VI. THE DREAM-WORK
ALL other previous attempts to solve the problems of
dreams have concerned themselves directly with the manifest dream-content
as it is retained in the memory. They have sought to obtain an
interpretation of the dream from this content, or, if they dispensed with
an interpretation, to base their conclusions concerning the dream on the
evidence provided by this content. We, however, are confronted by a
different set of data; for us a new psychic material interposes itself
between the dream-content and the results of our investigations: the
latent dream-content, or dream-thoughts, which are obtained only by our
method. We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and
not from the manifest dream-content. We are thus confronted with a new
problem, an entirely novel task- that of examining and tracing the
relations between the latent dream-thoughts and the manifest
dream-content, and the processes by which the latter has grown out of the
former.
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content present
themselves as two descriptions of the same content in two different
languages; or, to put it more clearly, the dream-content appears to us as
a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose
symbols and laws of composition we must learn by comparing the origin with
the translation. The dream-thoughts we can understand without further
trouble the moment we have ascertained them. The dream-content is, as it
were, presented in hieroglyphics, whose symbols must be translated, one by
one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It would of course, be
incorrect to attempt to read these symbols in accordance with their values
as pictures, instead of in accordance with their meaning as symbols. For
instance, I have before me a picture- puzzle (rebus)- a house, upon whose
roof there is a boat; then a single letter; then a running figure, whose
head has been omitted, and so on. As a critic I might be tempted to judge
this composition and its elements to be nonsensical. A boat is out of
place on the roof of a house, and a headless man cannot run; the man, too,
is larger than the house, and if the whole thing is meant to represent a
landscape the single letters have no right in it, since they do not occur
in nature. A correct judgment of the picture-puzzle is possible only if I
make no such objections to the whole and its parts, and if, on the
contrary, I take the trouble to replace each image by a syllable or word
which it may represent by virtue of some allusion or relation. The words
thus put together are no longer meaningless, but might constitute the most
beautiful and pregnant aphorism. Now a dream is such a picture-puzzle, and
our predecessors in the art of dream- interpretation have made the mistake
of judging the rebus as an artistic composition. As such, of course, it
appears nonsensical and worthless.
|
