A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
You must surely have heard that in psychoanalysis it is always
maintained that all dreams have a sexual meaning. Now you yourselves are
in a position to form a judgment as to the incorrectness of this
reproach. You have become acquainted with the wish-fulfillment dreams,
which deal with the satisfying of the plainest needs, of hunger, of
thirst, of longing for freedom, the dreams of convenience and of
impatience and likewise the purely covetous and egoistic dreams. But
that the markedly distorted dreams preponderantly--though again not
exclusively--give expression to sex wishes, is a fact you may certainly
keep in mind as one of the results of psychoanalytical research.
6. I have a special motive for piling up examples of the use of symbols
in dreams. At our first meeting I complained of how hard it is, when
lecturing on psychoanalysis, to demonstrate the facts in order to awaken
conviction; and you very probably have come to agree with me since then.
But the various assertions of psychoanalysis are so closely linked that
one's conviction can easily extend from one point to a larger part of
the whole. We might say of psychoanalysis that if we give it our little
finger it promptly demands the whole hand. Anyone who was convinced by
the explanation of errors can no longer logically disbelieve in all the
rest of psychoanalysis. A second equally accessible point of approach is
furnished by dream symbolism. I shall give you a dream, already
published, of a peasant woman, whose husband is a watchman and who has
certainly never heard anything about dream symbolism and psychoanalysis.
You may then judge for yourselves whether its explanation with the help
of sex symbols can be called arbitrary and forced.
"_Then someone broke into her house and she called in fright for a
watchman. But the latter had gone companionably into a church together
with two 'beauties.' A number of steps led up to the church. Behind the
church was a hill, and on its crest a thick forest. The watchman was
fitted out with a helmet, gorget and a cloak. He had a full brown beard.
The two were going along peacefully with the watchman, had sack-like
aprons bound around their hips. There was a path from the church to the
hill. This was overgrown on both sides with grass and underbrush that
kept getting thicker and that became a regular forest on the crest of
the hill._"
You will recognize the symbols without any difficulty. The male genital
is represented by a trinity of persons, the female by a landscape with a
chapel, hill and forest. Again you encounter steps as the symbol of the
sexual act. That which is called a hill in the dream has the same name
in anatomy, namely, _mons veneris_, the mount of Venus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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