns on a dream and thus enables us to compare extrapolations to
dream formation and the genesis of neuroses directly. Before turning
to Elisabeth von R., I note briefly the case of Breuer’s patient known
1 See, for example, his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1909a, and his Introduction to
his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1917.
89

90 Freud’s Other Works
as Anna O., the first patient treated, in 1881–1882, with what was to
become psychoanalysis; Breuer and Freud collected their respective
Studies in Hysteria into a single volume in 1895.
It was during that first case that Breuer discovered that Anna,
when in either a spontaneous or an induced hypnoid state, recalled
events apparently connected to her symptoms and unavailable to her
waking thought. The symptoms disappeared when she recalled the
associated episodes with the full vigor of the emotion she had expe-
rienced at the time of the events. In the canonical example, Anna,
during a scorching summer, found herself unable to drink, despite
tormenting thirst, and lived on fruit. One day, while in one of her
absent states, she recalled a lady companion her family had employed
for her a few years earlier, whom she did not like. She segued to a
vivid memory of having come upon the lady’s disgusting dog drink-
ing from a human cup. Recalling the episode now with all the revul-
sion and horror she had felt at the time, but concealed for the sake of
propriety, she awoke from her trance pleading for water, which she
readily drank, ever to retain the capacity thereafter (in Breuer and
Freud, 1895, Case 1, cf. pp. 34–35).
Similarly, an early patient of Freud’s, in 1889, Frau Emmy
von N, who had developed involuntary clacking sounds and some
psychosomatic bodily pains, improved when excavating some memo-
ries of her early childhood. Freud once asked her, while she was under
hypnosis, why she was easily frightened, a condition she had associ-
ated with her symptoms. She recounted a number of terrifying scenes,
including the practice of her siblings, when she was 5, to throw dead
animals at her, which led her to faint and have spasms. After her aunt
criticized her reaction, she stopped. At 7, she unexpectedly saw her
sister in her coffin; at 8, her brother terrified her often by dressing up
in sheets as a ghost; at 9, while she observed her aunt in a coffin, the
aunt’s jaw suddenly dropped. As she described the tales, which she
did with great difficulty, she twitched all over and assumed a look
of fear and horror. When she concluded, she opened her mouth wide
and panted for breath. Afterward her features became peaceful, and

The Analysis of Psychoneuroses 91
Freud confidently assured her the bad images would not appear again
(in Breuer and Freud, 1895, Case 2, pp. 52–53).
Those cases, along with many others, established both the
existence of unconscious mentation and the connection of conscious
behavior to it. For our purposes, they suggest a connection between
the analyses the patients undertook and the remission of their symp-
toms. Thus, by contrast with the case of dreams, there are reasons to
think the analysis led to what was in fact the source of the behavior
in question.
We now turn to Freud’s analysis of Elisabeth von R. (in Breuer
and Freud, 1895, Case 5), in the course of whose treatment he recog-
nized, among other things, the expediency of abandoning hypnosis
for waking free association as an investigative and therapeutic tool.
Tracing the analysis in detail – it is compact enough to allow us to do
that – we can see how analyses, when pursued with care, can lead to
sources of an illness and to the illness’s mitigation.
Fräulein Elisabeth von R.

Elisabeth von R., 24 at the start of treatment, had suffered for more
than two years of pains in her legs and difficulty walking, which her
referring doctor thought might indicate hysteria. Her family had expe-
rienced grave misfortune: the death of her father, serious eye surgery
for her mother, and the death of a beloved married sister from heart
problems. Freud found her, on first contact, intelligent and mentally
normal, bearing her problems gracefully. She walked normally, he
observed, despite her report of both great pain and a propensity to
be overcome by fatigue in both walking and standing, the pain and
fatigue the only remarkable features he noted.
Diagnosis
Two comparisons led Freud to a tentative endorsement of a diagnosis
of hysteria (1895, pp. 135–136).
First, whereas people with organic pain tend to describe it calmly
and in detail, Elisabeth gave indefinite descriptions. Additionally,

people experiencing pain in the context of other neuroses, like hypo-

chondria or anxiety neurosis, when attempting to describe the pain,
give a sense of being engaged in a formidable intellectual task they
can barely manage. Their features become strained and distorted, as
though influenced by distressing affect, and their voices grow shrill
as they strain to express themselves aptly. Feeling language insuf-
ficient to express the uniqueness of their sensations, they never tire
of adding fresh details to their descriptions, as though they have still
not made themselves understood (p. 136).
All of the preceding tendencies, accompanying neuroses other
than hysteria, mark a condition that has usurped people’s entire
attention. Elisabeth’s recounting of her pains followed an opposite
trajectory on every count. Freud concluded that, because she none-
theless attached importance to her symptoms, her attention must
have been dwelling on some other content, of which the pains were
only an outward manifestation (p. 137).
The second comparison leading Freud to diagnose hysteria con-
cerns Elisabeth’s response to the stimulation of her sensitive areas.
When the sensitive areas of people with organic pain are stimulated,
the people’s faces show discomfort or wincing in response to physical
pain. When Freud pressed or pinched Elisabeth’s sensitive areas, by
contrast, she assumed a peculiar expression suggesting more pleasure
than pain. She cried out, almost as though she were having an erotic
tickling sensation. Her face became flushed, she threw her head back,
shut her eyes, and her body bent backward. Although not exaggerated,
the movements were noticeable. The total picture aligns more with a
hysterical than with an organic condition. The facial expressions in a
case of hysteria would be assumed to connect with the subject mat-
ter of the thoughts camouflaged by the pain, which the stimulation
of the body parts associated with the thoughts had aroused (p. 137).
Freud could find no explanation of the unusual location of
Elizabeth’s sensitive zone, predominantly in her thighs, or the
engagement of her muscles in particular, apparent in her difficulties
walking, her fatigue, and the site of her pain. Based on additional

considerations, he later diagnosed an organic condition, a muscular

rheumatism, to which he imagined a neurosis could have attached,
making the organic disposition – of her legs – seem of exaggerated
importance. Nonetheless he treated her physical symptoms directly,
with massage and electrical stimulation and with modest success,
for four weeks before starting psychological intervention for which
a colleague was meanwhile preparing the groundwork (pp. 137–138).
Freud believed it likely that Elisabeth had an impression of the
cause of her illness and harbored it only as a secret, rather than as
the foreign and unknown body typical of canonical cases of neuro-
sis. Therefore, he proceeded with just talking, not hypnosis, which
he held in reserve in case he needed it. The talking method, alone,
became his deliberate procedure in subsequent cases. The plan was to
clear away pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, like excavat-
ing a buried city. He would begin by having Elisabeth tell him what
she knew, during which he would note the points at which a train
of thought remained obscure or a link in it seemed to be missing.
Subsequently he would probe her memories at those points either
under hypnosis or through other techniques he describes as he pro-
ceeds with the history (pp. 138–139).
The Initiation of Treatment

Elisabeth told what Freud describes as a wearying story of her ill-
ness, touching on many painful experiences. The youngest of three
girls, Elisabeth had a tender relationship with both her parents. Her
mother, however, often found herself troubled by ongoing eye dis-
ease and nervous states, which resulted in Elisabeth’s forming a close
bond with her father, a spirited man of the world with whom she
came to enjoy an intellectual relationship. Although her father rel-
ished the intellectual camaraderie as well, he noted Elisabeth’s devi-
ation from the female type and warned her that her forthrightness
might discourage potential suitors. On the other side, her complete
selflessness in her treatment of family members reconciled her par-
ents to her virile traits (pp. 139–140).

Her father fell ill of an unacknowledged chronic heart prob-

lem, a pulmonary edema. Elisabeth took the lead in nursing him for
18 months. Freud surmised her illness probably responded to that
period, because she remembered that she had taken to her bed for a
day and a half during her father’s last six months, on account of leg
pains, which, however, passed quickly. She otherwise slept in his
room, answered his call day and night, and forced herself to appear
cheerful even when she did not feel it. She fell discernibly ill two
years after her father’s death, becoming incapable of walking on
account of a resurgence and intensification of her pains (p. 140).
The year after her father died, her older sister married a gifted
and enterprising man, to whom Elisabeth took a dislike on account of
his morbid sensitiveness and egoistic attention to his fads. She espe-
cially disparaged his lack of consideration for her mother, as part of
which he moved his family away from hers on account of a prospec-
tive promotion, thereby increasing her mother’s isolation. However,
everyone applauded the marriage of the second sister to a very con-
siderate man, despite his less prodigious intellectual gifts compared
with the first brother-in-law. His entrance into the family redeemed
the idea of marriage for Elisabeth. Additionally, the couple remained
in the neighborhood, not only enabling ongoing contact with Elis-
abeth and her mother, but also providing Elisabeth with a favorite
nephew, on whom she doted (pp. 141–142).
A difficult period ensued when Elisabeth was nursing her
mother after her eye surgery, on account of which her mother needed
to be in the dark; Elisabeth was always with her. Although the sur-
gery coincided with the older sister’s move away with her family, all
three families reunited for the summer holiday, during which the
others hoped Elisabeth would recover from the exhaustion and agi-
tation she had felt while caring for her mother. But it was during
that holiday that Elisabeth’s pains and locomotor difficulty started.
Although she had become aware of the pains sometime after the start
of the visit, they came on violently after she had a warm bath at
the bathing place of the establishment. Because she had taken a long

walk a few days earlier, it was easy to connect the pains to Elisabeth’s
being overtired and then having caught cold. Starting then, Elisabeth
lived as an invalid.
Later that summer, she was away at a health spa with her
mother when the two were called home on account of her second
sister’s turn for the worse during a difficult second pregnancy. An
agonizing journey home, during which they expected the worst, in
fact resulted in their arriving to find the sister already lying in state.
The family, aware of the history of heart disease in the family and a
heart episode the sister had experienced when she was a girl, blamed
themselves for having let the sister marry. Her husband blamed him-
self for precipitating the two pregnancies. Elisabeth herself became
preoccupied by the thought that a happy marriage, having finally
materialized, was destroyed by a terrible end, which also devastated
all she had hoped for for her mother. Her brother-in-law, inconsol-
able, withdrew from his wife’s family and moved back with his own
at their request; the families judged it impractical for him to live
with Elisabeth and her mother, because of Elisabeth’s single status
(pp. 142–143).
Freud describes that part of the story as the unhappy tale of a
proud girl longing for love, unreconciled to her fate, embittered by
the repeated defeat of her family and the loss of those she loved to
death or estrangement. She found herself nonetheless unprepared to
seek refuge in the love of an as-yet unknown man. For the next 18
months she lived in almost complete seclusion, but for her care of
her mother, and tormented by her own pains.
Turning to the medical portion of the story, Freud notes that
nothing in the case history so far explains why Elisabeth fell ill of
hysteria or why the hysteria took the form it did. Although some
might suppose she formed an association between her distressing
mental experiences and the bodily pains to which she happened
to be prone at the time, that scenario leaves unexplained why she
might have made that particular association and when she first
made it (p. 144).

Moreover, not only did Elisabeth’s narrative, though informa-

tive, offer no explanation of her condition; telling it produced no
curative effect. It was familiar to both Elisabeth and her family and,
in itself, opened up no new avenues of either discovery or cathar-
sis. She told Freud during this first phase of treatment, and evidently
with some satisfaction, that her pains remained as bad as ever.
Freud could not help but agree that no progress had been made – yet
(pp. 144–145).
Initial Progress: A First Conflict

Expecting she knew the causes and immediate determinants of her
hysterical symptoms, he asked her directly which psychical impres-
sion coincided with the first emergence of her leg pains. Finding her
insusceptible to hypnosis, which he had hoped to use as an aid, he
used a maneuver he had developed for an earlier recalcitrant patient.
He put his hand on her head and asked her to report whatever appeared
before her inner eye or passed through her mind at the moment of the
contact (p. 145).
Elisabeth described, after a silence, an evening on which a
young man, a family acquaintance who had become a protégé of her
father’s, had seen her home from a party; she recounted the conver-
sation they had had and her feelings upon arriving home to her ill
father. That mention led her to other thoughts concerning the man,
including her growing belief, based on their contacts and remarks he
had made to others, that he loved and understood her. She thought
she might be able to tolerate marriage if it were with him. However,
they were almost the same age, and he was not yet self-supporting.
Though she planned to wait for him, she saw him less and less after
her father fell ill (p. 146).
Although she had experienced her most intense feelings for
him that evening, she reproached herself bitterly, when she returned
home and found her father suddenly gravely ill, for having spent the
evening on her own enjoyment. She never left her father for an entire
evening again and seldom met the man. After her father died, the

man kept away out of respect for Elisabeth’s grief. He then turned
his attention elsewhere. The disappointment in that first love still
distressed her whenever it came to mind.
Elisabeth’s first pains, then, coincided with a conflict that
arose between the blissful feelings she had enjoyed while in the com-
pany of the young man and the remorse she felt for that pleasure
once she became aware of her father’s worsening state. However,
Freud hesitated to assume a direct connection between the pains and
that event, because it was not clear that the pains became hysteri-
cal at that juncture. He thus remained on the alert for other similar
experiences during the period in which Elisabeth was nursing her
father, though saw nothing that would have pointed to a conversion
of psychic innervations into hysterical symptoms. Then, however,
he recalled that the leg pains, at least intense ones, had not in fact
occurred while Elisabeth nursed her father; she had taken to her bed
only once on their account, and they had passed quickly.
Despite many attempts, Elisabeth and Freud were unable to
identify a convincing initial psychical cause of the pains. It was here
that Freud tentatively concluded the pains represented a mild rheu-
matic disorder, which, in any case, they were able to establish pre-
dated her blissful return from the party. The hysterical pains, which
occurred later, simply made use of a preexisting condition, which
until then mainly eluded notice.
Following those preliminary disclosures, the treatment entered
a productive phase. Elisabeth surmised that the pains radiated from
an area of her right thigh at the place where her father used to rest his
leg every morning while she redid the bandage around it. Although
she hadn’t noticed the association until now, she felt sure the pairing
had occurred many times. Thus, the area had become a hysterogenic
zone. Additionally, it began to respond to the therapeutic conversa-
tion. Generally, Elisabeth had little pain when she and Freud began a
session. But if a question, train of thought, or pressure to Elisabeth’s
head elicited an emotionally potent memory, a sensation of pain
would arise. It was usually sharp enough that Elisabeth would give

a start and bring her hand to the spot. The pain would last as long
as she remained under the influence of the memory. It would peak
while she made efforts to describe the critical part of what had come
to mind and would vanish at the end of the effort (p. 148).
Freud now adjusted their procedure. If Elisabeth reached the
end of a description and still felt pain, Freud would prod her for more
of the story, until the pain had been talked away. Once they reached
that point, Elisabeth became susceptible to having a new memory
evoked. During that period of what Freud, after Breuer, called “abre-
action,” Elizabeth’s physical and mental condition improved to the
point that she carried on without pain most of the time (pp. 148–149).
She experienced spontaneous fluctuations in her condition
that turned out to be prompted by associations with contempo-
rary experiences. For instance, she might hear of the illness of an
acquaintance that would remind her of her father’s illness, or, her
dead sister’s child visited and, because of his striking resemblance to
his mother, stirred up Elisabeth’s grief. Alternatively, a letter from
the distant, living sister that revealed the influence of the unfeeling
brother-in-law brought on the pain, which lasted until she had dis-
closed a family scene she had not yet mentioned. Because it proved
sufficient to lessen her symptoms with just a single mention of each
precipitating cause of the symptom, Freud decided to further Elisa-
beth’s encounter with situations likely to bring up provoking memo-
ries. Thus, for example, he had her visit her sister’s grave and attend
a party at which she might encounter the man she fancied when she
was younger (p. 149).
Memories from different eras would trigger the pain in differ-
ent locations. Her right leg hurt when she discussed nursing her sick
father, relations with the young man, or other events falling within
the first period of suspected pathogenic experiences. Pains in the left
leg would appear when memories came up related to her dead sister
or her two brothers-in-law, which is to say from the later period of
her illness. The disease thus appeared to differentiate into distinct
entities, one relating to the nursing of her father and neighboring

traumas and the other occupying the second period, concerning her
sisters and brothers-in-law. They manifested in similar, though not
identical, symptoms, given the variation in the location of the pains
(pp. 149–150).
Later Progress: A Second Conflict

One particular episode, which Elisabeth recalled vividly, stood out
to Freud. Elisabeth had described a long walk she had taken with
several others with whom she was staying at a health resort during
the summer. The three branches of the family were staying at the
spa, the two sisters and their families and Elisabeth and her mother.
It was a pleasant, mild day, during which her mother stayed in, her
older sister had already left the establishment, and her younger sister,
who felt ill, stayed behind. Initially the younger sister’s husband was
going to stay with her, but then decided to join the walk on Elisa-
beth’s account (p. 151).
Elisabeth believed the walk coincided with the first appear-
ance of her pains – the first pronounced ones, which occurred in
the second period of the illness – which she remembered as having
risen violently after the walk. Freud, responding to her uncertainty
about whether she had noticed the pains earlier, offered that she
might have refused the walk if her legs had hurt. Answering Freud’s
query about a possible trigger during the walk for the pain, Elisabeth
pointed obscurely, Freud says, to the contrast between her loneli-
ness and her sick sister’s married happiness, of which her (second)
brother-in-law’s behavior constantly reminded her (p. 151).
In another scene, which occurred a few days after the preced-
ing one, after her (younger) sister and brother-in-law had left the
establishment, she found herself in a restless, yearning mood. She
rose early and climbed a small hill to a spot with a pretty view they
had often visited together. Her thoughts, as she sat on a stone bench
there, dwelled on her loneliness and the fate of her family. She admit-
ted a burning wish to be as happy as her sister. She returned from the
sojourn with violent pains, to which she succumbed long term after

her bath that evening. She was able, for a time after, to allay the pain
by lying down, until, when traveling home from the spa to see her
ailing sister, she was tormented during the night by worry about the
sister’s condition and by raging pains, as she lay sleepless, stretched
out in a railway car (p. 152).
Progress toward a resolution of the case occurred after an
obstruction arose in the treatment. Although, in the first half of the
treatment, Elisabeth freely came forward with memories on occa-
sions when Freud pressed his hand to her head, she subsequently
occasionally produced nothing. Initially Freud curtailed the session,
thinking the time unfavorable. However, he changed course after
noting that she often asserted that nothing came to mind after she
had spent a long interval during which her face showed a tense and
preoccupied expression, suggesting she was, in fact, grappling with
content of some kind (p. 153).
Freud adopted the working hypothesis that the procedure of
pressing on Elisabeth’s head and asking what came to mind in the
context they were discussing never failed. He assumed that on every
occasion he pressed her head, some idea occurred to her or some image
came to mind, but she felt reluctant to communicate it and was try-
ing to suppress anew the content that had arisen. He reminded her of
the rule of treatment that she remain completely objective and say
what had come to mind, regardless of whether it was appropriate or
honorable. He said he knew something had occurred to her and that
to become free of her pains she would need to disclose everything.
From then onward, Elisabeth produced a memory or thought when-
ever Freud put his hand against her head. Sometimes he had to repeat
the action a few times before she mentioned something; however,
she would then admit that she could have said it the first time. When
Freud asked her why she didn’t say it, she said she thought it wasn’t
what was wanted or thought she could avoid it (p. 154).
It is at this juncture in his narrative that Freud introduces
the concept “resistance,” noting that, in the course of his difficult
work with Elisabeth, he began to note the occasions on which her

production of memories proved especially halting. During the period

that followed, Elisabeth enjoyed some mental relief and made pro-
ductive effort in her treatment. However, her pains persisted, some-
times with their old severity. An incomplete result, Freud surmised,
indicated an incomplete analysis. They had yet to isolate when and
by what means the pains had started (p. 154).
Resolution
A chance occurrence led him to pursue a suspicion he had formed
earlier. One day, during a session, they heard in the outside room
Elisabeth’s brother-in-law, the husband of the stricken sister, asking
for Elisabeth. Elisabeth got up and asked to end the session. Although
she had felt no physical discomfort until then, her facial expression
and gait now betrayed the sudden emergence of pronounced pains.
Freud prompted her to reconsider the origin of the pains.
Elisabeth’s thoughts turned to the summer visit to the health
resort, now disclosing details of her experiences that had not emerged
before. For instance, she felt exhausted after having nursed her mother
through her eye surgery and all the anxiety her mother’s problem had
aroused in her. She began to despair of ever getting any enjoyment
out of life or achieving anything in it. Although until then she had
thought herself strong enough to manage without the help of a man,
she now experienced a sense of her weakness as a woman and a long-
ing for love in which – in her words – her frozen nature might melt
(pp. 154–155).
It was in that frame of mind that she had found herself deeply
affected by her second sister’s happy marriage: the tender care of the
husband who looked after her, the way they understood each other
at a moment’s glance, and how sure they seemed of each other.
Although everyone but the sister regretted her second pregnancy,
which followed soon upon the first and made her ill, she bore it hap-
pily because her husband had caused it. On the walk that ended with
Elisabeth’s pains, her sister had persuaded her husband to join the
outing because it would give Elisabeth pleasure. She remained in his

company throughout the walk as they discussed all kinds of subjects,

including intimate ones. She found herself agreeing with everything
he said. The experience increased her wish to have a husband like
him. The same wish returned a few days later when, after her sister
and her family had left the resort, Elisabeth walked to the lookout
that had been a favorite destination in the family’s walks (p. 155).
Although she felt pain when she stood up after her reverie
there, the pain passed. It erupted again after her warm bath in the
evening and remained thereafter. Freud’s inquiry into what Elisabeth
had thought of during the bath produced only the comment that the
bathhouse reminded her of the sister and her family, because they had
stayed in the building while they were there. She continued to repro-
duce memories of the period: the visit to the resort with her mother,
the anxiety with which she waited for each letter from home, the
news about her sister’s decline, the train journey home in tormenting
anticipation of what they would find there when they arrived.
She next recalled the final leg of the trip: her arrival in Vienna
and the disillusioning impression given by the relatives who met
them, the short journey to her sister’s neighborhood, the hurried
walk through the garden to the door of the small garden house, the
silence and oppressive darkness within the house, the absence of
her brother-in-law, and, finally, how she stood at the bedside of her
beloved sister, who lay dead.
At the moment she confronted the terrible certainty that her
sister had died without saying goodbye to them and without Elis-
abeth’s having eased her final days with her care, another thought
flashed through her mind and now bolted through it again. Her
brother-in-law was free again and could marry her (p. 156).
Now the composition of the disease came clear. Elisabeth felt
an affection for her brother-in-law her entire moral being rejected.
She had fended off the idea, generating hysterical symptoms through
the conversion of the unwanted psychical excitations into a physical
manifestation, which removed the unwanted thoughts from her con-
scious life. She succeeded, Freud says, in sparing herself the painful

recognition that she loved her sister’s husband by inducing physical

pains in herself instead. When the idea tried to force itself on her – on
the walk with her brother-in-law, during her reverie at the lookout,
in the bath, by her sister’s deathbed – the pains assaulted her, on
account of the successful conversion (p. 156).
Recovery of that idea had a devastating impact on Elisabeth,
who erupted in terrible pains and tried to talk Freud out of the inter-
pretation: that he had talked her into it, that it couldn’t be true; that
she was incapable of such wickedness and could never forgive herself
for it. It was easy, he says, to show her that her own narrative led
to that conclusion. It took a long time, though, for her to accept his
consolations: that we are not responsible for our feelings and that the
fact that she fell ill attested strongly to her moral character (p. 157).
Freud, still faced with the task of alleviating Elisabeth’s suffer-
ing, was able to orient the treatment around her relationship with her
brother-in-law and help her to “abreact” the excitation she had built
up in connection with it. Thus they looked into the first impressions
she formed of his dealings with her, bringing her to recount all the lit-
tle premonitory signs a fully grown passion can make much of when
looking back on them. Those included his mistaking her for her sis-
ter on his first visit to the house and the sister’s joking remark on a
different occasion when Elisabeth and her soon-to-be brother-in-law
had lost themselves in so animated a conversation that the sister
was moved to interrupt: “The truth is, you two would have suited
each other splendidly.” Gradually it became clear to Elisabeth that
her affectionate feeling for her brother-in-law dated back a long time
and had flourished under the mask of sisterly camaraderie, a natural
sentiment for someone with the strong family feeling she harbored
(p. 158).
Elisabeth’s mother, whom Freud took into his confidence during
that phase of the treatment, had long suspected Elisabeth’s fondness
for her widowed brother-in-law. Many factors, however, militated
against a marriage between them. The brother-in-law had health
issues and was having a difficult recovery from his wife’s death. Freud

and Elisabeth terminated the treatment when both believed she was
progressing steadily toward a cure. After initial anger that Freud had
broached her presumptive secret with her mother, she reconciled and
recovered fully. She eventually married someone unknown to Freud.
Comparison with Freud’s Account of Dreams

In this, his first fully reported analysis and the first in which he had
his patient employ the conscious associative reflection he would
later use to study dreams, Freud and his patient worked meticulously
to identify the thoughts to which her symptoms seemed to respond.
The ebb and flow of Elisabeth’s symptom – debilitating leg pains that
exceeded any organically determined sensitivity she might have had
in the area – corresponded in detail with the quieting and intensi-
fication of a tormenting psychical conflict taking place outside her
awareness, between her erotic interest and her moral imperatives.
She felt a deep attraction, unacknowledged, to her brother-in-law
that, when it did surface, she found thoroughly abhorrent. Exposure
of the conflict, combined with Elisabeth’s negotiation of her feelings,
coincided with the final dissipation of her symptoms and her return
to full psychological health. Anna O.’s and Frau Emmy von N.’s
respective analyses, reviewed earlier in this chapter, followed a simi-
lar trajectory, as did Freud’s later “Rat Man” case (1909b), concerning
a young lieutenant suffering from obsessional neurosis.
In all four cases, the abating of symptoms, when the material
to which the analysis led was brought to consciousness, supports the
hypothesis that the symptoms arose in the attempt to remove that
material from consciousness. No analogous support exists for the
hypothesis that the material uncovered in the analysis of a dream
brought about the dream.
When a Neurosis and Its Cure Turn

on a Dream: The “Wolf Man”
Other cases of psychoneurosis are less perspicuous than are the pre-
ceding ones, among them Freud’s celebrated “Wolf Man” history

(1918/1914), part of which I elaborate next. The case, in addition

to offering a glimpse of his approach to neuroses with more diffuse
symptoms than we have reviewed so far, turns on the analysis of a
dream, in the wake of which (analysis) the patient’s illness abated.
In doing so, the case provides a potentially more felicitous test of
Freud’s dreams theory than do the myriad dreams he reports in the
dreams book, because the analysis of a dream in the present case
coincided with a cure. That convergence might make more plausible
than has our discussion thus far the idea that a dream, like a neurosis,
materializes from a wish, or need, that coalesces out of unacknowl-
edged thoughts and feelings in conflict with other imperatives.
The patient, a wealthy Russian man, came to Freud as a young
adult whose mental health had broken down a few years earlier after
a bout of gonorrhea. He had become entirely incapacitated and totally
dependent on others. Previously, he had suffered a severe anxiety
neurosis, in the form of an animal phobia, in early childhood, start-
ing at 4, that transitioned to an obsessional neurosis during his mid-
dle childhood and appeared to resolve spontaneously at age 10. The
succeeding eight years, until his breakdown, brought him relative
normalcy, allowing his easy completion of his secondary education.
Freud, based on the stability in the adult’s mood and lack of evident
pathology beyond his incapacitation, diagnosed a defect left behind
by the earlier ailments after ostensible recovery from them (pp. 7–8).
Freud’s case history dwells on the first period. The outbreak of
anxiety during that interval could be confidently dated to a dream the
little boy had the night before his fourth birthday. It is the resolution
of that dream, 20 years later, that coincided with a restoration of the
man’s health, to a level he had not known until then (p. 8).
Freud, acknowledging the presumably greater trustworthiness
of the direct analysis of a child than that of a retrospective examina-
tion, advises that the direct analysis would yield scant material. A
retrospective analysis, promising richer and more instructive results,
need only take account of the distortions and refurbishing likely
introduced by looking back (pp. 8–9). However, as Freud argues in

The Interpretation of Dreams, the distortions and emendations we

impose on our recollection of something we have experienced pre-
sumably intersect psychically significant strands of thought relating
to it.
Aware of the fantastical-sounding nature of the results to which
he and his patient were led, Freud, in requesting readers’ forbearance,
remarks the satisfactory conclusion of the analysis and its confluence
with previous psychoanalytic work. The part of the analysis Freud
reports – that dealing with the patient’s early childhood – is meticu-
lous to a fault. I concentrate on a few portions of the dream analysis.
The Dream and Its Immediate Sources

In the dream, the patient saw his window fly open, while he was
lying in bed. Several white wolves, six or seven, the patient said, with
bushy tails sat motionless in the tree outside his window, their ears
pricked at attention as they looked at him. He woke in terror of being
eaten by the wolves, had great difficulty accepting the vision as only
a dream, and remained disturbed by it long after (p. 29).
Freud and the patient were able to identify immediate sources
of the dream content in events of the period. Among the more
salient ones: During that time, the boy had great fear of an illustra-
tion of a wolf in a book of fairy tales, possibly an accompaniment to
Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf stood upright, striding out with
one foot, claws outstretched and ears pricked. The patient’s sister,
older by two years, made sport of taunting him with the picture
(p. 29). She teased him in other ways, including sexual ones, for
instance having the two of them expose their bottoms and then
pulling on his penis (p. 20).
The appearance of the wolves in the tree reminded the patient
of a story related by his grandfather, in which a tailor was at work in a
room when a window opened suddenly and a wolf jumped in. The tai-
lor caught the wolf by the tail and pulled it off, upon which the wolf
ran away in terror. Later, the tailor, when alone in the woods, was
charged by a pack of wolves, prompting him to climb a tree to escape

them. The maimed wolf, among them, instructed the others to climb
on each other, starting with him, until the last one could reach and
attack the tailor. But the tailor recognized him and cried, as he had
done before, “Catch the grey one by his tail!”, upon which the again-
mortified wolf ran away, leaving the others to tumble down. Freud
found the castration imagery of the story unmistakable and imagined
the bushy tails of the wolves in the dream – befitting foxes more than
wolves – compensated for the threat (pp. 30–31).
The allusion to six or seven wolves in the tree reminded the
patient of another fairytale also familiar to him at the time, “The
Wolf and the Seven little Goats,” a story also of devouring: The wolf
ate up six of the little goats; the seventh hid in a clock case. The wolf
lay down under a tree after his meal; hence, the story furnishes both
the numbers, six and seven, and the tree contained in the dream,
unlike Little Red Riding Hood, which contains only the single wolf
and no discrete tree (p. 31).
Analysis
The interpretation of the dream, which the patient described early
in his treatment, extended over the treatment’s four years, during
which the patient returned to it often and also redreamt it periodi-
cally. He, like Freud, suspected it contained clues to the origin of his
infantile neurosis. Nonetheless, the treatment scarcely progressed
during most of its duration. The patient was consumed by apathy,
which Freud surmised reflected resistance to some content that had
not surfaced. Freud, when at last convinced that the patient had
formed a secure attachment with him, decided to try to spur progress
by imposing a deadline on the treatment. He fixed a date by which
the treatment would stop, regardless of the juncture it had reached.
During the last few months of the analysis the patient came to appre-
ciate Freud’s earnestness and began to reach new ground (p. 33).
Three features of the dream stood out to the patient: the still-
ness of the wolves, the strained attention they directed toward him,
and the lasting sense of reality the dream impressed upon him.

Freud, discussing the last first, says he drew, in the analysis,

on a rule of thumb he had extracted from interpreting dreams: That
the feeling of reality that accompanies some dreams applies, not to
the dream itself, but to a real occurrence in the past, alluded to by
the dream, that the dreamer no longer remembers (1900, p. 372).
The item must be something of which the dreamer is no longer con-
scious, because we cannot easily explain why dreamers would hide
from themselves something obvious or innocuous. In the present
case, for example, the patient would have had no reason to mask that
he had heard either the fairy tales he did or his grandfather’s story of
the tailor and the wolf (1918, p. 33).
Assuming, then, that the emphatic conviction he felt about
the reality of the scene in his dream referred to something that had
occurred before, of whose reality he was no longer conscious, then
the event in question had to have occurred before he turned 4; the
dream occurred the night before his birthday, which fell on Christ-
mas day. The portions of the dream emphasized by the dreamer, the
attentive looking and motionlessness of the wolves, Freud and the
patient reasoned, must have connected to the forgotten event, pos-
sibly representing it in distorted form (pp. 33–34).
Those reflections had next to be integrated with the patient’s
initial analysis of other constituents of the dream, the most vivid
of which, the wolves, had led the patient most immediately to his
grandfather’s story of the tailor and the wolves. That story, in turn,
convincingly, Freud and the patient thought, evoked castration
themes. They had also concluded, from the earlier analysis, that the
figure of the wolf in both the dream and the ensuing phobia stood for
the patient’s father, fear of whom, having apparently first manifested
in the dream, came to dominate his life (p. 34).
Freud, combining those and other considerations, reconstructed
to the patient the following fragments, identified thus far, of the
dream’s possible latent content: There had been a real occurrence dat-
ing from an early period that involved fixed looking, immobility, sex-
ual issues, castration fears, the father, and something terrible (p. 34).

The patient, continuing with the interpretation, offered that

the dream’s depiction of a window opening suddenly of its own
accord did not align with the grandfather’s story of the wolf jump-
ing through an open window (into the tailor’s room). He ventured
that the image, of the suddenly opening window, corresponded to an
occurrence in which his own eyes suddenly opened. He woke up and
saw something (p. 34).
Freud, pressing further, suggested that the attentive looking of
the wolves might similarly be ascribed to the dreamer. Thus, the boy,
at some point in the past, had suddenly opened his eyes and was look-
ing attentively at something. The dream incorporated an additional
transposition, of the grandfather’s story. In the story, the wolves
amassed below the tree – up which the tailor had climbed – unable to
climb it themselves, whereas in the dream they sat in the tree (p. 35).
Therefore, three key elements of the dream, identified as key
by the dreamer, appeared to reverse the unrepresented content with
which he associated them: the opening window inverting the little
boy’s opening his eyes, the wolves’ attentive looking at the boy
inverting the boy’s attentive looking at something, and the dream’s
situating of the wolves in the tree reversing the wolves’ position
beneath the tree in the grandfather’s story.
Freud now wondered whether the frozen motionlessness of the
wolves, another feature singled out by the patient, might not also
embody a transposition, of violent motion into absolute stillness. On
the assumption of that transposition, the dream recalled an event
in which the boy suddenly woke and witnessed a scene of violent
motion at which he looked with fixed attention – the reality of that
event forced itself upon his notice and terrified him (p. 34).
Resolution and the Primal Scene

Further associations by the patient guided the dream analysis closer
to a resolution. The dream’s tree, he determined, was a Christmas
tree, one of the features that helped date the dream to his birth-
day, Christmas day. Freud depicts the arising of the dream in the

following way. The boy had gone to sleep in excited anticipation of

the double helping of presents he expected to receive the next day,
some for his birthday and some for Christmas. In the dream, Christ-
mas had arrived, his presents hanging from the tree. But they turned
into wolves instead of presents, evoking his terror of being eaten by a
wolf, and resulted in his waking and running to his nurse for protec-
tion (p. 35).
The question for dream interpretation then became why the
boy’s thrill at receiving gifts, or, as Freud translates, having his wishes
fulfilled, gave way to fright. Freud, drawing on his knowledge of the
patient’s sexual development and on the surmise that the wolves
represented his father, interpolates that the strongest wish the boy
harbored at the time was to obtain sexual satisfaction from his father.
The strength of that wish, Freud reasons, enabled the boy’s revival of
a long-lost memory of a scene that showed him what sexual satisfac-
tion from his father looked like. That result terrified him, sending
him running from the object of his desire to safer refuge (pp. 35–36).
Only one condition, Freud extrapolates from details of other
portions of the analysis, would have frightened the boy away from
the fulfillment he longed for, namely, unmistakable evidence that
the possibility of castration was real. Freud and the patient, using a
litany of clues, concluded that an image came to the boy’s expectant
mind that night of sexual intercourse between his parents, in which
he was able to see organs not normally exposed in the act: He saw
his parents carrying out intercourse from behind, a posture evoked,
among other cues, by the upright position of the wolves in the dream.
His mother, according to that scene, was a castrated wolf, which let
others climb on top of her; his father was the wolf that climbed. If
the dreamer, taking his mother’s place, wanted satisfaction from his
father, he would have to be castrated, like his mother. The threat of
castration converted happy expectation into terror (pp. 36–39, 47).
Numerous additional hints emerged from the analysis, as well
as from the dream and variations of the dream the patient dreamt
while under Freud’s treatment, that placed the scene in the summer

the boy turned 1½. They include: the boy’s having contracted malaria
that summer, on account of which he slept in his parents’ bedroom,
additional pointers to the time of year, the likelihood that as the boy
grew past that age the parents would have become more discrete
(pp. 36–47).
Through the analysis of the dream and its variants, many addi-
tional details of the patient’s early life came to light, and along with
them, the torments with which he had been afflicted, including those
surrounding his previously shackled homosexuality. His condition
improved markedly during that portion of the treatment, its final
months. He remained in good health thereafter, but for occasional
interruptions, for one of which he saw Freud again briefly five years
later; after that, he saw direct or indirect associates of Freud’s, again
briefly and infrequently (pp. 77, 122 and ed. note, p. 122).
The Genesis of Symptoms

Regardless of whether we accept Freud’s solution of the man’s dream
and his neurosis, a solution made no less fantastical by the brevity
of my account of the case, one fact stands out that unifies its analy-
sis with the others recounted in this chapter. The patient’s improve-
ment coincided with the uncovering of the presumptive sources of
his illness. Even if the scene extrapolated from his dream and the
scene’s later ramifications did not form the precise basis of the ill-
ness, something about broaching and exploring the scene and the
reflections it elicited quieted his torment.
The Interpretation of Dreams and

Neuroses: An Appraisal
We seem on shakier ground with dreams in themselves. Even in the
case of the Wolf Man, for whom the analysis of a dream proved instru-
mental in the amelioration of his illness, we cannot assume that the
themes reached in the analysis – castration fears and longing for the
father – led in any organized way to the generation of the dream. That
doubt remains even if we accept, for the sake of argument, Freud’s

and the patient’s story of both the primal scene and the feelings by
which the boy was beset at the time. Those feelings, along with other
events occurring in the boy’s life during the period in which the
dream occurred – his hearing related fairy tales, taunts by his sister
with a picture of a wolf, etc. – could have provided raw material for
the dream, which indeed produced profound terror in him. But the
dream might have picked up that material adventitiously, and not in
a concerted way around the themes its analysis later revealed, includ-
ing the primal scene the boy allegedly witnessed between his parents.
To be sure, we may apply the same skepticism to analyses of
neuroses, especially cases like the Wolf Man’s neurosis – as opposed
to his dream – which lacks the close alignment of symptoms and their
putative basis evident in other cases, like Elisabeth von R.’s. We can
be more certain of the occurrence of scenes – for instance the taunts of
his sister, the stories he was told, activities he and his family engaged
in – for which either external corroboration exists or memory can be
assumed to be more reliable. Somehow the revisiting of those scenes,
along with the more fantastical reconstructions of the analysis, had a
salutary effect. The salutary effect makes a connection with the exca-
vated lines of thought credible, even if not compelling.
Nonetheless, the dream was the immediate precipitant of the
neurosis, including the boy’s wolf phobia. Once we allow that the neu-
rosis arose from the lines of thought to which the analysis led – the
yearning for sexual relations with the father and the fear of castration –
then we have to wonder how the dream could have had the catalyzing
effect it did without having embodied those themes itself. Those were,
after all, among the themes that, when traced to their presumptive
infantile roots, saw the mitigation of the adult patient’s illness.
Even accepting all of Freud’s conclusions about the currents
active in the boy’s mental life at the time – the lust and fear – we have
no warrant to suppose the wolf dream materialized as a fulfillment
of the boy’s yearnings – yearnings gone sour with the evocation of
further content called up by the prospect of fulfillment. The manifest
content of the dream might still have amassed serendipitously from

recent and concurrent events in the boy’s life: the tales he heard, his
sister’s taunts, and so on. It might have amassed serendipitously even
if some of the events incorporated by the dream – the picture of the
upright wolf with which his sister teased him – had already become
imbued with special poignancy because of their intersection with the
lust and fear Freud believes the boy harbored. The dream, rather than
germinating as a response to those undercurrents, might have galva-
nized them after the fact.
In that way, a dream may be able to tip a treatment toward
a tangle of thoughts that proves pivotal in resolving an illness, the
deeper occupations of the mind, like more superficial material, find-
ing their way into a dream incidentally, and not as germinators that
set an entire dream in motion. As Freud says, our defenses against
some content may relax when we sleep, or, more broadly, the shut-
ting down of both external perception and our ongoing torrent of con-
scious thought may give that content room to attract notice. Either
way, dreams might draw on, or at least retrospectively open up, a
greater sweep of the mind, or at least a different one, than does wak-
ing thought. In doing so, dreams may, as Freud believed, offer the
richest road to the unconscious mind (Freud, 1900, p. 608; Chapter 3
here, p. 78).
Freud makes nearly the same point in his postscript to his
incomplete case history of Dora (1904/1901), which he reported
shortly after publishing The Interpretation of Dreams, to which he
views his analysis of Dora as an appendix (1904/1901, p. 114). He
believes the two dreams around which her case turned exposed
parts of her mental life not accessible through the analysis of symp-
toms, her transference onto him, and her conscious thought alone
(1904/1901, p. 114).
It can come about, then, that the interpretation of a dream, or
dreams, can invigorate or redirect a general analysis in progress. The
most we can say confidently, though, is that it is the analysis that is
doing so, while the question remains open of how the dream came to
offer stimuli that felicitously upended the work in progress.

6 Phenomena of Ordinary
Waking Life
Freud’s investigation of mental life took him beyond psychoneuroses

and dreams to other phenomena of waking life. Though well aware of
psychological happenings requiring no special explanation, he identi-
fied some occurrences on which he thought he might productively
bring to bear the view of the mind nurtured by his treatment of neu-
roses and formalized in his account of dreams. In that category fall
short-term behaviors and experiences that, although common, elude
straightforward explanation. Examples include the mental glitches
he called parapraxes – small involuntary errors, like slips of the
tongue and the forgetting of names – and jokes and the appreciation
of the comic, as well as more passive experiences like getting lost in
a book and the feeling of the uncanny.
Like neurotic symptoms, those happenings occur during our
waking moments, yet like dreams, they manifest in the healthy, as
well as in the ill, and they are short-lived. Having found a more
compelling line of argument in Freud’s portrait of psychoneuroses
than we did in his depiction of dreaming, we may ask with which of
those two efforts his accounts of the new group of phenomena more
closely align.
This chapter considers Freud’s treatment of the aforemen-
tioned subjects with that question in view. He proposes for two of
them, parapraxes and the experience of the uncanny, explanations
similar to those he offers for dreams and neuroses: as behaviors or
experiences that diverge from the ordinary happenings of waking life,
they invite explanation, for which he suggests an incursion of uncon-
scious functioning – of different sorts in the different cases. The pro-
duction and appreciation of the comic, and the experience of getting
lost in a book, meanwhile, appear to most people to form part of
114

Phenomena of Ordinary Waking Life 115
our ordinary waking life; they don’t call out for special explanation.
Freud finds, and goes to some length to demonstrate, that, nonethe-
less, those occurrences are less straightforward than they seem; he
deploys his theoretical apparatus to fill the gaps.
The new accounts draw upon a variety of concepts of Freud’s we
have encountered in his discussions of dreams and neuroses, includ-
ing: the motivating force of unconscious wishes (parapraxes and get-
ting lost in a book), the mechanisms of dream formation (jokes), and
the engagement of infantile material (the uncanny).
I consider the new topics in the order in which Freud discussed
them, beginning with parapraxes, his examination of which he gath-
ered into a single volume published in 1901, a year after The Interpre-
tation of Dreams appeared.1
Parapraxes
I consider two from among the many seeming mental accidents that
Freud examines in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
Slips of the Tongue

He tells of a patient to whom he had relayed his impression, based on
their immediately preceding interchange, that she had felt ashamed of
her family during the period they were discussing and had reproached
her father with an insult that had not yet surfaced. She had no mem-
ory of such an occurrence and thought it unlikely. She continued the
conversation with the remark: “One thing must be granted [the fam-
ily]: they are certainly unusual people, they all possess Geiz (greed) – I
meant to say Geist (cleverness).” The allegation of greed expressed
the reproach he had claimed she kept back (p. 64).
The disturbance of speech evident in a slip of the tongue, can,
as Freud points out, arise simply from mechanical interference like
assonance or the anticipation of words or sounds to come later in
1 I have examined at length elsewhere (Sugarman, 2010) Freud’s treatment of the phe-
nomena covered in this chapter and summarized here.

the utterance (p. 56), as in “Can we turn on the heat seater?” Such
interference becomes disposed by states of fatigue or divided atten-
tion, or under the influence of disturbing emotions (Freud, 1891, p.
13). However, a verbal slip can also result from influences outside the
intended word or sentence, influences of whose existence the utterer
becomes aware only through the occurrence of the error itself. Freud
suspected the latter possibility in the case of his patient.
Although it remains possible that phonic similarity and a
moment of inattention, even one precipitated by the difficult con-
versation he and the patient were having, accounted for the patient’s
error, it is a plausible alternative story he tells. The motivation for
substituting “greed” in the sentence existed, in both the immediate
context – Freud’s voicing of his suspicions about the patient’s deroga-
tion of her family – and the not-yet-explicit thoughts of the patient’s
that had been hinted at in the analysis.
The Forgetting of Names

Freud gives a more detailed account than the foregoing one of an
instance of his own of the forgetting of a name. Traveling by rail
toward Herzegovina and discussing travel in Italy with another pas-
senger, Freud wished to mention the famous frescoes in the Orvi-
eto cathedral painted by the Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli.
Signorelli’s name eluded him, though he knew it well. While strug-
gling to retrieve it, he summoned two other Renaissance painters’
names, Botticelli and Boltraffio, one of which he knew no better
than he knew Signorelli, and the other of which he knew less. He
begins an analysis of his memory lapse by asking why those names,
among numerous others he might have conjured, might have come
to his mind.
He identifies some possible connections in the conversation he
and his interlocutor were having in the exchange that preceded the
one in question, about the frescos. Freud had recounted a custom of
the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina (his italics) to trust both
their doctors and fate so completely that if a doctor informed them

that a loved one could not be saved, they would reply, “Herr [Sir],
what is there to be said? If he could be saved, I know you would have
saved him.” The significance of the highlighted elements, along with
Signorelli (Signor, likewise, Sir), becomes apparent in the chain of
associations Freud interpolates, next, between Signorelli, the forgot-
ten name, and the other two (1901, p. 3).
He adds, first of all, that he had felt tempted to share a further
thought in relation to the Turks in Bosnia, etc. but had held it back
through propriety. If that people, placing the highest value on sexual
enjoyment, learn they suffer an incurable sexual disorder, they meet
the news with anything but a resigned attitude. As a patient of one
of Freud’s colleagues once said, “Herr, you must know that if that
comes to an end, then life is of no value.” The conversation about
the Bosnian, etc. Turks became able to disturb his subsequent recall
of Signorelli, according to his reasoning, because he had kept from
expression a salient, associated thought (1901, p. 3).
That associated thought had particularly painful ramifications
for Freud just then. A few weeks earlier, while staying briefly at Tra-
foi, a hamlet in the Tyrol, he received the devastating news that a
patient with whom he had worked intently had ended his life because
of an incurable sexual disorder. Although Freud did not contemplate
the event consciously during the ride to Herzegovina, the phonetic
similarity between Trafoi and Boltraffio, absent any other persuasive
reason for him to have generated “Boltraffio,” persuades him that the
terrible event loomed in his mind and affected his thinking; he knew
Boltraffio least of the three painters (1901, p. 4).
He concludes that his forgetting of “Signorelli,” rather than a
chance event, arose from that interference. The remark he shared
before the turn of the conversation to the frescoes, “Herr, what is
there to be said? …,” evoked the parallel remark about irreparable
sexual dysfunction, “Herr, you must know if that comes to an
end …,” which he held back. The latter, he believes, aroused in him
the traumatic news from Trafoi. He wanted to forget the latter and
forgot something else he wanted to remember.

Imagining how the substitution might have occurred, he sug-

gests his unwanted and repressed memory of receiving the news at
Trafoi drew the wanted name, Signorelli, into repression through its
associative connection, via “Signor,” with the Herr of the anecdote,
“Herr … if that comes to an end …” Memory of the anecdote led,
through further associations, to the patient’s suicide. The names he
produced in Signorelli’s place, Botticelli and Boltraffio, effected a
compromise between the two intentions, the one to retrieve Signo-
relli and the other his unconscious preoccupation with the patient’s
death of which he had learned at Trafoi. Both names, like Signorelli,
belong to Italian Renaissance painters, and the “elli” with which
“Botticelli” ends overlaps the end of “Signorelli,” the name he was
trying to retrieve; “Boltraffio,” meanwhile, overlaps “Trafoi,” in
addition to sharing “Bo” with “Botticelli,” as well as “Bosnia,” the
setting of the subject of the presumably interfering conversation.
Granted Freud’s acknowledgment that some forgetting of
names and words, like some slips of the tongue, occurs straight-
forwardly, for example, through proximity in a phonetic or seman-
tic network (1901, p. 7), he again builds a plausible case for a more
involved alternative. He was troubled at the time he forgot “Signo-
relli” by a matter that could easily have received an impetus through
its association with material he either mentioned or considered con-
sciously without mentioning. We know from his account that he
had worked extensively with the patient who ended his life and can
imagine that the loss of a patient via suicide might have signaled to
Freud a tragic failure of responsibility on his part, in addition to a
shattering loss in itself. Signorelli, as a proper name not part of his
daily discourse, might have proved especially susceptible to disrup-
tion. It is conceivable that a semantically related term from his con-
versation and his private reflection (Herr, for Signor) led him down a
path diverging from the painter. That path might have made it easy,
relatively speaking, to summon the names he did instead.
We can imagine the operation of simpler mechanisms in the
episode, like a general diversion of mental function as a result of

Freud’s dwelling on and then withholding the second, delicate, anec-

dote about the Bosnian Turks’ attitude toward sex; the unwanted line
of thought to the patient’s suicide might have followed from there,
distracting Freud further. Given the special susceptibility of proper
names to forgetting (e.g., Schachter, 2001), “Signorelli” could, under
those influences, have slipped from his grasp, and the names he pro-
duced in its stead might have arisen as arbitrary choices from his
internal collection of Renaissance painter names.
Freud’s account holds the advantage that it endeavors to
explain why this particular retrieval proved difficult at the moment
it did and why the specific names he generated instead might have
occurred to him.
Relation to Freud’s Accounts of Dreaming and Neuroses

Freud’s explanation of parapraxes, though similar in structure to his
account of dreams, has the persuasiveness more of his depiction of
neuroses.
His explanation of parapraxes parallels his account of dream-
ing in that, in both cases, an unconscious wish or intention alleg-
edly intrudes on active currents of thought to create a structure that
realizes the wish. In the case of a slip of the tongue, when, in some
instances, we fall into saying a word we didn’t intend, we actually
had an interest in saying it or in what it says. In the case of the for-
getting of a name, as when the name Signorelli eluded him, Freud
had an interfering intention – to forget a painful memory beginning
to be aroused by an ongoing conversation – and forgot the painter’s
name instead.
In the latter case, his forgetting of Signorelli, he maps out a
web of pathways over which his mind might have wandered toward
the painful memory such that he ran from ‘Signorelli’, alighting
instead on the two names he summoned in its place. He spots in
the two names elements of the forgotten name and of the trains of
thought relating to the interfering memory. We don’t know, and
he can’t know, whether his mind in fact traversed the pathways he

maps out on its way to forgetting the name. All we know is that
he was able to make the associations he describes when he subse-
quently observed the facts: the names he retrieved while struggling
to find ‘Signorelli’, the conversation he was having at the time with
his interlocutor, and the material he thought of but omitted from
the conversation.
His elaboration of the process by which dreams form bears
many similarities to that template. A dream, on his account, spurred
by residual thoughts from waking life, coalesces around a wish relat-
ing to those thoughts, which reaches expression – in a dream – though
in a roundabout way on account of competing imperatives. The
residual thoughts themselves arise from a meshwork of thoughts and
memories. The pathway to the dream is extrapolated from associa-
tions the dreamer makes, after the fact, to the dream’s constituents.
Analysis continues until it yields a wish that seems to fit with the
extrapolated “latent” content, and the different currents of thought
emerging from the analysis appear to come together and offer a fitting
account of the dream.
As is the case with Freud’s analysis of his memory failure, all
we know for certain from dream analyses are the associations the
dreamer made to the dream content and the associations that flowed
from those associations, and so on. We also know the dream, or the
dream as recounted by the dreamer, which, as Freud notes (1900, p.
517), presents a good place to start an analysis regardless of whether
the dreamer’s report is accurate.
However, there are differences in the type of phenomenon the
two accounts are explaining. In the case of the memory failure, an
incongruity has arisen in the waking activity that calls for an expla-
nation. Freud suggests that competing intentions may interfere with
that activity, producing the incongruity, and shows how the inter-
ference might happen. In the case of dreaming, our minds give us a
nightly experience different from what we entertain in waking life.
Nothing is disrupted. But we do know dreaming both to be cut off
from all external perception, the occasional incorporated stimulus

excepted, and to involve a shutting down of other processes that

might produce a different flow of mental contents from what we
experience while we are awake. Thus, it is a different form of men-
tal activity that needs to be explained, rather than a disruption of
a function.
The thesis that a wish has pressed for expression during our
sleep and finally achieved it after assuming a disguise brought about
by our fear or shame, is an explanation less of the phenomenon that
has occurred – the dream – than of the analysis the dreamer produces
afterward. It is the analysis that serves as evidence that a configura-
tion of thoughts along the lines disclosed by the analysis exists and
can be shaped into a narrative about the dream. Slips of the tongue
and the forgetting of names, by contrast, are the very thing explained
by reference to a lurking wish.
Jokes and the Appreciation of the Comic

Jokes, though not errors like slips of the tongue and accidental for-
getting, engage unconscious mentation as the latter do, on Freud’s
analysis, and, as he claims of dreams, they consist of a separable sur-
face expression and underlying meaning. In his book, Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he carefully teases apart what
makes jokes funny, why the features he identifies would have that
effect, and why laughter is our response to them.2
He argues that jokes’ form carries the humor in them and, in
doing so, allows listeners to economize on mental effort of different
kinds. The economization, itself unexpected, results from listeners’
preparation for greater effort, which, suddenly made unnecessary,
2 Although Freud’s volume eventually considers the broad class of comic effects,
extending well beyond jokes, his investigation centers around jokes. Jokes, especially
ones over 100 years old, though perhaps less intuitively engaging than the broader
class of the comic in general, make up a rich and well-defined set of phenomena that
admit of progressive step by step analysis; that analysis might prove more elusive in
the study of other species of the comic (pp. 14–15). I restrict my coverage here to the
treatment of jokes to expose Freud’s reasoning most clearly; I treat his analysis of
other instances of the comic in Sugarman (2010).

provides the propulsion for laughter. Tellers of jokes, meanwhile,

exhibit evidence of lapsing into unconscious processing for a moment
as they come forth with a (new) joke. Additionally, aspects of joke
construction appear to Freud to have direct analogues in the process
of formation he has ascribed to dreams.
Those claims emerge slowly and systematically over a treatise
second in length, among Freud’s works, to only The Interpretation of
Dreams. I reconstruct excerpts from his discourse to demonstrate the
method of investigation he brings to bear and the evidentiary founda-
tion on which his claims rest – both matters important in the com-
parison with his accounts of dreams and neuroses, which I undertake
at the end of the section.
Joke Techniques
He begins by examining the relative contribution of jokes’ form
and content to the creation of humor, rephrasing jokes into a direct
statement of their meaning, a process he calls “reduction.” Thus,
he translates the joke, “I drove with him tête-à-bête,” into “I drove
with X tête-à-tête, and X is a stupid ass.” Given that the latter, lit-
eral, statement of the joke’s meaning scarcely raises a laugh, we
know that the form of the joke is what makes it a joke. The mere
replacement of the t in the second tête by the b of bête allows the
two terms to be combined into one and avoids the entire assertion
of “il est un bête.” The joke therefore condenses its content on two
counts – the compression of the two assertions into one of the same
length as either of the original ones, and the merging of two words
into one, again with no gain in length. Freud calls the whole pro-
cess “condensation accompanied by slight modification” and ven-
tures that the slighter the modification the more satisfying the joke
(Freud, 1905b, p. 25).
After “reducing” a long series of jokes in the same fashion,
Freud expands the list of techniques of joke construction, which
include, among others, additional plays on words like multiple use
of the same material and double entendres. In the multiple use of the

same material, we take pleasure in hearing the same thing repeated

in slightly different contexts, as in the joke Traduttore-Traditore!
(“translator – traitor!”) (1905b, p. 34). A double entendre, which
makes use of the different meanings of the same single word or
phrase, appears in the courtier’s reply to Louis XV’s demand to have
a joke made of which the king was the subject (sujet): Le Roi n’est pas
sujet (“The king is not a subject”) (p. 37).
A large category of jokes moves beyond a play on words to
conceptual play, for instance diversion from the question asked,
often for purposes of invective, illustrated by the following Jewish
bath joke.3 One man who has met another at the bathhouse asks the
other, “Have you taken a bath?”, to which the other replies, “What?
Is there one missing?” (p. 51). Although the joke contains the double
meaning of the word taken, it also diverts the train of thought to a
different track by means of a displacement in the psychical empha-
sis from “Have you taken a bath?” to the implied question “Have
you taken a bath?”. In that diversion it accomplishes a deeper one,
from the implicit reproach of “When is the last time you took a
bath?”, contained in the original question, to the respondent’s repri-
mand of the questioner: “What an idiotic question” (p. 51, emphasis
in the original).
Some jokes are purely conceptual, relying on only subverted
logic and not on wording per se; Freud teases out, tests, and codifies
the techniques that appear to operate in those as well. He ends this
first, analytical, part of his study with an extensive, though admit-
tedly incomplete, delineation of the characteristics sufficient to pro-
duce jokes, believing himself to have sampled the terrain broadly
enough to have extracted the most common and most essential tech-
niques. Those, he maintains, all converge on a psychic economiza-
tion of some sort, the connection between economization and the
generation of pleasure now ripe for investigation, to which he turns
next (p. 88).
3 These jokes capitalize on Galician Jews’ aversion to baths (Freud, 1905b, p. 49).

The Purposes of Jokes and the Production of Pleasure

Preparatory to that endeavor, Freud divides jokes into two groups
depending on whether they carry any kind of invective. One group,
innocent jokes, does not do so and aims only to produce pleasure in
the hearer. The other group, tendentious jokes, carries a potentially
offensive message of a hostile, obscene, cynical, or skeptical nature.
We have already seen examples of the latter category in “I drove
with him tête-à-bête,” which carries an insult and hence hostility.
Traduttore-Traditore! comes closer to an innocent joke, a mere play
on words, granted Freud’s caveat that jokes thoroughly innocent of
any ulterior purpose may appear only in childhood (p. 132).
Tendentious jokes, he observes, tend to elicit more intense
pleasure than do innocent ones. It is as a result of their more pro-
nounced effect that inspection of them affords a point of entry into
the question of how pleasure comes to be generated in jokes of either
kind. Enlisting again his method of reduction, Freud shows how ten-
dentious jokes always cloak their potentially offending content in an
allusion of some kind. For example, “I drove with him tête-à-bête”
implies, rather than asserts, that the subject of the joke is a stupid
ass. We may infer that the pleasure of the joke comes in part from
the recognition of the illicit content under the protective cloak of the
ellipsis (pp. 117–118).
We would normally inhibit acknowledgment or enjoyment of
the content we are on the verge of appreciating, Freud elaborates, and
that inhibition requires a psychical effort on our part. It takes work to
inhibit the flow of mental activity in the direction in which it wants
to go. If an inhibition can be made unnecessary, then the energy we
would have expended on it is saved. Tendentious jokes, in only allud-
ing to the offensive content, make the inhibition unnecessary and
save us the energy we would have spent erecting or maintaining the
inhibition. More precisely, Freud suspects, the yield of pleasure cor-
responds to the psychical exertion thus saved (p. 118).
He extrapolates from that model to how we derive pleasure
from innocent jokes, in which the pleasure induced seems to derive

entirely from the form of the joke. In that case as well, he suggests,
our pleasure traces to a savings in psychical expenditure. He identi-
fies three ways in which joke techniques accomplish the savings.
First, when sound receives emphasis over meaning, hearers are
transported fluidly from one circle of ideas to another remote one not
normally connected with the first. Freud cites the example: After a
meal in which the host served a roulard (or roulade), a labor-intensive
preparation, a guest asked whether the delicacy had been made in the
house. The host replied, “Yes, indeed. A home-roulard.” The more
alien the two circles of ideas combined in that way, Freud speculates,
the greater the economy in psychological effort to link them – sound
having supplanted meaning as the connection – and the more intense
the pleasure.
Second, a variety of techniques incorporate the recognition of
something familiar where listeners might have expected something
new. A joke from Lichtenberg (cited in Freud, 1905b, p. 82) repeats
and then subverts an adage: “It is almost impossible to carry the
torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.”
The rediscovery of the familiar, Freud says, saves the effort we might
expend in processing something new and also can become a pleasure
in itself (p. 122).
A third group of techniques employs faulty thinking, absur-
dity, and other types of pleasure in nonsense. A tutor given to drink
replied, when exhorted to give it up to attract business, “I do tutoring
so I can drink. Am I to give up drinking so I can get tutoring?” (p. 52).
That and other sophistical jokes economize on psychical effort in
relaxing the rules of disciplined thought.
If, as per the preceding analysis, joking techniques spare us psy-
chical expenditure, and thereby give us pleasure, then we can see
how tendentious jokes confer greater pleasure than innocent ones do.
Given that tendentious jokes employ the same techniques as inno-
cent ones and add their own source of economization – we are spared
the effort of inhibition against the illicit content – they must yield
greater pleasure (p. 135).

All the foregoing techniques share another property also inte-

gral to the economization Freud believes they effect. They each
embody a characteristic of childhood mentation and thus a further
saving in psychological expenditure by shedding the burden imposed
by subsequent development. The linking of words through sound at
the expense of meaning, the first kind of economization just noted,
dots children’s early word learning and word play. The third kind,
including faulty reasoning, absurdity, and so forth, also reverts to a
mode of thought that dispenses with logical rigor. The middle group,
capitalizing on the rediscovery of the familiar, recalls the signature
pastime of childhood, thriving on repetition and deriving intense
pleasure from it (Freud, 1920, p. 17). Babies shake their rattles or
enjoy someone else’s funny faces over and over again. Children want
to hear the same story or repeat the same game many more times
than adult interest would ever sustain (Freud, 1905b, p. 122).
Why We Laugh
We come to the critical test of any theory of jokes: why we laugh
at them – why, that is, it is laughing that we do. Freud has told us
so far that the object of joking is enjoyment, and the source of the
enjoyment the savings of energy afforded by both the release from
inhibition and the mental work saved by the joke techniques. The
question remains of why jokes provoke laughter specifically. It is a
pleasurable response of a particular kind, an explosive discharge, by
contrast with the more measured release of, say, a sigh, which can
also indicate relief from tension and the accession to pleasure. Also
calling for explanation is the result that the laughter arises not in the
teller of the joke, but in the hearer.
The explanation of the latter effect provides leverage on the
explanation of the former, the occurrence of laughter as the result of a
(successful) joke. The explanation of who laughs, Freud extrapolates,
cannot be that only the hearer experiences a lifting of inhibition. Were
the tellers of jokes to experience no lifting of inhibition, they could
not come up with the joke; they must therefore have their inhibitions

lifted as well. The difference must arise instead in the possibilities for
discharge of the effort neither person needs any longer.
The production of the joke must itself attenuate the energy
available to the teller for discharge, Freud surmises. Hearers, on
the other hand, receive the joke ready-made. Provided they need no
extra effort to comprehend the joke, and the joke succeeds in begin-
ning to spur the relevant inhibition in them, then their inhibition
will become superfluous the moment it forms. It is caught in statu
nascendi, Freud says (p. 151), borrowing a term from G. Heymans
(1896), who used it somewhat differently in his theory of the comic.
The hearer then “laughs off” the extra “quota” of energy, according
to Freud, in much the way our arm flies into the air when we lift an
object we expected to be heavier than it is (p. 149).
The Participation of the Unconscious in

Jokes and Dreams, According to Freud
Freud carries his search for the mechanism of joking a step further.
A resemblance exists, he thinks, between joke techniques and the
“dream-work” he identifies in The Interpretation of Dreams, the
means by which he believes underlying dream thoughts are trans-
formed into a manifest dream (1905b, pp. 88–89, 159, 165). Principal
features of the dream-work include condensation, displacement, and
indirect representation, all three of which also appear in jokes. The
condensation of different lines of thought into one expression oper-
ates in the joke “I drove with him tête-à-bête,” for example. The
displacement of emphasis undergirds the bath joke “Have you taken
a bath?—Why, is one missing?”. Indirect representation appears in a
different bath joke, in which two men meet outside the bathhouse,
prompting one to sigh, “Another year gone by already?” (p. 78). Many
subsidiary analogies exist as well, for instance in multiple use of the
same material, representation by the opposite, the use of absurdity,
and so on (p. 165).
The closeness of the comparison suggests to Freud the pos-
sibility of a commonality of process in the dream-work and joke

production, granted the speculative nature of the connection (pp. 165,

177–178) and the existence of clear differences between the activi-
ties. With respect to the differences, the culmination of the process
in a perception (hallucination) belongs only to dreams, for example,
and the production of laughter only to jokes (p. 165).
Nonetheless, Freud imagines, other phases of dream formation
might extend to jokes, in particular the giving over of preconscious
thought to unconscious manipulation. In dreaming, according to his
theory, a tissue of thoughts that has built up during the day, con-
sisting of incompletely dealt with fragments – a “day’s residue” (p.
161) – continues in sleep to retain dreamers’ interest and threatens
to disturb their sleep. We might place Freud’s unease with his friend
Otto’s report on their mutual patient Irma (see Chapter 1 here) in
that category. The day residue becomes transformed into a dream and
made harmless to sleep (pp. 160–161).
To achieve that result, the day residue connects with an
unconscious wish, a condition easy to fill, because the day residue
has persisted for a reason – something is not settled. The wish aris-
ing from those beginnings forms the preliminary stage and later the
core of the dream. Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, specifically his
need, identified through his analysis of the dream, to be proved as
being in the right, triumphant over his colleagues, and not respon-
sible for Irma’s incomplete cure, again provides an example. The
action of an unconscious wish such as that on the rational material
of the thoughts that prompted the wish produces the dream, accord-
ing to him (1905b, p. 166).
In the light of the dipping of dreams into unconscious thought,
and the alignment of other features of dreaming and joking, Freud
extrapolates, the creation of a joke may also entail a momentary
giving over of preconscious thought to unconscious processing. He
cites as circumstantial evidence for the proposition that although we
speak of “making” a joke, we are aware that, when we produce one,
our behavior differs from what we do when we “make” a judgment
or create something. A joke, when we come up with one, seems to

arise in us involuntarily. It is not that we know ahead of time the

joke we are going to produce, and all we need to do is find the words
for it. Instead we have an indefinable feeling, Freud says, coupled
with an “absence” – the French term for the blank state that precedes
slipping into a hypnoid state – and a sudden release of intellectual
tension, and then all of a sudden the joke arrives, typically already
clothed in words (p. 167).
We have a choice with other intellectual maneuvers. We can
decide to make an allusion. For instance, we might want to share
a thought whose direct expression might produce unwanted reper-
cussions on account of which we decide to make the point more
delicately and indirectly, via an allusion. In that case the allusion is
a figure of speech, and not a joke. It remains under constant super-
vision by our ongoing thought, by contrast with spontaneous jokes
that make use of allusion. A joking allusion occurs to us without
our following any such preparatory stages in our thoughts. Addi-
tionally, we often find jokes not at our disposal when we want one,
yet at other times they appear unbidden, including at junctures
in our train of thought for which we cannot see their relevance
(pp. 167–168).
Relation of the Account of Jokes to Freud’s Accounts of

Dreams and Neuroses
Although Freud himself finds descriptive similarities between joking
and dreaming, from which he extrapolates to a commonality of pro-
cess, he neglects to take account of a critical difference between his
two investigations. He observes the descriptive commonalities more
or less directly in jokes, whereas he infers them in the case of dreams.
To establish the mechanisms of joke-work, Freud “reduces”
expressed jokes to a full statement of their meaning, for example “I
drove with him tête-à-bête” becomes “I drove with him tête-à-tête,
and he’s an idiot.” We have no trouble agreeing that that is the message
of the joke and no difficulty appreciating that the joke expresses the
meaning in a compressed, or to use Freud’s terminology condensed,

form. Likewise, we can see that the joke achieves the compression
by making use of combining two similar-sounding words.
To establish the mechanisms that operate in what Freud calls
the dream-work – the process he imagines transforms the meaning(s)
a dream expresses into a manifest dream – he interprets the dream.
Interpretation involves the dreamer’s considering each manifest ele-
ment in turn and, under the condition of full disclosure, reporting
any and every thought and memory consideration of the element
brings to mind. The dreamer then pursues each such thought in the
same way, and then the associations to that thought, and so on. Even-
tually, with persistence, dreamers come upon content that strikes
them as essential. In that way, Freud, when analyzing his dream of
Irma’s injection, followed up thoughts responding to the dream’s
plentiful elements until chains of association converged on the idea
that he was not responsible for the persistence of Irma’s illness.
To arrive at an account of the mechanisms that transform a
thought like that into the manifest dream, Freud compares the end
result – the dream – with the many intermediate steps that led, dur-
ing the analysis, from the dream elements to the thought or thoughts
to which he now thinks the dream alludes. Thus, for instance, at
one juncture in his dream of Irma, Freud takes her to the window to
look down her throat. When analyzing that element, he realized he
had never observed Irma in that pose, whereas he had one evening
come upon a friend of hers, whom he also suspected suffered hys-
teria, in that aspect. He thought highly of the friend, who, had she
replaced Irma, might have accepted his approach to Irma’s condition
more readily than Irma did. Thus, he concludes, based on the align-
ment of additional elements, he wished, in the dream, to substitute
the friend, who would have made a more compliant patient, for Irma
(Freud, 1900, pp. 109–110).
Thus does the single feature of Irma’s pose by a window con-
nect, via the analysis Freud conducts, with a whole web of ideas that
ultimately intersect other thoughts analysis of the dream produced.
On the assumption that the dream grew from residual thoughts from

Freud’s daytime experience, which ultimately provoked a wish to be

redeemed in Irma’s treatment, we might say that Irma’s stance by
the window condensed many trains of thought. Condensation, on
Freud’s account, is a central characteristic of dream-work and a tell-
tale sign of unconscious processing.
As we can see from the preceding extract, the extrapolation to
the mechanisms of supposed dream-work follows a far more tortuous
path than does the designation of the mechanisms that tie a joke’s
meaning to its form. Dreamers explore the contents of their minds,
for traces that connect with the express elements of the dream. A
sense of reasonably thorough excavation reached,4 dreamers, or
dreamers with their analysts, compose a picture of the major threads
of thought revealed by the dream.
What Freud has shown, in that exercise, is that dreamers
reflecting on the constituents of their dreams may arrive at a body of
thought that concerns significant and potentially deep-seated issues
of their emotional life. His theory of dreaming inverts the process and
supposes that the dream arises from the tissue of thoughts that has
emerged in the analysis. He offers no strong defense of the maneuver.
No such explanatory difficulty attends Freud’s account of
symptoms, parapraxes, or jokes. In the case of symptoms, the uncov-
ering of the associated material led to the banishment of the symp-
toms. Parapraxes, like slips of the tongue and the forgetting of names
and words, raise the question of why the errors occur when they do
and take the form they do. Factors like fatigue or inattention may
contribute, but not necessarily always, and when they do, they may
not operate alone. Other currents of thought could interfere.
The case of jokes differs. Freud does not stipulate an intrusion
of unconscious processing that disrupts ongoing thought. Rather, we
are going along, thinking and talking, and suddenly a joke comes to
mind. He begins his explanation of the process from the descriptive
4 “If one carries out an analysis attentively, one gets a feeling of whether or not one has
exhausted all the background thoughts that are to be expected” (Freud, 1900, p. 109).

analogy between the “techniques” of jokes – the plainly evident

properties of the joking envelope – and the mechanisms of dream-
work he extrapolates from the relation between the dream thoughts
identified by analysis and the manifest dream. He infers, given the
analogy and the association of dreams with unconscious processes,
that jokes, also, might involve a plunge into the unconscious.
But then he notes in addition circumstantial evidence that jok-
ing may indeed involve that plunge. We don’t “make” a joke in the
way we consciously and deliberately “make” a judgment or an objec-
tion. Our attention diverts for a moment, and then suddenly the joke
is there. He says we “drop” the train of thought we are embarked on
for that moment, and the joke materializes, without our knowing
exactly how it did so. No comparable observation attends the hypoth-
esis that dreams embody the unconscious sources, and mechanisms
of their transformation into a dream, he ascribes to them. The evi-
dence is only dreamers’ associations to the content of their dreams.
Getting Lost in a Story

Freud believed that the forces behind the experience of becoming
absorbed by fiction, reading in the case he considered, are not self-
evident and, like those behind dreaming as he understands it, include
the fulfillment of our most basic wishes. Without a psychical contri-
bution of that kind, we would find it difficult to explain why strings
of words on a page concerning individuals we do not know and who
do not even exist would keep us turning the pages, to find out what
happens to the people. To conceive that circumstance, he asks us, in
his “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908), to imagine reading
tracts we would nowadays call B-novels, light plots that engage our
fancy and keep us reading on. What makes that adhesion possible?
Some straightforward possibilities might come to mind. We can
relate to the characters, or, alternatively, they present a new world
that entices us. Perhaps the author sprinkles teasers throughout
the narrative about what lies ahead and deftly lobs one cliffhanger
after another. Such explanations fall short. That we can relate to

characters – empathize with, or find ourselves in, them, for example –

might explain why we would become interested in them, not why
we would stay up half the night clinging madly to the story. Clever
manipulation of the narrative still does not explain either why we
so readily abandon our own world and totally inhabit another or the
narcosis we feel in doing so.
Freud observes that even writers themselves, the instigators
of that narcosis, cannot say how they make the impression on us
they do. Accordingly, he begins his search for the source – first, of
the writer’s activity and then of its effect on the reader – with the
attempt to identify something we all do that resembles the writer’s
craft. He identifies imaginative activity as that endeavor and traces
its developmental origin to children’s play. Both children at play and
creative writers fashion a world according to their fancy. They take
that world seriously, investing it with great emotion, while at the
same time distinguishing it from reality. Some languages embody
the connection, for example English refers to children’s play, and to
a play as the creative writing designed for theatrical presentation;
children’s play is Spiel in German, which also refers to Lustspiel and
Trauerspiel, comedy and tragedy, respectively.
As people age, they exchange playing for daydreaming, in which
they continue to invent happenings shaped by their fancy and fueled
by their emotions, abandoning only the connection of their fanta-
sying to tangible objects. However, an important divergence occurs
between the two in that, whereas children happily expose their play
to onlookers, adults conceal their fantasies. Children’s play, Freud
explains, realizes their wish to be grown up, a wish they have no rea-
son to hide. Adults’ daydreams, meanwhile, fulfill unsatisfied erotic
and ambitious wishes, to which they would hesitate to admit.
A typical adult daydream, Freud illustrates, might consist of
the fantasy of a man on his way to inquire about a job. He might
imagine getting the job, impressing his employer, becoming indis-
pensable in the firm, being welcomed into the employer’s family,
marrying his daughter, and eventually running the business. Freud

sees in the series a reproduction of the protecting house, loving par-

ents, and first love objects of childhood, all projected onto an adult
vision of the future, using the objects of the present.
The same ingredients appear in the B novel. The hero manages
to survive and triumph despite adversity, his success sufficiently
guaranteed that we read along in security, and whose invincibil-
ity reveals the bald egoism of the story. Moreover, all the desirable
women in the story fall in love with him, thus realizing the erotic side
of the fantasy. Although many narratives depart from that model – of
the naïve daydream, as Freud calls it – he believes we could link even
major deviations from it to the template through intermediate cases.5
Writers’ narratives, Freud supposes, originate in the writers’
own wishful fantasies anchored in the same formula. However, those
narratives, unlike the daydreams of ordinary nonwriters, which
would evoke only disinterest or disgust, entice readers with carefully
designed disguises and purely formal aspects of composition that
remain the writer’s gift.
Thus captivated by what Freud describes as the incentive
bonus of the text, which he compares with sexual foreplay, we read-
ers proceed to reap our deepest pleasure from the release of preexist-
ing tensions in our minds. Those tensions consist of our basic erotic
and ambitious wishes, the ones our daydreams fulfill, now seeming
to find fulfillment, then reemergence, then fulfillment again … as we
are carried along by the writer’s art.
The process, then, is tantamount to daydreaming, indeed is
daydreaming, which explains why we continue onward, unaware of
anything else and unable to let go.
Freud’s Accounts of Reading and Dreaming

Becoming swept up in a story, though ordinary, is less straightfor-
ward than it would appear. Regardless of the quantity of factors in
5 Freud does, however, offer a somewhat different account of the pleasurable effect of
stories with distressing content (e.g., 1906).

the story, and in the story’s relation to the reader, we might point
to – like the relatability of the characters, the lure of the familiar,
the shock of the unfamiliar, and so on – something in our psychol-
ogy must answer to the specimen before us and power us through
it. Freud says such narratives arouse our most basic wishes – erotic
and ambitious ones, typically – and offer the prospect of their fulfill-
ment. We are, in our captivation with those tracts, daydreaming; day-
dreams seem to fulfill the same wishes and occur because we have
the wishes.
Ironically, night dreams do not lend themselves to the equiva-
lent explanation as easily. Many do not self-evidently fulfill wishes,
and Freud’s argument that they nonetheless do so relies on layers
of assumptions we cannot easily establish. We cannot identify any
behavior or experience that requires the extrapolations he sees fit to
make. There is irony in that result, because night dreams have tradi-
tionally struck the human imagination as fulfilling wishes; reading
has not done so, at least not in connection with a technical explana-
tion for why we read, and keep reading.6
The Experience of the Uncanny

When we become carried away by reading, we engage in the act of
reading, though the experience of being transported by what we read
happens to us. When we experience the uncanny, we have a still
more limited hand in bringing about what we undergo than we do the
trance brought on by reading. In that respect it resembles dreaming.
We don’t do anything to bring dreaming about, except go to sleep,
after which dreams happen or they do not. Unlike a dream, however,
the experience of the uncanny is a feeling, not a scene in which we
are participating. But it is difficult to place and to understand and
hence draws Freud’s interest.
Feelings in general are difficult to study, he observes. Normally
we experience them and can say little about what the feeling is. Yet

6 See, however, Richardson (2000).

when language provides a distinct term for a cluster of such experi-

ences, we may assume a discrete core of sensibility exists and that
most people recognize the sensibility when it manifests in them,
even if they cannot describe it. The sense of the uncanny, as Freud’s
original das Unheimliche is translated, is such a category. It verges
on the frightening and the incitement of dread and horror and yet
exists apart, having its own term in many languages. Freud’s project
is to learn what warrants the term.
He draws on two lines of evidence to do so, a linguistic history
of unheimlich and an open-ended search for commonalities across
people’s experience of the feeling. He will conclude, on the basis of
both, that the uncanny is a subcategory of the frightening that leads
back to something long known and yet obscure. The task of his pre-
sentation is to show how that paradoxical result arises, given the
usual affiliation of the familiar with the comforting, like home.
Linguistic History
Unheimlich derives from heimlich, which originally meant of the
home or family, of which it forms the opposite. Although we might
be tempted to conclude from that circumstance that unheimlich
refers to what is frightening on account of its lack of familiarity,
not everything that is novel and unfamiliar is frightening. Thus,
Freud reasons, the uncanny must include something in addition to
the unfamiliar. Tracing the history of the root term heimlich, Freud
shows the term shades into its opposite, unheimlich. One meaning
cited by one of his sources (Sanders, 1860) compares a certain fam-
ily with “a buried spring or dried up pond. One cannot walk over
it without always having the feeling that the water might come up
there again” (1919, p. 223). He cites from the Grimms’ dictionary:
“From the idea of ‘homelike’, ‘belonging to the house’, the further
idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers,
something concealed, secret” (Freud, 1919, p. 225). Unheimlich thus
emerges as a subcategory of heimlich and not merely as its opposite
(Freud, 1919, p. 226).

Analysis of Occurrences
Freud begins his exploration of the experience of the uncanny with
a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1815), which
arouses an uncanny feeling in many readers and formed the focus
of a previous psychological investigation of which Freud was aware
when he wrote his paper. The previous author, Ernst Jentsch,
ascribed the feeling to uncertainty about whether a given entity is a
human or an automaton. He believed the feeling to be evoked in the
tale by the life-size mechanical doll Olympia, with whom the pro-
tagonist, the student Nathaniel, believing the doll to be alive, falls in
love. However, Freud points out, the story, like many other works of
Hoffmann’s, evokes the uncanny throughout with additional imag-
ery unrelated to the matter of the boundary between the living and
nonliving. Thus, the blurring of that boundary does not adequately
explain the effect.
The Sandman Story

The story begins with Nathaniel’s childhood recollections of the tale
of the Sandman, an evil person who throws sand into the eyes of
children who refuse to go to bed, as a result of which the eyes jump
out bleeding and are carried away by the Sandman to feed his chil-
dren. After bedtime, Nathaniel would often hear the heavy steps of
an unidentified visitor of his beloved father’s whom he associated
with the Sandman.
One evening, Nathaniel, having resolved to keep watch to
determine the visitor’s identity, discovers the visitor to be the lawyer
Coppelius, whom he and his siblings always found repulsive and fear-
some. While the two men work at a flaming brazier, Nathaniel hears
Coppelius call out, “Give me eyes! Give me eyes!”, and screams,
thus revealing himself.7 Coppelius grabs him, threatening to drop hot

7 Strachey, the English translator, offers “Eyes here! Eyes here!” (Freud, 1919, p. 228),
which may also have the meaning “We’ve got eyes here!”. I thank Rüdiger Bittner for
a less ambiguous translation of “Augen her!”

coals into his eyes, but is stopped by Nathaniel’s father. Nathaniel

faints and succumbs to a lengthy illness.
Now in remission and a university student, Nathaniel believes
Coppelius has reemerged in the person of Giuseppe Coppola, a trav-
elling optician who sells weather glasses, from whom Nathaniel, at
first terrified of the man, buys a small spyglass. With it, he gazes
at the house opposite and sees the owner’s beautiful, but silent and
motionless, daughter Olympia. He falls violently in love with her,
to the neglect of his wise and sensible betrothed, Clara. Olympia,
though, is a mechanical doll her father Spalanzani has created; her
eyes were supplied by Coppola, the optician-Sandman-Coppelius.
Nathaniel, looking to meet Olympia, ventures to Spalanzani’s
house and finds Spalanzani and Coppola arguing over their invention,
her eyes lying bleeding on the floor. While Coppola carries the inert
figure away, Spalanzani throws the bleeding eyes at Nathaniel, advis-
ing him that Coppola had stolen them from Nathaniel. Nathaniel,
giving way to a new attack of madness, sets upon Spalanzani and
tries to strangle him.
Later, Nathaniel, having recovered, reconciles with Clara and
plans to marry her. But soon another sighting of Coppelius sends
Nathaniel into madness, now atop a tower from which he tries
unsuccessfully to push Clara and then succeeds in hurling himself.
Coppelius vanishes in the crowd below.
Freud’s Account of the Uncanny

Even if we find the beguiling but inert Olympia uncanny, Freud says,
a sense of the uncanny pervades the story and is aroused more strik-
ingly by other images. It arises especially, Freud says, in connection
with the Sandman/Coppelius/Coppola and hence with the idea of
being robbed of one’s eyes. Psychoanalytic experience corroborates
the special dread people associate with losing their eyes. The fear
of losing one’s eyes or going blind often emerges in dreams, fanta-
sies, and myths, as a substitute for the dread of castration, on Freud’s
analysis. The self-blinding of the mythical Oedipus, he maintains,

became Oedipus’s choice as a modified version of the punishment of

castration, the only punishment merited, by the law of equivalence,
for the crime he committed.
The Re-evocation of the Repressed. Freud rejects the more
rational-sounding possibility that the prospect of the loss of so pre-
cious an organ as the eye would elicit a corresponding horror. That
construal fails to account for the persistence of a substitution of the
eye for the male organ in dreams, myths, and fantasies and for the
particularly violent and obscure emotion the idea of losing one’s eyes
arouses. More strongly still, the so-called castration complex some
neurotic patients reveal in analysis and the importance the complex
appears to hold in their mental life persuade him of the singular psy-
chical prominence the idea of castration holds (p. 231).
He can point, further, to elements of the Sandman story that
seem to bear out his surmise about the connotation of the eyes. For
instance, anxiety about the eyes emerges in close connection with
Nathaniel’s father’s death, death of the father in general often linked
with dread of castration. Moreover, the Sandman always appears as a
disturber of love – he separates Nathaniel from his bride, he destroys
Olympia, the second object of Nathaniel’s love, and he drives Nathan-
iel to suicide just when he has won back his beloved and will soon be
permanently united with her (pp. 231–232 and n. 1, p. 232).
Without as yet venturing an account of why the evocation of
the castration complex might produce a feeling of the uncanny, Freud
wants for the present to ascribe the uncanny experience provoked by
The Sandman to the anxiety arising from the castration complex of
childhood. He wonders, next, whether other contributions of infan-
tile mental life might figure in occurrences of the uncanny as well.
The Re-evocation of Surmounted Beliefs. In that connection,
Jentsch’s seemingly intuitive ascription of the feeling of uncanniness
to intellectual uncertainty about whether an entity is real becomes
curious. Dolls, of which Olympia proves to be one, pervade child-
hood life. Children delight in treating their dolls as live beings and
relaxing the boundary between the living and the inanimate. But

those occupations, echoed in the Sandman story where they ignite a

sense of strangeness, if not downright uncanniness, excite no reserva-
tion among children, some of whom might, on the contrary, wish for
a doll’s coming to life and even believe it possible.
Thus, on the one hand, our susceptibility to uncanniness upon
encountering an apparently alive doll might draw on a childhood fac-
tor, and, on the other hand, that childhood antecedent might lie in an
infantile wish and pleasure, rather than an infantile fear. Therefore, we
cannot generalize that uncanniness in that instance draws on an earlier
fear, and, we need to explain how the capacity to experience uncanni-
ness, which is a form of fear, could arise from something pleasurable.
Freud attempts to resolve the apparent contradiction by plumb-
ing The Sandman and other texts of Hoffmann’s to identify and ana-
lyze additional sources of uncanniness. One such source is the idea
of a “double” (p. 234), which, in The Sandman, materializes in the
different incarnations of the evil antagonist: the Sandman, the lawyer
Coppelius, and the optician Coppola. In other works, including the
bewildering The Devil’s Elixir (Die Elixiere desTeufels), duplications,
divisions, and substitutions occur of both benign and malevolent
characters and things, all to great uncanny effect.
However, in a much earlier historical period, Freud remarks,
following the research of his colleague and disciple Otto Rank,
people believed the idea of the double, a copy of oneself, to be an
insurance against death. Accordingly, they believed the soul, as the
presumptive double of the body, guaranteed a continuation of life
after death, for example, and they regarded guardian spirits, shadows,
their own likeness in the mirror, and other such images as emblems
of good. Similarly, the ancient Egyptians made images of the dead in
lasting material, to preserve those they loved and admired. Later, the
benevolent conception of the double was supplanted by its opposite.
It became the harbinger of death, something alien to the ego, in other
words something uncanny.
In the idea of the double as a protection against death, or
destruction of oneself, Freud sees a natural concomitant of the phase

of unbounded self-love he attributed, by the time he wrote “The

‘uncanny’,” to both early human history (Freud, 1913) and the child-
hood of individuals (Freud, 1914). Later, in history, when that stage
was outgrown, the double became an object of dread.
A parallel succession may occur in individual development,
Freud proposes, creating the susceptibility to the experience of the
uncanny. Initially we do not distinguish ourselves sharply from other
things and people. It is a period of comfort and assurance, which,
though we may feel loathe to leave it, we gradually do supplant. In
the jolt we receive when suddenly we perceive a second us – a dou-
ble – we have, in experiencing the uncanny, projected outward, in a
vigorous act of defense, what is in fact familiar as something alien
and even frightening.8 The quality of uncanniness attaching to the
double, then, derives from its evocation of a much earlier period of
mental life, long since outgrown, in which it assumed a more agree-
able mien, now replaced by horror (p. 236).
Freud traces other forms of uncanniness, also exploited by
Hoffmann, to the same early ego-feeling, including the involun-
tary repetition of an action, the prompt fulfillment of wishes, and
other coincidences. He cites as examples of involuntary repetition
his unintended return, several times, to the red-light district in an
unfamiliar city when he was trying to reach a different location; also
people’s return to the same place when they are lost in the woods and
trying to get out. Or, we continue to encounter the same number in
different contexts in a short period of time, for instance a tag with
the number 62 in the cloakroom, then on the bakery queue, and then
on a returned letter we misaddressed. Anything reminiscent of our
inner “compulsion to repeat,” a tendency so primal we may heed
it in disregard of the pleasure principle – our root tendency to avoid
displeasure and, where possible, cultivate pleasure – can provoke a
feeling of uncanniness.

8 Freud indicates that he is drawing in this vision on his experience with pathological
mental processes (1919, p. 236).

An example of the prompt fulfillment of wishes arises in the

“Rat Man” case history (Freud, 1909b): the patient exclaimed, on his
return to a spa, he wished the old man occupying his former room
were struck dead so he could reclaim the room and resume relations
with the nurse who had the room next door; the old man had a stroke
soon after. The patient coined the term omnipotence of thoughts to
portray the uncanny feeling he experienced upon the prompt fulfill-
ment of his words. The idea bears the stamp of animistic thought and
hence of narcissism, the early developmental stage through which
everyone passes.
Freud now feels prepared to articulate the content of the feel-
ing of uncanniness as it arises in response to occurrences, like the
preceding ones, that appear to align with archaic beliefs. The occur-
rence makes us feel, for a moment, as though it confirms one of those
beliefs: “So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere
wish!”, while in the same moment we say it isn’t possible (1919, p.
248, Freud’s emphasis). The powerful, but obscure feeling – uncan-
niness – we experience at such moments is the combination of that
sense of confirmation combined with our continued disavowal of it.
The idea of the double, the prompt fulfillment of wishes, the near-
diabolical repetition of an event that ought to occur haphazardly – all
those triggers, when they result in the experience of the uncanny,
follow suit.
The uncanniness that can attach to the idea of loss of the eyes,
falls in a separate and smaller category of uncanny experiences,
though still one in which an earlier belief or, as the case may be,
feeling or fantasy, has become superseded. In instances of that kind,
a repressed complex, like that of castration fear, is momentarily
evoked and simultaneously energetically denied.
Either type of effect can arise in a fictional, as well as a real,
context, though uncanny effects arising, as in the Rat Man’s case,
from the apparent confirmation of apparently surmounted beliefs –
like the idea that our wish can cause a distant effect – must observe
constraints when occurring in fiction. Those effects can arise in a

fictional context as long as the narrative gives the impression that

the characters are moving in reality or leaves the question of whether
they are doing so ambiguous. The uncanny arising from an evocation
of repressed material can occur against either a fictive or a real frame
of reference; important for that experience is the arousing of the old
thoughts and associations, not an apparent confirmation of them.
The Uncanny, Dreams, and Neuroses

The experience of the uncanny introduces, in addition to the elu-
siveness of any feeling to precise description, a special obscurity and
tenor. Freud, first through an etymological analysis, generates the
proposal that the uncanny arises from a resurgence of what is long
familiar and yet buried, such that the resurgence presents something
alien and familiar at the same time. The analysis of instances, begin-
ning with The Sandman, leads first to the uncanny effect created by
the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes. Ancient literature and mythol-
ogy suggest a connection between the loss of the eyes and castration,
which Freud infers emerged from an unconscious tendency to con-
nect the two that could, in turn, make the idea of being robbed of
one’s eyes uncanny to the contemporary individual. Other triggers
of uncanny feeling trace, on Freud’s analysis, to primitive beliefs,
especially animism, which, in turn, aligns with primary narcissism,
a phase of development we have long since surmounted.
Freud makes meticulous use of evidence to establish the two
pathways he believes we follow to the experience of the uncanny.
Even in the more speculative case, which he believes engages
repressed complexes such as that connecting the loss of the eyes to
castration, the two themes coincide in a number of settings. Freud
can further point to the castration anxiety revealed by the psycho-
analysis of neurotic patients and themes of the same embedded in art
and literature.
The content analysis he conducts of the second and more com-
mon route to uncanny feeling, namely the apparent confirmation of
surmounted narcissistic-animistic ideation, makes credible that the

beliefs at stake conform to that category of thought. The details aside,

Freud makes a strong case that the pathway to the experience of the
uncanny is not straightforward. The obscurity of the feeling requires
an explanation; something like a revival of an old idea our current
mind finds alien engages that task. A simpler account would encoun-
ter difficulty. Suppose, for instance, we explained the uncanny feel-
ing arising from the repeated encounter with the same thing or the
prompt fulfillment of our wishes through either the fear that some-
one was watching us or a mysterious force at work. The questions
would then arise of why those prospects would seem uncanny and
what the nature of the feeling was that we were experiencing. Freud
answers both.
His theory of dreaming lacks the force of that account. Instead
of pointing to observations left unexplained by simpler hypotheses
and persistently surveying converging evidence for the narrative he
is building, his dreams argument assumes and then fills out a story.
An experience of the uncanny cannot arise, he concludes on the
basis of his inquiry, unless a developmental interaction of the sort he
describes arises. He gives arguments of the same form in his dream
treatise – for example, that unless a day residue engages an uncon-
scious wish, it cannot produce a dream. But the argument is theoreti-
cal. It does not point to events that are left without explanation if we
do not assume an account of the sort he is proposing.
Freud on Ordinary (Waking) Mental

Life and Dreaming
Freud’s attempts to explain four disparate happenings in our ordi-
nary mental life – mental glitches like slips of the tongue, joking and
appreciating humor, becoming lost in a book, and experiencing the
uncanny – align with his accounts of neuroses in presenting more
compelling arguments than does his account of dreams. In each, he
sets out a puzzle – something unexplained, or more than one such
thing – and goes about methodically solving it. The account of dream-
ing, though methodical as well, rests on the uneasy supposition that

the lines of thought that emerge from our reflection on our dreams –
their analysis – have a direct relation to the process by which the
dreams materialized.
Some of the other accounts of Freud’s we have considered,
in this and the previous chapter, engage retrospective reflection –
analysis – also, to determine the nature of the observed occurrence.
However, in those cases, something remains unaccounted for in the
absence of the contributions from the analysis, or from other consid-
erations Freud brings to bear. In the case of the dream theory, it is
unclear that anything about the dream remains unexplained without
the contribution of the analysis.

7 Speculative Works
We have compared The Interpretation of Dreams with Freud’s

investigations of other specific behaviors, like neurotic symptoms,
parapraxes, and our susceptibility to humor and the uncanny – and
found the latter undertakings more robust than the dreams treatise.
However, Freud also wrote some avowedly speculative pieces whose
narratives might seem more susceptible to leaps of argument than
the aforementioned expositions, aside from the dreams book, have
turned out to be. They thus allow us a final opportunity to assess the
singularity of the flaw in the dreams book. In this chapter, I examine
two of Freud’s most speculative pieces, both completed long after
The Interpretation of Dreams, to conduct that appraisal.
The first piece, the fourth chapter of Totem and Taboo (1913)
titled “The Return of Totemism in Childhood,” attempts to anchor
the modern human psyche in primal events. The second, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), adds new ingredients to Freud’s initial the-
oretical vision, among them the idea that our striving toward a payoff
of some kind – embodied by the pleasure principle – can be overrid-
den by a compulsion to repeat; that addition, in turn, segues to the
introduction of overarching trends Freud will call the life and death
instincts. The last chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, recon-
structed here in Chapter 3, which introduces the initial theoretical
vision, is a speculative effort on a par with Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple and will be revisited in conjunction with that text.
“The Return of Totemism in Childhood” (1913)

Freud, in this essay, portrays a primeval drama he envisions seeded
the human psyche, on the one hand, and religion, on the other. He
extrapolates from Darwin’s speculations about early higher primates
146

Speculative Works 147
that the first humans wandered in small hordes ruled by a power-

ful male whose maltreated and rebellious sons eventually killed
him. But because the sons loved, as well as hated, their father, they
felt remorse for the deed, which, though it satisfied their hostile
impulses, left their affectionate impulses unfulfilled. The result was
both a guilt for the deed that carried down through subsequent gen-
erations and the establishment of safeguards to prevent the deed’s
recurrence. Both the modern family and many religions replay the
drama and carry the original guilt.
Though Freud does not intend to establish conviction in the
empirical details of that story, we can ask to what extent he offers
compelling grounds for the piece of mentality he claims to exist. It is
such grounds his account of dreaming lacks.
Intimations of the story exist, Freud believes – in totemism,
which is thought to have formed a transition from primitive,
pre-religious existence to the era of heroes and gods, and of which
remnants persist to the present. Totemism accords special powers
to particular species of animals, from which clan members believe
they are descended, whose name they bear, and around which many
practices and rituals center. Of the practices, two especially interest
Freud, each having largely escaped the attention of the anthropolo-
gists who wrote before him: the prohibitions, respectively, against
killing the totem animal and against either engaging in sexual inter-
course or marrying within the clan. Their source has proved obscure
to those who have considered them (e.g., Frazer, 1910, 4, pp. 97f, cited
in Freud, 1913, p. 123).
It is to resolve that puzzle that Freud enlists Darwin’s “his-
torical” (Freud, 1913, p. 125) hypothesis that original hominids may
have lived in small communities, or hordes, within which the oldest
and strongest male’s jealous protection of his access to the females
would have impeded sexual promiscuity by the other males. When
the young males grew up, a contest took place for mastery, with the
strongest driving out or killing the others and establishing himself as
head. The younger males, expelled and wandering about and when

finally able to find a partner, would have lived far from the brood and
thus would not have interbred in their original family (Darwin, 1871,
2, pp. 362f, citing Savage, 1845–7, v, p. 423) (Freud, 1913, p. 126, cit-
ing Atkinson, 1903).
The Development of Individuals:

Contributions from Psychoanalysis
Freud enlists psychoanalytic observation to identify psychological
constituents that might support and explain the historical picture.
He begins from a resemblance he observes between the relations of
children and primitive humans toward animals. Children consider
animals their equals; they may feel more akin to them than they do
to adults, given, among other commonalities, their lack of inhibition
in avowing their bodily needs (Freud, 1913, p. 126).
But sometimes the relationship, in the case of children, takes a
diametrically opposite turn, when they form animal phobias, usually
against particular species, including species in which the children
have enjoyed a lively interest until then. The affliction impresses
Freud as possibly the earliest form of psychoneurotic illness. Many
cases have gone unanalyzed, because of the difficulty of carrying out
analysis with children so young, he supposes. Although he believes
the phobias may turn out to harbor a variety of meanings, a few
cases directed toward larger animals have yielded to analysis, and
those, when arising specifically in boys, have exhibited a consistent
theme (p. 127).
The fear they feel relates, on analysis, to their father and has
become displaced onto the animal. They fear specifically retribu-
tion for masturbation, a finding reported by several practitioners. M.
Wulff of Odessa, for instance, describes a 9-year-old boy promising to
be good – meaning “not playing on the fiddle” – so dogs he saw would
not bite him (“Dear doggie, don’t bite me! I’ll be good!” ) (Wulff, 1912,
p. 15); Wulff, like Freud, believed phobias relating to smaller animals
had a different meaning (ibid., p. 16) (Freud, 1913, 127–128). Freud’s

own patient,1 a 5-year-old boy he calls “Little Hans” who had a fear of
horses, had similar underlying fears and felt himself in competition
with his father for his mother’s affections. He also regarded horses
with admiration and interest, as he did his father and his father’s
large organ, which the boy believed portended a threat to his own.
As his anxiety began to lessen, he identified with the dreaded object
of his fear – horses – as have other children, for example, the toddler
Árpád observed by Ferenczi (1913), who fancied himself a chicken on
the way to becoming a cock like his father (Freud, 1913, pp. 128–130;
1909b, p. 52).
The cases align with totemism in both the ambivalent attitude
toward the totem – fear of and admiration for it – and the identifica-
tion with it, those two traits the essence of totemism according to
the authorities (e.g., Frazer, 1910, 4, p. 5; cited in Freud, 1913, p. 131).
Totemic clans display ambivalence toward their totem in their wor-
ship of it, on the one hand, and slaughtering of it for their celebratory
feast, on the other (Freud, 1913, pp. 105, 132). With respect to iden-
tification, they take on the name of the totem, dress to resemble it,
and believe themselves descended from it (Freud, 1913, pp. 104–105).
Both the child phobias and totemism give evidence of an association
of the totem animal with the father: The psychoanalysis of phobic
children (boys) makes the connection explicit; totemic clans declare
the totem a common ancestor and primal father (Freud, 1913, p. 131).
If, then, the totem is the father, then the two taboo prohibitions
at the core of totemism – not to kill the totem and not to have sexual
relations within the same clan, because all females were considered
to belong to the father – coincide with the two crimes ascribed to
Oedipus in the myth: he killed his father and married his mother.
They have distant echoes in the early wishes of children, exposed
by psychoanalysis, to do away with their father and possess their

1 Freud treated Little Hans only indirectly, through conversations with the boy’s father
(Freud, 1909b).

mother. The connection to the Oedipal circumstances, Freud thinks,

permits an account of the origins of totemism and, insofar as totem-
ism represents the first religion, then of religion in general (p. 132).
The Totem Meal

The account receives further support from a tracing and analysis of
the totem meal, for which Freud draws on the work of the archaeolo-
gist William Robertson Smith (1894). The periodic killing and eating
of the totem formed an essential element of totemic religion. The
totem, which could not be slaughtered or eaten at other times, was
ritualistically and brutally killed and then devoured, sometimes raw,
by the entire community; the act was wholly forbidden to the indi-
vidual. Members not only rejoiced in the act, they became sanctified
by it; they had taken into themselves the sacred life of the totem. But
the same community also mourned the lost totem. Why the ambiva-
lent attitude?
The identification of the totem with the father provides the
key, Freud thinks. The characteristics of the relationship with the
totem mirror that with the father, all the way into modern times in
the life of the individual: the killing of the animal – or, in the case
of modern children, animus toward the father – is at once forbidden,
rejoiced in when accomplished, and a source of grief.
Freud supposes the totem meal mimics an earlier histori-
cal event. Specifically, at some juncture the brothers who had been
driven from the horde came together and killed and devoured their
father, thereby ending the patriarchal horde. United, they had the
courage and means to do what they could not have accomplished
individually. Meanwhile, though they feared the primal father,
they also envied him for his strength and power; by eating him
they achieved a longed-for identification, acquiring a portion of his
strength. The totem meal, which Freud and others imagine might
represent humankind’s first festival, repeated and commemorated
the ancient criminal deed, planting the seed of the bulwarks of later
social life: social organization, moral restrictions, and religion. Freud

notes a convergence of his admittedly “monstrous” (p. 142n) hypoth-

esis with the conclusions of J. J. Atkinson (1903), who extrapolated
independently of Freud from Darwin’s story.
The Origin of Guilt and the Laws against Murder and Incest
The tale achieves some credibility, Freud thinks, from the father-
complexes of modern children and neurotic patients. The fierce mob
of brothers hated their father, who forcefully obstructed their sexual
desires and lust for power, and, at the same time, they loved and
admired him, as per the modern Oedipal situation. Freud, based on
the sequelae often observed in the modern psyche, extrapolates to the
developments that might have followed the primal drama.
When the band of brothers murdered their father, satisfying
their hatred of him, their affection for him, until then eclipsed by
their hostility, had room to assert itself. It did so, Freud imagines, in
the form of remorse: The affectionate impulses could not find satis-
faction in the absence of their object and could only provoke pain –
which we know as remorse.
The remorse, in turn, coincided with a sense of guilt for the
deed, felt by the whole group. The guilt provided a stronger incen-
tive than did the dreaded father’s actual presence to prevent the deed
in the future; Freud calls the process “deferred obedience” (p. 143).
The brothers revoked the original deed by prohibiting the killing of
the totem, the substitute for their father, and renounced the fruits
of the murder, namely the free access to the now-liberated women,
which would have produced competition among the brothers – both
restrictions results the living father would have imposed. They thus
created the two taboos of totemism, the prohibitions against murder
and incest, which, because they arose out of filial guilt, coincide with
the repressed wishes of the Oedipal complex (p. 143).
Those two taboos, which form the start of human morality,
are not equivalent psychologically. The law against murder – or for
protecting the totem animal – emerged from emotional motives.
The father had actually been eliminated, and the deed could not be

undone. The rule against incest, by contrast, has a practical basis as

well. Sexual desires tend to divide, rather than unite, men. Because
each brother would have wanted all the women for himself, and none
had the towering strength of the father, they might, absent a prohibi-
tion, have fought among themselves over the women in a war of all
against all, leading to the collapse of their union. By imposing the
restriction against incest, they preserved their organization, though
at the expense of the prize they all had sought in eliminating the
father (p. 144).
In the first of the two taboos, against the murder of the totem,
Freud sees the first attempt at a religion. The treatment of the totem
expresses remorse and could be seen as allaying a sense of guilt. The
totem animal is mourned after the slaughter and is honored and
worshipped as well as given succor during its lifetime. The totemic
system thus expresses a covenant with the father, now idealized, in
which he promises everything a child might expect from a father –
protection, care, and indulgence – while the worshippers, for their
part, act to respect his life, by not repeating the deed that destroyed
their real father. The system may embody in addition an attempt at
self-justification along the lines: If our father had treated us as the
totem does, we would never have felt inclined to kill him. The psy-
chological effect of those consequences was to smooth things over
and make it possible for succeeding generations to forget the event to
which the practices owed their origin (pp. 144–145).
Totemic religion, therefore, arose from a filial sense of guilt, in
an effort to mollify the feeling and placate the father by delayed obe-
dience to him. All later religions attempt to solve the same problem.
They vary according to the stage of civilization during which they
emerged and according to the methods they employ. But they all aim
at the same end and embody reactions to the same cataclysmic event
with which civilization started and which, because it occurred, has
kept humankind restive. Totemism also expresses the ambivalence
that continues in all later religions, the ambivalence of the father com-
plex; the totemic religion itself memorializes the triumph over the

father in the totem meal, on the one hand, and expresses remorse over
his slaughter along with efforts at atonement, on the other (p. 145).2
Psychological versus Material Reality

Although Freud has so far imagined the primal killing as an actual
occurrence, he now considers that expressions of guilt may arise in
neurotic people who turn out not to have committed any base deeds;
they only harbored impulses and emotions consistent with one. Their
sense of guilt emerges from psychical realities, not factual ones (p. 159).
The same, Freud ventures, might have been true of primal
humans. That stage of human evolution, he extrapolates from con-
temporary primitive cultures in the third essay of Totem and Taboo,
saw an overvaluation of psychical acts in the form of widespread
magical practices. For example, beating an enemy’s effigy or destroy-
ing an article of his clothing could bring him down at a distance;
a rain dance could produce rain. Consequently, Freud supposes, the
mere hostile impulse against the father or the wishful fantasy of kill-
ing and devouring him might have sufficed to create the remorse that
produced totemism and taboos.
In that event, our cultural legacy would not need to have started
in a terrible crime, and the remorse that brought about the ensuing
fraternal organization and the laws governing it might have arisen
in a less violent and less wrenching fashion. As long as the primal
offspring can be assumed to have felt pressure from their father, then
hostile feelings could have arisen, producing the ambivalent relation
that lies at the bottom of taboo and of totemic restrictions and sacri-
fices (pp. 159–160).
Nonetheless, it is not entirely true, Freud says, that obsessive
neurotics defend themselves against only a psychical reality, pun-
ishing themselves for impulses they only felt. They did in fact act
on their evil impulses as far as childhood impotence would allow.
2 Freud clarifies in a footnote added later (p. 157n) that it would be more correct to
speak of a “parental,” rather than a “father,” complex.

In their child’s mind’s eye, their impulses and resulting actions had
overwhelming force, as the Rat Man case history (1909) demon-
strates: the little boy’s outburst at his father haunted the boy, and
later grown man, as a devastating assault against his loved one. On
the strength of that prototype, we may need to return to the idea that
the primal horde did commit the evil deed, which the evidence – in
the form of totemic ritual, taboos, and subsequent recurrences – sug-
gests they did (p. 161).
At the same time, the analogy between primitive people and
neurotics has limits. Although we of the modern era draw a sharp
contrast between what is thought and what is done, it is not clear
primitive humans did so. Moreover, whereas neurotics are above all
inhibited in their action, primitive people were uninhibited. We may
imagine, then, that thought passed directly into action in primitive
times; the deed occurred instead of thought, leading, after all, to the
conclusion that everything began with the deed (p. 161).
The Primal Horde Narrative and Freud on Dreams

In this avowedly speculative essay, Freud anchors human social life,
including religion and morality, in a primeval drama pervaded by pro-
found ambivalence: furious hatred toward a figure also admired and
yearned for. The tale, extrapolating events dating to the beginning of
the human race, cannot, and does not aim to, establish conviction
regarding those events. It discloses a piece of human mentality, for
which it progressively builds a case.
Freud’s argument begins from observations of totemism, the
practices thought to anticipate later world religious systems and still
practiced in parts of the world. Totemism, on Freud’s analysis, exhib-
its two restrictions that call for explanation, the prohibitions, respec-
tively, against killing the totem animal and against sexual relations
within the clan.
Regarding the first, and extrapolating from other features of clan
members’ relation with the totem, Freud imagines it to have served
as a father surrogate, the type of figure that in later eras became a god.

The juxtaposition of that veneration with ritualized murder, the lat-

ter seen in the totem meal, lends plausibility to the existence of an
ambivalent stance toward the figure embodied by totem. The prohi-
bition against killing the totem, other than at the ceremony, attests
further to an inclination to eradicate it or the individual it stands
for, given that prohibitions would exist only against actions toward
which individuals otherwise inclined.
The second prohibition, against sexual relations within the clan,
bolsters that picture. Freud, extending a surmise of Darwin’s, here
inserts the idea that the first hominids wandered in primal hordes
headed by a terrible father. The father kept the females to himself and
repulsed any competitive male in the group. The males of a given gen-
eration, Freud speculates, rose up and slaughtered the father. That act
would have led, on account of lingering love for the father, to remorse
and guilt for the deed and, in response to those, perpetuation of exog-
amy and the institution of a prohibition against killing the head. Exog-
amy ensured that males of the same group would not aggress against
one another; the prohibition against killing the head prevented them
from repeating the earlier dreadful deed later regretted.
Freud finds converging evidence for the foregoing narrative in
the observation of what he sees as partly parallel behavior in the neu-
roses of children with animal phobias. Those children – boys in the
cases he discusses – harbor profoundly ambivalent feelings toward
their fathers: love and longing combined with fear and hostility; out-
wardly they show the same configuration of feelings for the animal
around which their illness forms. On the strength of the parallels
between the imagery of those cases and of totemism, and the sub-
text of ambivalence that emerges from the children’s analytic treat-
ment, Freud affirms his ascription of ambivalence to the imagery of
totemism.3

3 We might add to the converging evidence the perhaps more compelling case Freud
makes, in the second of the essays in his collection, for the presence of ambivalence
in taboo practices, which are arguably related to totemism even if not directly a part
of it: “Taboo and emotional ambivalence,” Totem and Taboo (1913).

He thus builds the narrative he does from empirical obser-

vation – distinguishing characteristics of totemism heretofore
minimally remarked – for which he draws in several streams of con-
verging evidence, as well as extrapolations from known fact. There
is no disputing that the totemic prohibitions against murdering the
totem and mating within the clan demand an explanation given an
again-compelling argument that neither restriction would occur
naturally. Freud makes a similarly convincing case that the totem
evokes a father-figure, that totemic practices incorporate both rev-
erence toward and destruction of the figure, and that parallels may
be drawn between those circumstances and the behavior of children
with animal phobias. The insight he adds from the analysis of such
cases regarding the import of the imagery appears well documented
as far as a handful of cases will allow.
The Interpretation of Dreams not only shows no signs of offer-
ing itself as speculation, aside from the account in the final chapter of
the evolution of the wish; it lacks the cogency of the expressly specu-
lative argument we have just reviewed. There is the incontestable
fact that dreams occur. And, as can be done with any other content
subjected to analysis, their elements can be used to start chains of
association in which the people whose minds produced the content
retrieve thoughts and impressions evoked by it. Freud assumes that
those waking associations provide, in reverse, the pathway through
which the dreams formed. He does not query the assumption until
his final chapter, where he considers only peripheral challenges. He
instead presents examples whose analysis would support the hypoth-
esis that dreams fulfill wishes and contain a hidden meaning, if we
could license the extrapolation he makes from dream analysis to
dream origin, which we have so far proved unable to do.
beyond the pleasure principle (1920)

This text, not only Freud’s most wildly speculative piece, poses a
direct challenge to the most basic building block of his theory of
dreams and the general psychology it spawned. If any writing of his

were going to stand on tenuous ground, it would be that. We will

find, however, that it, too, contains a cogency absent from The Inter-
pretation of Dreams.
The Compulsion to Repeat

In its challenge to Freud’s earlier general theory, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle questions the ubiquity of the eponymous principle: the idea
that every mental process we undergo aims to divert us from pain or
point us toward pleasure (Freud, 1900, 1911). Every dream, Freud had
theorized before, fulfills a wish; it realizes a circumstance that either
pleases or relieves us. The evening before he dreamt of Irma’s injec-
tion (Chapter 1 here), he had perceived in his colleague’s news that
Irma remained ill an imputation of his responsibility for her condi-
tion; the dream, on his analysis, exonerated him by placing the blame
elsewhere.
Although many things we do and think might seem to con-
travene the program of the pleasure principle, like self-undermining
actions, self-flagellating thinking, or crushing nightmares, Freud is
able to show how in nearly all cases we are fulfilling a purpose. Even
if the purpose is to suffer, we are suffering because we want to do
so, granted we may also wish not to suffer. Even nightmares, over
which we have no conscious control, meet purposes, according to
him, like punishing ourselves when we think we deserve it, alerting
us to some psychic danger, for instance the imminent fulfillment of
a wish whose fulfillment will undermine other imperatives we have
(1920, Chapters 1–3).
But Freud could find no positive purpose in people’s compul-
sive repetition of earlier experiences, in particular in the dreams of
patients suffering traumatic neurosis, or post-traumatic stress disor-
der as we now know the condition. Soldiers returning from the front
proved vulnerable to a particularly vicious form of the disease, for
example in their recurrent dreams returning them to a catastrophic
shelling in the trenches. Contrary to the idea that dreams serve the
function of wish-fulfillment, the dreams of traumatic neurosis bring

on an experience of no redeeming value; no amount of repetition less-

ens the fright sufferers experience.
Some repetitions of distressing experiences, for instance reen-
actments of unpleasant events like visits to the doctor’s office that
sometimes appear in children’s play, do have a positive payoff; chil-
dren, in their play, gain some control over a fearsome and sometimes
painful experience. Freud could find no such benefit in patients’ trau-
matic dreams. Even if we were to ascribe to them an attempt to gain
retroactive control over a shocking and devastating circumstance,
the effort is futile. Patients attain no relief and sink ever more deeply
and irretrievably into a state of terror and exhaustion.
Granting that exception and others in which the repetition of
an experience exceeds any payoff the repeater might gain from the
recurrence, Freud discerns a compulsion that goes beyond the attain-
ment of pleasure: a compulsion to repeat.
But even more salutary repetitions, he reflects in retrospect,
contain an element of compulsion, an automatism unrelated to the
outcome of the act in progress, that goes beyond the attainment of
pleasure or other benefit. Such repetitions would include, for instance,
those evident in people’s unwitting transference of the frustrations
and suffering of their early relationships onto their therapeutic or
other contemporary relationships. The positive side of such repeti-
tions is that they may become an avenue for self-punishment, where
the impulse toward it exists, and, in the specific case of transference
onto the therapeutic relationship, the repetition can be exploited
toward the diagnosis and alleviation of patients’ ailment. But the rep-
etition contains something unwitting and involuntary beyond those
advantages, unlike children’s play, which appears to be carried out
for the express purpose of pleasure.
In the light of the occurrence of a marked and unambiguous
compulsion to repeat in the wake of severe trauma, Freud tries to
imagine what trauma could be, such that it elicits that response. He
pictures it as a total breach of the organism’s defensive capabilities, a
flood of stimuli so powerful that all the organism can do is grasp for

control. It cannot try to reduce pain or generate pleasure, because it

is overwhelmed. The dreams of traumatic neurosis exemplify the cir-
cumstance: a dream cannot take up the fulfillment of wishes unless
the mind can stop the flow of excitations flooding out processes such
as wishing and the attempt at its fulfillment. Thus, Freud posits, the
attempted mastery, or binding as he calls it, of stimuli – as realized
in the repetition – has supplanted the function of dreams to fulfill
wishes or satisfy the pleasure principle in any other way.
The Death Instinct

In the compulsion to repeat, therefore, he perceives a driving force
more elemental and instinctual than the pleasure principle it can
override (p. 23). Indeed, those impulsions Freud calls instinctual, like
hunger, repeat something. The experience of hunger presses us, each
time we feel it, to (re)gain satiety. Therefore, Freud continues, launch-
ing the decidedly speculative discussion that occupies the rest of his
volume, if instincts, which form the basic building blocks of mental
life, inherently drive toward repetition, then perhaps all of organic
life does so. An urge may exist in organic life to restore an earlier
state of things. The earliest such state is inorganicity, on account
of which Freud next imagines that the arc of life pushes us back to
that original state, given that everything that lives eventually dies.
From that perspective, life first emerged on earth as a disturbance of
an earlier state, the inorganic one, to which the living matter strives
to return.
Hence, Freud attributes all living things with a death instinct,
a drift toward quiescence and ultimately extinction, in addition to a
complementary life instinct, which stirs things up and aims to keep
them going; the latter contributes, among other processes, the repro-
ductive instinct. That opposition dominates Freud’s later theoretical
works. Important to our purpose here, which is to examine Beyond
the Pleasure Principle as a canonically speculative work of Freud’s
and determine its status compared with his theory of dreams, is his
situating of the pleasure principle within the new framework.

Initially, Freud characterized the pleasure principle as a striving

to reduce stimulation, heightened stimulation being associated in the
most rudimentary scenario – that of the reflex – with pain, or agita-
tion. A reflex, our simplest unit of action, discharges stimuli imping-
ing on the body. Correspondingly, the most basic operation of the
nervous system is to discharge stimuli, that is, return to quiescence.
The pleasure principle, according to Freud’s early psychoanalytic
writing, expressed that drift psychologically. Thus, at a first approxi-
mation, the pleasure principle is an expression of the death instinct.
Pleasure Reimagined
However, Freud (1924) observed that we sometimes reap pleasure
from an increase, rather than a decrease, in stimulation, as happens,
for instance, in sexual foreplay. Thus, the idea of pleasure must allow
room for the occasional increase in stimulation. Consequently, the
striving for it – our conformity to the pleasure principle – diverges
from the death instinct, which embodies only the drift toward quies-
cence, or, as Freud now labels the drift, the Nirvana principle (after
Low, 1920). The pursuit of pleasure, as now reconceived, involves an
intermixing of the life and death instincts. Human psychological life
in general is composed of both, which is to say the striving toward
activity and stimulation, including the formation of ever larger mul-
titudes, on the one hand, and the striving toward quiescence and
decomposition, on the other hand.
Life and Death and Freud’s Theory of Dreams

The grand scheme Freud elaborates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
incorporating the dueling and intermixing life and death instincts,
has little bearing on how he would account for particular psycho-
logical phenomena, like dreams, neuroses, or other specific behaviors
and experiences – save that the function of dreaming, whatever it
may be, can be disrupted.
The book presents instead an overarching view of the life of
the mind and life in general. The view, in the end, holds less drama

than the surprising idea of a death instinct might seem to promise.

Freud has dissected the basic thrusts of the mind into even finer
elements than he had done before. Now, the most elementary prin-
ciples do not include pleasure, which, as he shows, has hidden com-
plexity, but the build-up of activity and its denouement. Pleasure
and other seemingly primary constituents of our mental life, like
aggression (Freud, 1923), are now derivative of the interaction of
those parts.
Despite the text’s broad, speculative sweep, it exhibits a
grounding The Interpretation of Dreams lacks. It does so also despite
the fact that both start from a phenomenon – traumatic dreams in the
case of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and dreams in general for The
Interpretation of Dreams – and try to explain it.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle begins by noting the apparent
exception traumatic dreams pose to the pleasure-fulfilling function
he had been ascribing to dreams. They repeat horrific, frightening
experiences with no apparent benefit: the reimmersion in the experi-
ences is wanted by no trend in the mind, and the sufferer emerges
only hurt and exhausted, again to no evident end. After differentiat-
ing that case from others that closely resemble it, for instance in
the repetition of negative events in play, Freud determines that some
repetition can occur without any engagement of the pleasure prin-
ciple. He consequently designates a compulsion to repeat that exists
independently of the pleasure principle. He has, in the development
of his argument to that juncture, teased apart strands of evidence and
described what he has seen.
From there the book takes a decidedly speculative and highly
abstract turn. But still it moves methodically. Instinctual life can
be described as compulsively repetitive. Hunger prompts us to
attain satiety, which restores the equilibrium we enjoyed before
the need set in. Such cycles can be described as restoring an earlier
state and hence imply that instinctual life does so. In a more eccen-
tric step, Freud next wonders whether all of life might not enact a
huge cycle of repetition, beginning and ending in inorganicity, or,

as popularly understood, ashes to ashes. The narrative then prods

that theme. If all life aims, so to speak, toward death, then what
keeps us alive in the first place? What evidence might exist of the
drift so described? Thereafter he plumbs the consequences that
would accrue if we were to adopt the framework he has outlined.
For example, the striving toward pleasure, which, under Freud’s
initial understanding of it as a decrease in stimulation, aligned
with the death instinct, now – in the light of instances of pleasure
deriving from an increase in stimulation – must express a different
configuration of trends.
Although some might question the utility of Freud’s vision,
every step of the argument leading to it is both clear and coherent, as
well as anchored in observation, if speculatively.
Granted, we might point to some methodical development
in The Interpretation of Dreams. For instance, after positing his
wish-fulfillment theory based on his Irma dream, he searches for
additional similar examples and then considers apparent counter-
examples to the theory, in the form of indifferent or displeasing
dreams. On account of the apparent counterexamples, he broaches
the hypothesis that dreams contain distorted wish-fulfillments, the
distortions arising to protect dreamers from a painful acknowledg-
ment of their wishes.
But all the while, he has assumed, rather than established as
plausible, that dreams fulfill wishes. A dream that does not overtly
look like it is fulfilling a wish can be shown to be a distorted fulfill-
ment of another wish if we assume that dreams fulfill wishes and we
go searching for one the dream could be seen as having fulfilled. Thus,
Freud cites a dream in which a disgruntled daughter-in-law arranges to
vacation with the mother-in-law she detests, with the aim, according
to the woman’s analysis, of refuting Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory
of dreaming, which he had described to her the day before. She might
have had that wish, and the dream would present a handy fulfillment
of it. We do not know that she dreamt it to fulfill the wish.

Freud’s Speculative Works and the Dreams

Treatise
Two of Freud’s most speculative writings show a more systematic
development and defense of an argument than does The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, in which his minimally and inadequately defended
extrapolations do not reach their intended mark: an account of the
nature and origin of dreaming and the mind that sustains it. We thus
find the dreams book standing alone when compared with a wide
array of Freud’s other writings, ranging from the narrowly focused
and concrete to the broad and speculative, and from the ordinary to
the pathological and the contemporary to the historically remote.

Conclusion

8 Freud on Dreams
A dream, according to Freud, is above all a psychic event; it is neither

a missive sent by an outside force nor physiological noise. It is a
wish-fulfillment. It lets us experience an aspect of our life in a way
we would like it to be. However, because we feel loathe to admit to
the wishes we are fulfilling, we distort and disguise them, producing
in ourselves curious and even distressing results.
Freud’s Argument on Dreams

Freud adduces two lines of argument to support that theory. One is an
extrapolation backward from the endpoint of the analysis of dreams
to their origin, the series of ideas dreamers generate in their analy-
sis of a dream held to indicate, when reversed, the pathway through
which the dream formed. The other line of argument derives Freud’s
account of dreams from general psychology, in particular the trend he
called the pleasure principle.
The Extrapolation from Dream Analysis

to How Dreams Form
Freud, when subjecting his own and his patients’ dreams to analy-
sis – observing what came to mind in connection with individual
dream elements, then pursuing the connections to which those con-
nections led, and so on – found that, with adequate perseverance, he,
and they, could identify a context in which even nonsensical dreams
made sense; once understood in that context, a dream could be fur-
ther understood to provide the dreamer psychic relief. For instance,
he was able to find in the oddities and worries contained in his (mani-
fest) dream of Irma’s injection circumstances that relieved him of any
responsibility for her continued ailment.
167

168 Conclusion
In that way, dreams could be understood as correcting unpleas-

ant realities. However, we have found evidence only that the trea-
tise’s reported dreams, as analyzed, corrected unpleasant realities.
The thoughts at which dreamers arrived in training their attention
on each element, and each nuance of each element, of their dreams
set up states of affairs as they would have appreciated encounter-
ing them. We have no basis on which to determine that the dreams
formed so as to carry out that charge.
The Interpretation of Dreams does make a convincing case
that the dreams whose analyses it presents had some connection
to dreamers’ ongoing ideation, for instance, in the case of Freud’s
dream of Irma, his concerns about her and about his professional
conscientiousness. It could be, though, that constituents filtered into
the dream as direct residues of lingering thoughts, with no mean-
ing or purpose beyond that. They need not have entered the dream
as vehicles to help him surmount the anxiety or distaste he might
have identified later as having been answered by the dream. In other
words, dream content may fulfill no purpose, psychologically, and
may serve only as a repository for the mind’s doings.
Freud offers two answers, not to that objection, but to a related
one. Whereas the preceding objection wonders whether dreams
address any purpose at all, Freud responds to the challenge that we
have no way of knowing that the associative paths we follow when
interpreting a dream in fact lead to the very material that prompted
the dream.1 He thus assumes dreams serve a purpose, namely wish-
fulfillment, and addresses how we know we’ve found the correct gen-
erating material when we analyze them.
One of the two answers he offers is that we could not explain
either the surprising connections that emerge in an analysis among a
dream’s elements or the exhaustiveness of the account that results,
unless the psychical connections had been laid down beforehand.
The second is that dream interpretation duplicates the procedure by
1 Toward the end of Section A of Chapter VII, SE, V, pp. 526–530.

Freud on Dreams 169
which Freud and colleagues resolved hysterical symptoms, and the

success of the latter application is indicated by the abatement of the
symptoms.
Regarding the first answer, we may observe that, even if an
interpretation proceeds along existing tracks, the dream need not
have formed along them. With respect to the second, whereas the
abatement of symptoms upon analysis supports the idea that the
material uncovered may have figured in the germination of the ill-
ness, no such conclusion follows for the formation of dreams.
It does not follow for the formation even of dreams whose
analysis may have helped in mitigating illness. Suppose, for exam-
ple, the analysis of a dream had helped Elisabeth von R. admit her
love for her brother-in-law and corresponded with a lessening of her
pains. Although we might conclude that her inability to negotiate
the love contributed to her illness, we could not conclude, from the
same data, that the dream arose from those sentiments. All we would
know is that the associations she made to the elements of the dream
touched material to which her illness responded.
The Argument from General Theory: Purpose

in Mental Life, or, the Pleasure Principle
A more general principle drives Freud’s two preceding answers to his
objector and anchors his entire conception. It is that, absent profound
organic cerebral destruction, our mental activity is always guided,
consciously or unconsciously, by what he calls purposive ideas, ideas
aiming toward an end (Freud, 1900, pp. 528–529). Elements enter
a dream, just as symptoms form, to do some kind of psychological
work. Elisabeth von R.’s leg pains distracted her from her psychic
pain relating to her (unacknowledged) love for her brother-in-law.
Freud’s dream of the uncle with the yellow beard served, according
to him, to affirm his academic standing and show a path to the pro-
motion he would have liked to receive.
The idea that all mental processes are carried along by a purpo-
sive stream of ideas converges with the central governing rule Freud

170 Conclusion
believes the processes follow, the pleasure principle. According to

that principle, all mental processes2 aim toward the discharge of
displeasure or the cultivation of pleasure (Freud, 1900, Ch. VII.C –
Wish-fulfillment; also Freud, 1911. See Introduction and Chapter 3
here). In Freud’s thinking, the two ideas – that our mental processes
address a purpose and that they observe the pleasure principle – are
the same. To be carried along by a purpose is to be aimed at an end of
some kind, and, what we aim at is presumably something we want.
Conversely, to be moved by the pleasure principle is to be striving
toward either attaining something desired or mitigating something
undesired; either way there is a purpose.
If all mental processes3 observe the pleasure principle, then
dreams, as mental processes, must do so as well. Freud, applying the
principle, points out that dreams would be useless, that is, counter
to the thriving of the organism and hence counter to the pleasure
principle, if they woke us up (Freud, 1900, p. 233). Thus, regardless of
their genesis, they must function so as not to do that, or not to do it
in a persistent and irreversible way; he says momentary waking may
be common and might require less energy use overall than would
sleeping on uninterruptedly at those moments (1900, p. 577).
However, that application of the pleasure principle encom-
passes more possibilities than does the conception of it Freud oth-
erwise assigns to dreaming: that dreams are generated by, and they
fulfill, wishes. The latter, more specific understanding says that
dreams’ actual job is to keep us asleep, by presenting the fulfillment
of wishes that, if left unsatisfied, would wake us (Freud, 1900, pp.
125, 233, 579). Freud, if dreamless, instead of dreaming of Irma, and
restive on account of his self-doubt and his concern about her, would
wake up, rather than continue sleeping.
But dreams, nightmares notwithstanding, could be such as
not to wake us by means other than their serving, themselves, the
2 Except pure instances of repetition compulsion (Freud, 1920, see Chapter 7 here,
second section)

3 All mental processes, with the exception just noted.

Freud on Dreams 171
positive purpose of protecting sleep. Other factors might protect

sleep, for instance, the shutting down of sensory reception and vol-
untary action and the depressing of thought, with the net result that,
whatever dreams may be, they do not rouse us.
The pleasure principle, which Freud implicitly invokes to
defend his wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, asks, then, only that
dreams not disturb sleep, a result that can materialize without
dreams’ functioning proactively to keep us asleep, whether through
wish-fulfillment or anything else. We have so far failed to find a
compelling argument, through either his extrapolation from dream
analysis or his deployment of his general theory, that dreams fulfill
wishes, disguised or not.
Freud’s Analysis of Other Phenomena

Freud makes a stronger case for his account of phenomena other than
dreams, including of the psychoneuroses, whose analysis provided
the template for his interpretation of dreams. The many additional
phenomena he animates with psychoanalytic readings include slips
of the tongue and other parapraxes, the laughter produced by jokes,
our capacity to become mesmerized by fiction, and the peculiarly
haunting experience of the uncanny. His avowedly speculative writ-
ing, also, for instance about the origin of civilization and the most
elemental trends of our psychological life, shows greater cohesion
and justification than does the dreams theory.
The weakness in The Interpretation of Dreams, therefore, is not a
generic feature of the way Freud writes. It is particular to that text. That
it diverges from the rest makes it difficult to suppose that Freud was
writing metaphorically: that he meant we are to understand dreams as
though they come about through an agitating wish, which they then
fulfill so we may continue sleeping. The meticulous way in which he
plots the purported formation of some dreams sounds like an earnest
attempt to puzzle through how the process might actually unfold.
He means similar narratives literally in his other works. When
he describes in detail how he thinks his attempt to recall the painter

172 Conclusion
Signorelli derailed on account of the arousing of the terrible news at

Trafoi, about the patient of his who committed suicide (Freud, 1901,
Chapter I; Chapter 6 here), he means that that is how he might have
come to forget the name. When he describes the material Elisabeth
von R. brings forth as her pains lessen and her outlook improves, he
means to establish that her decline into illness was meant to protect
her from the conflicts later excavated (Freud, in Breuer and Freud,
1895; Chapter 5 here).
None of those stories is certain, but the case for them is stronger
than it is for the parallel stories regarding dreams. More relevantly,
Freud’s intent is clear. He thinks he has learned how the phenomena
in question came to be.
We also know Freud produced some works he presented as
speculative (see Chapter 7 here), whereas he gives The Interpretation
of Dreams no such designation. Imagine, for instance, that he had
begun the later chapters of the text, which treat the wish-fulfillment
theory of dreams as given, with the conditional, “If dreams fulfill
wishes and may hide their true meaning, then …” (e.g., we could
explain why indifferent material appears in them, how they respond
to somatic stimuli).
He does in fact use that construction in his Moses and Mono-
theism (1939), written nearly four decades later. He begins, citing cir-
cumstantial evidence, with the speculation that Moses, rather than
only bred as an Egyptian, actually was born one. In the two essays
that follow, he assumes the idea tentatively and uses it to animate
diverse matters of biblical and historical record, titling the first of
the two pieces, appropriately, “If Moses was an Egyptian …” (my
emphasis). He produces by that means a remarkable anatomy, and
hypothetical history, of the human psyche. No similar conditional
construction appears in The Interpretation of Dreams.
The Larger Project

Freud’s larger project is little affected by the weakness of his pro-
fessed signature contribution. His analysis and treatment of neuroses

Freud on Dreams 173
provided the stepping stone to, and model for, his interpretation of
dreams, rather than the other way around. Because the dreams trea-
tise shows weaknesses not evident in the earlier accounts of neu-
roses and also not evident in the writings on psychopathology that
followed it, those works stand on their own. His analyses of other
phenomena subsist perfectly well without it, and the grand theory he
elaborated, beginning with the last chapter of The Interpretation of
Dreams, does not need it. Whether it makes sense to see us as regu-
lated by still more elemental trends than he describes there toward
life and toward death or as having descended from a parricidal pre-
history (Chapter 7 here), will not stand or fall on whether he has
explained dreams correctly.
Yet no one, on those accounts, need abandon the practice of
interpreting dreams, as Freud carried it out or as subsequent prac-
titioners have done, to gain insight into our inner lives and to help
remediate them. Freud, in propounding the interpretations he does,
makes a good, even an exquisite, case for truths thus uncovered
about people’s lives and, indeed, their wishes. Although those truths
and wishes may not propagate dreams, they exist in our minds along
with the fragments dreams do metabolize and may be illuminated by
reflection on the fragments.
As per Freud’s grand theory, we may still be driven by a pleasure
principle, even if dreams do not carry out wish-fulfillment, a particu-
lar, narrow embodiment of the principle. Our mental processes may
trend toward the reduction of discomfort or toward some positive
end; who we are and what we do may still emerge from influences,
including internal ones, as much outside as within our awareness.
As per the pleasure principle, the sleeping mind must find it easier to
dream, when it does, than not to do so. We may have still to discover
exactly what makes it easier.
Freud’s Position
We can only speculate about how Freud came to think he had
explained dreams, when his vision rests on an argument that has

174 Conclusion
a gap, the likes of which does not appear in his other works. The
text gives no indication that he considered the possibility that such
a flaw existed. The strongest potential objection he addresses is
how we can ever know that the analyses dreamers conduct pro-
duce the chain of associations that, in reverse, produced a dream
(Freud, 1900, pp. 528–529; see earlier this chapter). The very ques-
tion implies that dreams indeed materialize from some chain of
associations – beginning with a wish – only the analysis may not
pick up the right chain.
I do not find indication, in either Freud’s other writing or cor-
respondence with which I am familiar, of his awareness of a poten-
tial flaw in the dreams book. It is stunning that, on the contrary, he
saw fit, even in passing, to justify his conclusions by pointing to the
success of analysis in relieving symptoms: that the correctness of
the conclusion, demonstrated in the one case by the coincident dis-
appearance of symptoms, licensed its extension to the other (Freud,
1900, p. 528; see the preceding section of this chapter “The Extrapo-
lation from Dream Analysis to How Dreams Form”).
Allowing skepticism about the connection nonetheless, he
turns next in the text to what he views as the demonstrable maxim
that we are carried along a purposeful chain of ideas even when, in
interpreting a dream – or presumably other trends and occurrences
during the analysis of a neurosis – we allow involuntary ideas to
emerge in our thinking. All we ever get rid of, he says, are purposive
ideas known to us, which leaves unconscious purposive ideas free to
influence the course of involuntary ideas. No influence, he adds, can
ever enable us to think without purposive ideas, even, he claims, in
confusional states (Freud, 1900, pp. 528–530; again, see the preceding
section of this chapter just noted).
Although he insists that dreaming, likewise, responds to pur-
posive ideas (1900, p. 529) – it fulfills wishes, in the manner he has
described – the interpretive activity just alluded to concerns waking
states, however compromised, which dreaming is not. Having failed
to find any ground, beyond Freud’s insistence on the ubiquity of

Freud on Dreams 175
purposive ideas, to support his account of dreams, we may question

whether purposive ideas indeed extend to them.
Sleeping and Waking

It could be that the dynamic Freud describes operates in waking life,
but not when we sleep, and hence not when we dream. In our waking
life we are purpose-finding and connection-manufacturing creatures.
Perhaps that is why we may, under the right conditions, find such
meaning in our dreams, in the process of interpretation: when we
examine them, awake, after we have had them. When we are asleep,
our sensibilities have been muted, including our meaning-making
ones. So might be our capacity to become agitated by our waking
cares. Thus, we may, in our sleep, be bothered by neither dreams nor
the concerns Freud says prompt them.
Likewise, it may be that in waking life, rather than in dream-
ing, the proposition holds good that our mental processes variously
fend off pain and aim toward the pleasurable; even when we bring
terrible pain on ourselves, we may do so for a purpose and would not
provoke it otherwise. Psychoneuroses, as Freud understands them,
operate on that principle, for example. By contrast, dreams, by not
bothering us, would, again, conform to the pleasure principle, but not
embody in their content the answer to any potential bother.
The foregoing considerations would align with the greater per-
suasiveness of Freud’s analyses of phenomena other than dreams –
symptoms, parapraxes, jokes, beach reading, the experience of the
uncanny, and so forth – than that of dreams. In each of those we are
conscious. We are in the world, doing things. When we dream we are
asleep. Sense-manufacturing is turned off.
Freud on Dreams, Reimagined

Freud agrees, up to a point, that sense-manufacturing is turned off
in dreaming. He tells us, in the sixth chapter of The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900, VI.G; Chapter 2 here), that the dreaming mind
does not perform its daytime operations, like thinking, calculating,

176 Conclusion
planning, or sensory reception; at most images of those operations

appear. Nor does the dreaming mind will or choose. It does not do.
The dreaming mind, on Freud’s account, experiences, as we
do a landscape when driving through it. It therefore, we may infer,
would not wish. Freud again concurs. The purported dream wish
coalesces during the day and triggers the dream at night, much as,
in his hypothetical accounting (Freud, 1900, VII.C; Chapter 3 here),
the primordial baby’s hunger prompts hallucinated fulfillment. The
hunger lies outside the hallucination and prompts it. Likewise, the
wishes that precipitate dreams, according to Freud, lie outside the
resulting dreams.
That parallel, between waking hallucination and dreaming,
might seem to justify Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams. In
his telling, babies’ (hypothetical) hallucinations, like the hallucina-
tion of adults in profoundly disturbed states, respond to a need; the
hallucination realizes the fulfilling of the need. Dreams, also halluci-
nations, would, correspondingly, respond to a need, or a wish.
It is plausible that needs, or wishes produced by needs, provoke
instances of waking hallucination, either the kind Freud ascribes to
our hypothetical point of origin or the kinds seen in disturbed states.
In his depiction of the (hypothetical) hallucination of babies, he is
addressing need states specifically and posits hallucination as the
theoretically shortest path to their resolution. Struck by the over-
whelming pain of hunger, babies hallucinate satiety, on that hypo-
thetical account (Chapter 3 here). The hallucinations of disturbed
states, similarly, are presumably compensatory in some fashion.
Dreaming, by contrast, naturally includes hallucination. It
is something our minds produce when we are asleep. It might not
require a special disposing psychological condition, like a profound
need – or, in Freud’s terms, a wish – in order to occur. The state of
sleep may remove us from such conditions, granted that if strong
enough – like severe thirst, other physical pain, or other encroaching
physical stimuli – they may end up incorporated in some way in the
dream, if they do not wake us.

Freud on Dreams 177
More strongly, the state of sleep may prevent the dynamic

that prompts hallucination in waking cases. The hallucination in
dreaming may just be the way the mind operates when its function
is depressed in sleep. The hallucination that occurs in waking states
might represent a hijacking of that pathway for other purposes.
That is to say that, to explain dreams, we must distinguish the
fully functioning mind from the one on standby while we sleep. Freud
grants as much, in characterizing the sleeping mind as able only to
wish and to fulfill wishes through a series of operations – condensa-
tion, displacement, and so forth – that do not operate in normal, wak-
ing discursive thought. But to be truly asleep may be not to wish, and
hence for our dreams not to respond to our wishes, or anything else.
We thus return to the prospect that Freud’s dream theory –
the genesis and meaning, including wish-fulfillment, he ascribes to
dreams – may pertain more to waking than dreaming. For instance,
when waking from a dream in which we failed an upcoming exam,
we might console ourselves with the recognition that the exam has
not yet occurred; we might still have a chance to succeed in it. We
need not, and perhaps could not, have had the dream for the sake of
that consolation.
In that way, dreams can help us probe the past, understand
the present, and prepare for the future … once we wake up. Perhaps
Freud’s commitment to the presence of purpose in every trace of
mental life, down to the tiniest detail and in even the most fragmen-
tary state, precluded his allowing us to rest until then.

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Index
Although “dreams” is not indexed as a general category, given its pervasiveness throughout
the text, it appears as a marker in the following list to facilitate the indexing of some related
concepts.
In the listing of specific dreams, I have used the labels appearing in the Standard Edition of
Freud’s Complete Psychological Works (1981), except in instances in which I use my own
label to facilitate connection with the identifiers I use for those dreams in the text; in the
latter cases, the label from the Standard Edition appears in parentheses.
anxiety dreams. See dreams:distressing children’s, 27–28, 69–70, 81, 84, See also
case histories (Freud’s):Wolf
case histories (Freud’s) Man, the
Anna O., 89–90, 104 compared with adults’, 69–70
Dora, 6, 113 condensation in, 6, 52–56, 58, 75, 76, 81,
Elisabeth von R., 12–13, 89, 91–104, 172 127, 129, 131, 177
Emmy von N., 90–91, 104 convenience, of, 27, 47
Rat Man, the, 104, 142, 154 displacement in, 6, 54–58, 75, 76, 127,
Wolf Man, the, 12–13, 89, 104–113 177
castration anxiety, 109–111 doubt in dream recall, and, 62
comic, the. See jokes distressing, 34–37, 81
condensation. See dreams, condensation forgetting of. See dream interpretation,
in;jokes, condensation in method of: forgetting of dreams
consciousness, nature of, 33–34 during
historical views of, 21–22
daydreams infantile material in, 43–44, 59,
lost in a book, as model for getting, 69–70, See also case histories
132–135 (Freud’s):Wolf Man, The
night dreams, contrasted with, 68 intellectual activity in, 56
death instinct. See life and death instincts manifest and latent content of, 11, 28,
displacement. See dreams, displacement 39–40, 52–55, 81
in;jokes, displacement in navel of, 63–64
distressing dreams, 34–37 neologisms in, 54
dream interpretation, method of, 4–6, neural basis of, 5
22–26, 37 overdetermination in, 63–64
doubt occurring during, 62–63 primitive mental process, as, 11, 60,
forgetting of dreams during, 63–64 76–77, See also primary and
indefiniteness of. See dreams: navel of secondary process
reliability of, 61–66 primitive process, as, 175–177
dreams secondary revision in, 58
affect in, 56–57 somatic stimuli in, 44–48
182

Index 183
typical, 48–52, 59–60 speculative works, compared with, 163

dreams of the death of persons of uncanny, compared with explanation of
whom the dreamer is fond, 50–51 the, 143–144
embarrassing dreams of being
naked, 48–50 hallucination
dreams, specific dreaming vs. waking, in, 177
dreamt by Freud dreaming, as part of, 12, 79, 82
botanical monograph, 40–44, 53–55, origin of mind, as part of, 72–77
169 primary and secondary process, in, 73–77
Irma’s injection, 24–26, 28–29, 33, humor. See jokes
53–54, 68, 69, 83, 128, 130–131, hysteria. See psychoneuroses
157, 162
Norekdal, 54 jokes, 8, 14, 54, 114–115, 121–132, 144,
Otto looking ill, 71–72 171, 175
putrid dream (Open-air closet), condensation in, 122, 127, 130
57–58 displacement in, 123, 127
riding on a horse, 39–40, 45–47, 59
Son, news of, from the front, 71–72 latent content of dreams. See dreams:
Uncle with the yellow beard, 29–33, manifest and latent content of
40, 53–54 life and death instincts, 15, 159–163
dreamt by others lost in a book, getting, 8, 14, 114–115,
burning child, 66–68, 71 132–135, 144, 171, 175
Husyatin, 47
income-tax return, false, 36 manifest content of dreams. See
medical student and hospital, 27 dreams:manifest and latent
Napoleon’s dream, 47 content of
smoked salmon, supper of, 34–36 mental glitches. See parapraxes
Moses and Monotheism, 172
fiction, reading. See lost in a book, getting
forgetting of names, 116–119, See also neuroses. See psychoneuroses
parapraxes nightmares. See dreams:distressing
gap in Freud’s dreams theory, 4–5, 12, Oedipal conflict, 51, 148–149
15–16, 82–85, 167–177 totemism, expressed in, 149–153
jokes, compared with explanation of, origins of the mind, 72–76
129–132
life and death instincts, compared with parapraxes, 8, 14, 78, 115–121, 144, 146,
derivation of, 160–163 171–172, 175
lost in a book, compared with phobias
explanation of, 134–135 animal. See also case histories (Freud’s):
neuroses, compared with explanation of, Wolf Man, the
104, 111–113 totemism, and, 148–150
ordinary waking mental life, compared in general, 37
with accounts of, 144–145 pleasure principle (in Freud’s theory), 7, 16,
parapraxes, compared with explanation 72–77, 84, 156–162, 169–173
of, 119–121 primal horde, Freud’s narrative of, 146–156
primal horde narrative (totemism), psychological vs. material reality in,
compared with account of, 153–154
154–156 primal scene, Wolf Man’s dream of, 109–112

184 Index
primary and secondary process thought, 73–79 sleep, wish to, 11, 47–48, 60, 82
psychoanalytic therapy, 6, 15–16, 82, 173 slips of the tongue, 115–116, See also
psychoneuroses, 4, 8, 12–13, 21–22, 51, parapraxes
89–113, See also phobias; case
histories (Freud’s): Elisabeth tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT). See
von R.; case histories (Freud’s): forgetting of names
Wolf Man, the; case histories totemism. See primal horde, Freud’s
(Freud’s): Dora; case histories narrative of
(Freud’s): Rat Man, the; case
histories (Freud’s): Anna O.; case uncanny, experience of the, 14, 114–115,
histories (Freud’s): Emmy von N. 135–144, 171, 175
dreams, and, 77–80, 82–85, 104, 113,
168–169, 171–173 waking and dreaming, 16, 67, 174–177
jokes, and, 131–132 wish-fulfillment, Freud’s thesis of, 3–12,
ordinary waking life, and, 114, 119–121, 15–16, 57–58, 69–73, 76–85,
144–145 162–163, 167–171
parapraxes, and, 119–121 distressing dreams, in. See distressing
totemism, and, 153–154 dreams
psychosomatic illness. See case histories dreams and other phenomena in general,
(Freud’s):Elisabeth von R. in, 171–173
purposiveness of mental processes, 16, hallucination and dreaming, in, 176–177
65–66, 83–84, 169–171, 174–175 jokes and dreams, in, 128
neuroses vs. dreams, in, 104
repetition compulsion, 157–159 origins of, 69–73
parapraxes vs. dreams, in, 119–121
Sandman, The (E.T.A. Hoffmann), 137–140, reading fiction vs dreaming, in,
143 133–135
secondary revision. See dreams:secondary reading fiction, in, 133–135
revision in uncanny, in the, 141–142, 144

Susan Sugarman - Freud's Interpretation of Dreams - A Reappraisal-Cambridge University Press (2022)

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Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

Freud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams, and in particular

Susan Sugarman is Professor of Psychology at Princeton University,

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

PART I THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1900)17

A Note on Freud’s Text 19

1 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapters I–IV:

Published online by Cambridge University Press

2 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapters V

3 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapter VII:

4 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):

PART II FREUD’S OTHER WORKS87

5 The Analysis of Psychoneuroses: Elisabeth von R.

6 Phenomena of Ordinary Waking Life 114

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The Experience of the Uncanny 135

7 Speculative Works 146

8 Freud on Dreams 167

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I thank Harry Daniels and the English Department at Oxford

Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

This book began when I was invited to contribute a paper on Freud

Freud, throughout his career, considered The Interpretation of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Text and Its Puzzle

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arbitrary fashion and yet lend themselves to productive and auspi-

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Some perceive Freud himself as having moved, in his later writings,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

capitalized on in dream analysis, while at the same time holding fast

Freud’s Larger Project

2 The later version is elaborated further in Freud, 1911 and 1924.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Significant shortcomings in the dreams treatise, on which Freud

Plan of This Book

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

specific, transient phenomena that must be analyzed of themselves.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Part I. the interpretation of dreams (1900) 1

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009244138.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Chapter 2. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),

Chapter 3. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),

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that function. It is set in motion by a wish that, if unattended, would

Chapter 4. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):

Part II. Freud’s Other Works

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us to compare directly extrapolations to dream formation and to the

Chapter 6. Phenomena of Ordinary Waking Life

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Those occurrences consist of short-term behaviors and

Chapter 7. Speculative Works

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Beyond the Pleasure Principle, starting from an exception

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4. As per Freud’s grand theory, we may still be driven by a pleasure

We can only speculate about how Freud came to think he had

PART I THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1900)17

A Note on Freud’s Text 19

PART II FREUD’S OTHER WORKS87

6 Phenomena of Ordinary Waking Life 114

The Experience of the Uncanny 135

7 Speculative Works 146

8 Freud on Dreams 167