(h) Secondary Elaboration.

We may at last proceed to an exposition of the fourth of the factors which take part in the formation of the dream.

If we continue the examination of the dream content, in the manner already outlined—that is, by testing striking occurrences as to their origin in the dream thoughts—we encounter elements which can be explained only by making an entirely new assumption. I have in mind cases where one shows astonishment, anger, or resistance in a dream, and that, too, against a party of the dream content itself. Most of these exercises of the critical faculty in dreams are not directed against the dream content, but prove to be portions of dream material which have been taken over and suitably made use of, as I have shown by fitting examples. Some things of this sort, however, cannot be disposed of in such a way; their correlative cannot be found in the dream material. What, for instance, is meant by the criticism not infrequent in dreams: “Well, it’s only a dream”? This is a genuine criticism of the dream such as I might make if I were awake. Not at all infrequently it is the forerunner to waking; still oftener it is preceded by a painful feeling, which subsides when the certainty of the dream state has been established. The thought: “But it’s only a dream,” occurring during the dream, has the same object which is meant to be conveyed on the stage through the mouth of the beautiful Helen von Offenbach; it wants to minimise what has just occurred and secure indulgence for what is to follow. Its purpose is to reassure and, so to speak, put to sleep a certain instance which at the given moment has every reason to be active and to forbid the continuation of the dream—or the scene. It is pleasanter to go on sleeping and to tolerate the dream, “because it’s only a dream anyway.” I imagine that the disparaging criticism, “But it’s only a dream,” enters into the dream at the moment when the censor, which has never been quite asleep, feels that it has been surprised by the already admitted dream. It is too late to suppress the dream, and the instance therefore carries with it that note of fear or of painful feeling which presents itself in the dream. It is an expression of the esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychic censor.

In this example we have faultless proof that not everything which the dream contains comes from the dream thoughts, but that a psychic function which cannot be differentiated from our waking thoughts may make contributions to the dream content. The question now is, does this occur only in altogether exceptional cases, or does the psychic instance which is usually active only as censor take a regular part in the formation of dreams?

One must decide unhesitatingly for the latter view. It is indisputable that the censoring instance, whose influence we have so far recognised only in limitations and omissions in the dream content, is also responsible for interpolations and amplifications in this content. Often these interpolations are easily recognised; they are reported irresolutely, prefaced by an “as if,” they are not in themselves particularly vivid, and are regularly inserted at points where they may serve to connect two portions of the dream content or improve the sequence between two sections of the dream. They manifest less ability to stick in the memory than genuine products of the dream material; if the dream is subject to forgetting, they are the first to fall away, and I am strongly inclined to believe that our frequent complaint that we have dreamed so much, that we have forgotten most of this and have remembered only fragments of it, rests on the immediate falling away of just these cementing thoughts. In a complete analysis these interpolations are often betrayed by the fact that no material is to be found for them in the dream thoughts. But after careful examination I must designate this case as a rare one; usually interpolated thoughts can be traced to an element in the dream thoughts, which, however, can claim a place in the dream neither on account of its own merit nor on account of over-determination. The psychic function in dream formation, which we are now considering, aspires to the original creations only in the most extreme cases; whenever possible, it makes use of anything available it can find in the dream material.

The thing which distinguishes and reveals this part of the dream activity is its tendency. This function proceeds in a manner similar to that which the poet spitefully attributes to the philosopher; with its scraps and rags, it stops up the breaches in the structure of the dream. The result of its effort is that the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience. But the effort is not always crowned with complete success. Thus dreams occur which may seem faultlessly logical and correct upon superficial examination; they start from a possible situation, continue it by means of consistent changes, and end up—although this is very rare—with a not unnatural conclusion. These dreams have been subjected to the most thorough elaboration at the hands of a psychic function similar to our waking thought; they seem to have a meaning, but this meaning is very far removed from the real signification of the dream. If they are analysed, one is convinced that the secondary elaboration has distorted the material very freely, and has preserved its proper relations as little as possible. These are the dreams which have, so to speak, already been interpreted before we subject them to waking interpretation. In other dreams this purposeful elaboration has been successful only to a certain point; up to this point consistency seems to be dominant, then the dream becomes nonsensical or confused, and perhaps finally it lifts itself for a second time in its course to an appearance of rationality. In still other dreams the elaboration has failed completely; we find ourselves helpless in the presence of a senseless mass of fragmentary contents.

I do not wish to deny to this fourth dream-moulding power, which will soon seem to us a familiar one—it is in reality the only one among the four dream-moulders with which we are familiar,—I do not wish to deny this fourth factor the capability of creatively furnishing the dream with new contributions. But surely its influence, like that of the others, manifests itself preponderatingly in the preferring and choosing of already created psychic material in the dream thoughts. Now there is a case where it is spared the work, for the most part, of building, as it were, a façade to the dream, by the fact that such a structure, waiting to be used, is already to be found complete in the material of the dream thoughts. The element of the dream thoughts which I have in mind, I am in the habit of designating as a “phantasy”; perhaps I shall avoid misunderstanding if I immediately adduce the day dream of waking life as an analogy.¹ The part played by this element in our psychic life has not yet been fully recognised and investigated by the psychiatrists; in this study M. Benedikt has, it seems to me, made a highly promising beginning. The significance of the day dream has not yet escaped the unerring insight of poets; the description of the day dreams of one of his subordinate characters which A. Daudet gives us in Nabab is universally known. A study of the psychoneuroses discloses the astonishing fact that these phantasies or day dreams are the immediate predecessors of hysterical symptoms—at least of a great many of them; hysterical symptoms directly depend not upon the memories themselves, but upon phantasies built on the basis of memories. The frequent occurrence of conscious day phantasies brings these formations within the scope of our knowledge; but just as there are such conscious phantasies, so there are a great many unconscious ones, which must remain unconscious on account of their content and on account of their origin from repressed material. A more thorough examination into the character of these day phantasies shows with what good reason the same name has been given to these formations as to the products of our nocturnal thought,—dreams. They possess an essential part of their properties in common with nocturnal dreams; an examination of them would really have afforded the shortest and best approach to an understanding of night dreams.

Like dreams, they are fulfilments of wishes; like dreams a good part of them are based upon the impressions of childish experiences; like dreams their creations enjoy a certain amount of indulgence from the censor. If we trace their formation, we see how the wish motive, which is active in their production, has taken the material of which they are built, mixed it together, rearranged it, and composed it into a new unit. They bear the same relation to the childish memories, to which they go back, as some of the quaint palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose freestones and pillars have furnished the material for the structure built in modern form.

In the “secondary elaboration” of the dream content which we have ascribed to our fourth dream-making factor, we again find the same activity which in the creation of day dreams is allowed to manifest itself unhampered by other influences. We may say without further preliminary that this fourth factor of ours seeks to form something like a day dream from the material at hand. Where, however, such a day dream has already been formed in connection with the dream thought, this factor of the dream-work will preferably get control of it, and strive to introduce it into the dream content. There are dreams which consist merely of the repetition of such a day fancy, a fancy which has perhaps remained unconscious—as, for instance, the dream of the boy that he is riding with the heroes of the Trojan war in a war chariot. In my dream “Autodidasker,” at least the second part of the dream is the faithful repetition of a day phantasy—harmless in itself—about my dealings with Professor N. The fact that the phantasy thus provided more often forms only one part of the dream, or that only one part of the phantasy that makes its way to the dream content, has its origin in the complexity of the conditions which the dream must satisfy at its genesis. On the whole, the phantasy is treated like any other component of the latent material; still it is often recognisable in the dream as a whole. In my dreams parts often occur which are emphasized by an impression different from that of the rest. They seem to me to be in a state of flux, to be more coherent and at the same time more transient than other pieces of the same dream. I know that these are unconscious phantasies which get into the dream by virtue of their association, but I have never succeeded in registering such a phantasy. For the rest these phantasies, like all other component parts of the dream thoughts, are jumbled together and condensed, one covered up by another, and the like; but there are all degrees, from the case where they may constitute the dream content or at least the dream façade unchanged to the opposite case, where they are represented in the dream content by only one of their elements or by a remote allusion to such an element. The extent to which the phantasies are able to withstand the demands of the censor and the tendency to condensation are, of course, also decisive of their fate among the dream thoughts.

In my choice of examples for dream analysis I have, wherever possible, avoided those dreams in which unconscious fancies play a somewhat important part, because the introduction of this psychic element would have necessitated extensive discussion of the psychology of unconscious thought. But I cannot entirely omit the “phantasy” even in this matter of examples, because it often gets fully into the dream and still more often distinctly pervades it. I may mention one more dream, which seems to be composed of two distinct and opposed phantasies, overlapping each other at certain places, of which the first is superficial, while the second becomes, as it were, the interpreter of the first.²

The dream—it is the only one for which I have no careful notes—is about to this effect: The dreamer—an unmarried young man—is sitting in an inn, which is seen correctly; several persons come to get him, among them someone who wants to arrest him. He says to his table companions, “I will pay later, I am coming back.” But they call to him, laughing scornfully: “We know all about that; that’s what everybody says.” One guest calls after him: “There goes another one.” He is then led to a narrow hall, where he finds a woman with a child in her arms. One of his escorts says: “That is Mr. Müller.” A commissioner or some other official is running through a bundle of tickets or papers repeating Müller, Müller, Müller. At last the commissioner asks him a question, which he answers with “Yes.” He then takes a look at the woman, and notices that she has grown a large beard.

The two component parts are here easily separated. What is superficial is the phantasy of being arrested; it seems to be newly created by the dream-work. But behind it appears the phantasy of marriage, and this material, on the contrary, has undergone but slight change at the hands of the dream activity. The features which are common to both phantasies come into distinct prominence as in a Galton’s composite photograph. The promise of the bachelor to come back to his place at the club table, the scepticism of the drinking companions, sophisticated in their many experiences, the calling after: “There goes (marries) another one,”—all these features can easily be capable of the other interpretation. Likewise the affirmative answer given to the official. Running through the bundle of papers with the repetition of the name, corresponds to a subordinate but well-recognised feature of the marriage ceremonies—the reading aloud of the congratulatory telegrams which have arrived irregularly, and which, of course, are all addressed to the same name. In the matter of the bride’s personal appearance in this dream, the marriage phantasy has even got the better of the arrest phantasy which conceals it. The fact that this bride finally displays a beard, I can explain from an inquiry—I had no chance to make an analysis. The dreamer had on the previous day crossed the street with a friend who was just as hostile to marriage as himself, and had called his friend’s attention to a beautiful brunette who was coming towards them. The friend had remarked: “Yes, if only these women wouldn’t get beards, as they grow older, like their fathers.”

Of course there is no lack of elements in this dream, on which the dream disfigurement has done more thorough work. Thus the speech: “I will pay later,” may have reference to the conduct of the father-in-law in the matter of dowry—which is uncertain. Obviously all kinds of scruples are preventing the dreamer from surrendering himself with pleasure to the phantasy of marrying. One of these apprehensions—lest one’s freedom be lost when one marries—has embodied itself in the transformation to a scene of arrest.

Let us return to the thesis that the dream activity likes to make use of a phantasy which is finished and at hand, instead of creating one afresh from the material of the dream thoughts; we shall perhaps solve one of the most interesting riddles of the dream if we keep this fact in mind. I have on page 21 related the dream of Maury,³ who is struck on the back of the neck with a stick, and who awakes in the possession of a long dream—a complete romance from the time of the French Revolution. Since the dream is represented as coherent and as explicable by reference to the disturbing stimulus alone, about the occurrence of which stimulus the sleeper could suspect nothing, only one assumption seems to be left, namely, that the whole richly elaborated dream must have been composed and must have taken place in the short space of time between the falling of the stick on Maury’s cervical vertebra and the awakening induced by the blow. We should not feel justified in ascribing such rapidity to the waking mental activity, and so are inclined to credit the dream activity with a remarkable acceleration of thought as one of its characteristics.

Against this inference, which rapidly becomes popular, more recent authors (Le Lorrain,⁴ Egger,⁵ and others) have made emphatic objection. They partly doubt the correctness with which the dream was reported by Maury, and partly try to show that the rapidity of our waking mental capacity is quite as great as that which we may concede without reservation to the dream activity. The discussion raises fundamental questions, the settlement of which I do not think concerns me closely. But I must admit that the argument, for instance, of Egger has not impressed me as convincing against the guillotine dream of Maury. I would suggest the following explanation of this dream: Would it be very improbable that the dream of Maury exhibits a phantasy which had been preserved in his memory in a finished state for years, and which was awakened—I should rather say alluded to—at the moment when he became aware of the disturbing stimulus? The difficulty of composing such a long story with all its details in the exceedingly short space of time which is here at the disposal of the dreamer then disappears; the story is already composed. If the stick had struck Maury’s neck when he was awake there would perhaps have been time for the thought: “Why, that’s like being guillotined.” But as he is struck by the stick while asleep, the dream activity quickly finds occasion in the incoming stimulus to construct a wish-fulfilment, as though it thought (this is to be taken entirely figuratively): “Here is a good opportunity to realise the wish phantasy which I formed at such and such a time while I was reading.” That this dream romance is just such a one as a youth would be likely to fashion under the influence of powerful impressions does not seem questionable to me. Who would not have been carried away—especially a Frenchman and a student of the history of civilisation—by descriptions of the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women, the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die with a light heart, and preserved their quick wit and refinement of life until the fatal summons? How tempting to fancy one’s self in the midst of all this as one of the young men who parts from his lady with a kiss of the hand to climb fearlessly upon the scaffold! Or perhaps ambition is the ruling motive of the phantasy—the ambition to put one’s self in the place of one of those powerful individuals who merely, by the force of their thinking and their fiery eloquence, rule the city in which the heart of mankind is beating so convulsively, who are impelled by conviction to send thousands of human beings to their death, and who pave the way for the transformation of Europe; who, meanwhile, are not sure of their own heads, and may one day lay them under the knife of the guillotine, perhaps in the rôle of one of the Girondists or of the hero Danton? The feature, “accompanied by an innumerable multitude,” which is preserved in the memory, seems to show that Maury’s phantasy is an ambitious one of this sort.

But this phantasy, which has for a long time been ready, need not be experienced again in sleep; it suffices if it is, so to speak, “touched off.” What I mean is this: If a few notes are struck and someone says, as in Don Juan: “That is from Figaro’s Wedding by Mozart,” memories suddenly surge up within me, none of which I can in the next moment recall to consciousness. The characteristic phrase serves as an entrance station from which a complete whole is simultaneously put in motion. It need not be different in the case of unconscious thought. The psychic station which opens the way to the whole guillotine phantasy is set in motion by the waking stimulus. This phantasy, however, is not passed in review during sleep, but only afterwards in waking memory. Upon awakening one remembers the details of the phantasy, which in the dream was regarded as a whole. There is, withal, no means of making sure that one really has remembered anything which has been dreamed. The same explanation, namely, that one is dealing with finished phantasies which have been set in motion as wholes by the waking stimulus, may be applied to still other dreams which proceed from a waking stimulus—for instance to the battle dream of Napoleon at the explosion of the bomb. I do not mean to assert that all waking dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated discharge of ideas in dreams is to be altogether solved in this manner.

We must not neglect the relation of this secondary elaboration of the dream content to the other factors in the dream activity. Might the procedure be as follows: the dream-creating factors, the impulse to condense, the necessity of evading the censor, and the regard for dramatic fitness in the psychic resources of the dream—these first of all create a provisional dream content, and this is then subsequently modified until it satisfies the exactions of a second instance? This is hardly probable. It is necessary rather to assume that the demands of this instance are from the very beginning lodged in one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy, and that this condition, just like those of condensation, of censorship, and of dramatic fitness, simultaneously affect the whole mass of material in the dream thoughts in an inductive and selective manner. But of the four conditions necessary for the dream formation, the one last recognised is the one whose exactions appear to be least binding upon the dream. That this psychic function, which undertakes the so-called secondary elaboration of the dream content is identical with the work of our waking thought may be inferred with great probability from the following consideration:—Our waking (foreconscious) thought behaves towards a given object of perception just exactly as the function in question behaves towards the dream content. It is natural for our waking thought to bring about order in the material of perception, to construct relationships, and to make it subject to the requirements of an intelligible coherence. Indeed, we go too far in doing this; the tricks of prestidigitators deceive us by taking advantage of this intellectual habit. In our effort to put together the sensory impressions which are offered to us in a comprehensible manner, we often commit the most bizarre errors and even distort the truth of the material we have before us. Proofs for this are too generally familiar to need more extended consideration here. We fail to see errors in a printed page because our imagination pictures the proper words. The editor of a widely-read French paper is said to have risked the wager that he could print the words “from in front” or “from behind” in every sentence of a long article without any of his readers noticing it. He won the wager. A curious example of incorrect associations years ago caught my attention in a newspaper. After the session of the French chamber, at which Dupuy quelled a panic caused by the explosion of a bomb thrown into the hall by an anarchist by saying calmly, “La séance continue,” the visitors in the gallery were asked to testify as to their impression of the attempted assassination. Among them were two provincials. One of these told that immediately after the conclusion of a speech he had heard a detonation, but had thought that it was the custom in parliament to fire a shot whenever a speaker had finished. The other, who had apparently already heard several speakers, had got the same idea, with the variation, however, that he supposed this shooting to be a sign of appreciation following an especially successful speech.

Thus the psychic instance which approaches the dream content with the demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to preliminary interpretation, and in doing so brings about a complete misunderstanding of it, is no other than our normal thought. In our interpretation the rule will be in every case to disregard the apparent coherence of the dream as being of suspicious origin, and, whether the elements are clear or confused, to follow the same regressive path to the dream material.

We now learn upon what the scale of quality in dreams from confusion to clearness—mentioned above, page 305—essentially depends. Those parts of the dream with which the secondary elaboration has been able to accomplish something seem to us clear; those where the power of this activity has failed seem confused. Since the confused parts of the dream are often also those which are less vividly imprinted, we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is also responsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the individual dream structures.

If I were to seek an object of comparison for the definitive formation of the dream as it manifests itself under the influence of normal thinking, none better offers itself than those mysterious inscriptions with which Die Fliegende Blaetter has so long amused its readers. The reader is supposed to find a Latin inscription concealed in a given sentence which, for the sake of contrast, is in dialect and as scurrilous as possible in significance. For this purpose the letters are taken from their groupings in syllables and are newly arranged. Now and then a genuine Latin word results, at other places we think that we have abbreviations of such words before us, and at still other places in the inscription we allow ourselves to be carried along over the senselessness of the disjointed letters by the semblance of disintegrated portions or by breaks in the inscription. If we do not wish to respond to the jest we must give up looking for an inscription, must take the letters as we see them, and must compose them into words of our mother tongue, unmindful of the arrangement which is offered.

I shall now undertake a résumé of this extended discussion of the dream activity. We were confronted by the question whether the mind exerts all its capabilities to the fullest development in dream formation, or only a fragment of its capabilities, and these restricted in their activity. Our investigation leads us to reject such a formulation of the question entirely as inadequate to our circumstances. But if we are to remain on the same ground when we answer as that on which the question is urged upon us, we must acquiesce in two conceptions which are apparently opposed and mutually exclusive. The psychic activity in dream formation resolves itself into two functions—the provision of the dream thoughts and the transformation of these into the dream content. The dream thoughts are entirely correct, and are formed with all the psychic expenditure of which we are capable; they belong to our thoughts which have not become conscious, from which our thoughts which have become conscious also result by means of a certain transposition. Much as there may be about them which is worth knowing and mysterious, these problems have no particular relation to the dream, and have no claim to be treated in connection with dream problems. On the other hand, there is that second portion of the activity which changes the unconscious thoughts into the dream content, an activity peculiar to dream life and characteristic of it. Now, this peculiar dream-work is much further removed from the model of waking thought than even the most decided depreciators of psychic activity in dream formation have thought. It is not, one might say, more negligent, more incorrect, more easily forgotten, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something qualitatively altogether different from waking thought, and therefore not in any way comparable to it. It does not in general think, calculate, or judge at all, but limits itself to transforming. It can be exhaustively described if the conditions which must be satisfied at its creation are kept in mind. This product, the dream, must at any cost be withdrawn from the censor, and for this purpose the dream activity makes use of the displacement of psychic intensities up to the transvaluation of all psychic values; thoughts must exclusively or predominatingly be reproduced in the material of visual and acoustic traces of memory, and this requirement secures for the dream-work the regard for presentability, which meets the requirement by furnishing new displacements. Greater intensities are (probably) to be provided than are each night at the disposal of the dream thoughts, and this purpose is served by the prolific condensation which is undertaken with the component parts of the dream thoughts. Little attention is paid to the logical relations of the thought material; they ultimately find a veiled representation in the formal peculiarities of the dream. The affects of the dream thoughts undergo lesser changes than their presentation content. As a rule they are suppressed; where they are preserved they are freed from the presentations and put together according to their similarity. Only one part of the dream-work—the revision varying in amount, made by the partially roused conscious thought—at all agrees with the conception which the authors have tried to extend to the entire activity of dream formation.