The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud

apostle: He who hates his brother is a murderer. And whereas, after we awaken and become conscious of our moral strength, we may smile at the boldly executed structure of the depraved dream, the original formative material, nevertheless, has no ridiculous side. One feels responsible for the transgressions of the dreamer, not for the whole sum, but still for a certain percentage. "In this sense, which is difficult to impugn, we understand the words of Christ: Out of the heart come evil thoughts—for we can hardly help being convinced that every sin committed in the dream brings with it at least a vague minimum of guilt."

      Hildebrandt thus finds the source of the immorality of dreams in the germs and indications of evil impulses which pass through our minds during the day as tempting thoughts, and he sees fit to add these immoral elements to the moral estimation of the personality. It is the same thoughts and the same estimation of these thoughts, which, as we know, have caused devout and holy men of all times to lament that they are evil sinners.

      There is certainly no reason to doubt the general occurrence of these contrasting presentations—in most men and even also in other than ethical spheres. The judgment of these at times has not been very earnest. In Spitta⁶⁴ we find the following relevant expression from A. Zeller (Article "Irre" in the Allgemeinen Encyklopädie der Wissenchaften of Ersch and Grüber, p. 144): "The mind is rarely so happily organised as to possess at all times power enough not to be disturbed, not only by unessential but also by perfectly ridiculous ideas running counter to the usual clear trend of thought; indeed, the greatest thinkers have had cause to complain of this dreamlike disturbing and painful rabble of ideas, as it destroys their profoundest reflection and their most sacred and earnest mental work."

      A clearer light is thrown on the psychological status of this idea of contrast by another observation of Hildebrandt, that the dream at times allows us to glance into the deep and inmost recesses of our being, which are generally closed to us in our waking state (p. 55). The same knowledge is revealed by Kant in his Anthropology, when he states that the dream exists in order to lay bare for us our hidden dispositions and to reveal to us not what we are, but what we might have been if we had a different education. Radestock⁵⁴ (p. 84) says that the dream often only reveals to us what we do not wish to admit to ourselves, and that we therefore unjustly condemn it as a liar and deceiver. That the appearance of impulses which are foreign to our consciousness is merely analogous to the already familiar disposition which the dream makes of other material of the presentation, which is either absent or plays only an insignificant part in the waking state, has been called to our attention by observations like those of Benini,³ who says: "Certe nostre inclinazione che si credevano suffocate a spente da un pezzo, si ridestano; passioni vecchie e sepolte rivivono; cose e persone a cui non pensiamo mai, ci vengono dinanzi" (p. 149). Volkelt⁷² expresses himself in a similar way: "Even presentations which have entered into our consciousness almost unnoticed, and have never perhaps been brought out from oblivion, often announce through the dream their presence in the mind (p. 105). Finally, it is not out of place to mention here that, according to Schleiermacher,⁶¹ the state of falling asleep is accompanied by the appearance of undesirable presentations (pictures).

      We may comprise under "undesirable presentations" this entire material of presentations, the occurrence of which excites our wonder in immoral as well as in absurd dreams. The only important difference consists in the fact that our undesirable presentations in the moral sphere exhibit an opposition to our other feelings, whereas the others simply appear strange to us. Nothing has been done so far to enable us to remove this difference through a more penetrating knowledge.

      But what is the significance of the appearance of undesirable presentations in the dream? What inferences may be drawn for the psychology of the waking and dreaming mind from these nocturnal manifestations of contrasting ethical impulses? We may here note a new diversity of opinion, and once more a different grouping of the authors. The stream of thought followed by Hildebrandt, and by others who represent his fundamental view, cannot be continued in any other way than by ascribing to the immoral impulses a certain force even in the waking state, which, to be sure, is inhibited from advancing to action, and asserting that something falls off during sleep, which, having the effect of an inhibition, has kept us from noticing the existence of such an impulse. The dream thus shows the real, if not the entire nature of man, and is a means of making the hidden psychic life accessible to our understanding. It is only on such assumption that Hildebrandt can attribute to the dream the rôle of monitor who calls our attention to the moral ravages in the soul, just as in the opinion of physicians it can announce a hitherto unobserved physical ailment. Spitta,⁶⁴ too, cannot be guided by any other conception when he refers to the stream of excitement which, e.g., flows in upon the psyche during puberty, and consoles the dreamer by saying that he has done everything in his power when he has led a strictly virtuous life during his waking state, when he has made an effort to suppress the sinful thoughts as often as they arise, and has kept them from maturing and becoming actions. According to this conception, we might designate the "undesirable" presentations as those that are "suppressed" during the day, and must recognise in their appearance a real psychic phenomenon.

      If we followed other authors we would have no right to the last inference. For Jessen³⁶ the undesirable presentations in the dream as in the waking state, in fever and other deliria, merely have "the character of a voluntary activity put to rest and a somewhat mechanical process of pictures and presentations produced by inner impulses" (p. 360). An immoral dream proves nothing for the psychic life of the dreamer except that he has in some way become cognizant of the ideas in question; it is surely not a psychic impulse of his own. Another author, Maury,⁴⁸ makes us question whether he, too, does not attribute to the dream state the capacity for dividing the psychic activity into its components instead of destroying it aimlessly. He speaks as follows about dreams in which one goes beyond the bounds of morality: "Ce sont nos penchants qui parlent et qui nous font agir, sans que la conscience nous retienne, bien que parfoit eile nous avertisse. J'ai mes défauts et mes penchants vicieux; a l'état de veille, je tache de lutter contre eux, et il m'arrive assez souvent de n'y pas succomber. Mais dans mes songes j'y succombe toujours ou pour mieux dire j'agis, par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans remords.... Evidement les visions qui se déroulent devant ma pensée et qui constituent le rêve, me sont suggérées par les incitations que je ressens et que ma volonté absente ne cherche pas à réfouler" (p. 113).

      If one believes in the capacity of the dream to reveal an actually existing but repressed or concealed immoral disposition of the dreamer, he could not emphasize his opinion more strongly than with the words of Maury (p. 115): "En rêve l'homme se révèle donc tout entier à soi-même dans sa nudité et sa misère natives. Des qu'il suspend l'exercice de sa volonté, il dévient le jouet de toutes les passions contre lesquelles, à l'etat de veille, la conscience, le sentiment d'honneur, la crainte nous défendent." In another place he finds the following striking words (p. 462): "Dans le rêve, c'est surtout l'homme instinctif que se révèle.... L'homme revient pour ainsi dire á l'état de nature quand il rêve; mais moins les idées acquises ont pénétre dans son esprit, plus les penchants en désaccord avec elles conservent encore sur lui d'influence dans le rêve." He then mentions as an example that his dreams often show him as a victim of just those superstitions which he most violently combats in his writing.

      The value of all these ingenious observations for a psychological knowledge of the dream life, however, is marred by Maury through the fact that he refuses to recognise in the phenomena so correctly observed by him any proof of the "automatisme psychologique" which in his opinion dominates the dream life. He conceives this automatism as a perfect contrast to the psychic activity.

      A passage in the studies on consciousness by Strieker⁷⁷ reads: "The dream does not consist of delusions merely; if, e.g., one is afraid of robbers in the dream, the robbers are, of course, imaginary, but the fear is real. One's attention is thus called to the fact that the effective development in the dream does not admit of the judgment which one bestows upon the rest of the dream content, and the problem arises what part of the psychic processes in the dream may be real, i.e. what part of them may demand to be enrolled among the psychic processes of the waking state?"

       (g) Dream Theories and Functions of the Dream.—A statement concerning the dream which as far as possible