further question as to why these dreams reveal their meaning in such a disguised manner – i.e. What
is the origin of this distortion in dreams?
Freud then describes dreams of his own, and of acquaintances,
all of which appear indifferent, or painful, yet can be seen to be wish-fulfillments also. However Freud
acknowledges that anxiety dreams – as a sub-order of dreams with painful content, need to be considered
separately.
V. THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS
Freud introduces the idea of the 'latent' and
'manifest' content of dreams. Relating to manifest content, he identifies the following properties:
1) Dreams
show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days (Robert 1886, Strumpell
1877 Hildebrandt 1875 and Hallam and Weed 1896). 2) They make their selection upon different principles
than our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important, but what is subsidiary
and unnoticed. 3) They have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring
up details from that period of our life which. Once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking
state we believe to have been long since forgotten.
A. Recent and indifferent material in dreams
Freud
proposes that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous
day not days. Freud then analyses a dream in great detail
"I had written a monograph on a certain plant.
The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in
each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium."
He
found that he could continue at great lengths finding an event however subsidiary to relate to almost
every feature of the dream. However Two impression of the 'dream day' were outstanding. An indifferent
one concerning a sighting of a book in a shop window that day and a more important one – an hours
conversation with a Dr.
Freud suggests various possible sources of the dream material: (a) A recent and
psychically significant experience which is represented in the dream directly (b) Several recent and significant
experiences which are combined into a single unity by the dream (c) One or more recent and significant
experiences which are represented in the content of the dream by a mention of a contemporary but
indifferent experience (d) An internal significant experience (e.g. a memory or a train of thought), which
is in that case invariably represented in the dream by a mention of a recent but indifferent impression.
Freud
accounts for the fundamental objection, namely that indifferent impressions from earlier period of life
also appear in dreams. He proposes that these particular elements which were originally indifferent
aren't anymore, since taking over (displacing) psychically important material at an early stage (see neurotics
who attach irrational importance to indifferent impressions).
B. Infantile Material as a source of dreams
The
motives which led a dreamer to reproduce one particular impression from their childhood and not another,
cannot be discovered without analysis. – either confirmatory information from another person that what
you have dreamt did indeed originate from a childhood event, or if the dream is 'recurrent' the recurrent
item can normally be connected relatively easily with some childhood item. For example, Freud's dreams
of going to Rome – until fulfilled, partially represented his high childhood esteem of and identification
with the semitic leader Hannibal, who was fated to only see the city from afar. He also cites examples
from women patients.
However Freud is cautious and admits that some of his examples where dreams
could be traced to obscure childhood events from the first 3 years of life, are from neurotics, and as
such may not be representative of the general population. However he overcomes this by relating to
similar dreams that he can recollect, traceable to long-forgotten obscure early childhood events.
Since
Freud found that even in dreams which seem to have been completely interpreted, trains of thought
reaching back to earliest childhood can be found – therefore Freud suggests that this could be a further
precondition – that every dream was linked in its manifest content with recent experiences and in its latent
content with associated (source) the most ancient experiences. Whilst this point is harder to prove, it
is more prominent in analysis of hysteria, as these ancient experiences have remained recent, in the
true sense of the word. (see chapter 7 (C)).
Thus Freud concludes that the preference for non-essential
material in the content of dreams can be accounted for in terms of dream-distortion, and the other two
properties cited – namely emphasis on recent and infantile material, can be confirmed. One more important
inference is that dreams often have more than one meaning. Either several wish-fulfillments alongside
one another, or even the succession of meanings or wish- fulfillments may be superimposed on one
another, the bottom one being the fulfillment of a wish dating from earliest childhood – does this 'invariably'
or frequently' occur?
C. The somatic sources of dreams
Freud cites three types of somatic sources of
stimulation (Chapter 1 (c)). (a) objective sensory stimuli arising from external objects (b) internal states
of excitation of the sense organs having only a subjective basis and (c) somatic stimuli derived from