A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
complexions stand opposite each other in preparation for a fight, fall
upon each other, seize each other, take up the old position again, and
repeat the whole performance;" here the interpretation of these rows of
boys as teeth is plausible in itself, and it seems to become convincing
when after this scene the dreamer "pulls a long tooth out of his jaws."
The interpretation of "long, narrow, winding corridors" as intestinal
stimuli, seems sound and confirms Schirmer's assertion that the dream
above all seeks to represent the stimulus-producing organ by means of
objects resembling it.
Thus we must be prepared to admit that the internal stimuli may play the
same role in the dream as the external. Unfortunately, their evaluation
is subject to the same difficulties as those we have already
encountered. In a large number of cases the interpretation of the
stimuli as somatic remains uncertain and undemonstrable. Not all dreams,
but only a certain portion of them, arouse the suspicion that an
internal organic stimulus was concerned in their causation. And finally,
the internal stimuli will be as little able as the external sensory
stimuli to explain any more of the dream than pertains to the direct
reaction to the stimuli. The origin, therefore, of the rest of the dream
remains obscure.
Let us, however, notice a peculiarity of dream life which becomes
apparent in the study of these effects of stimuli. The dream does not
simply reproduce the stimulus, but it elaborates it, it plays upon it,
places it in a sequence of relationships, replaces it with something
else. That is a side of dream activity which must interest us because it
may lead us closer to the nature of the dream. If one does something
under stimulation, then this stimulation need not exhaust the act.
Shakespeare's _Macbeth_, for example, is a drama created on the occasion
of the coronation of the King who for the first time wore upon his head
the crown symbolizing the union of three countries. But does this
historical occasion cover the content of the drama, does it explain its
greatness and its riddle? Perhaps the external and internal stimuli,
acting upon the sleeper, are only the incitors of the dream, of whose
nature nothing is betrayed to us from our knowledge of that fact.
The other element common to dreams, their psychic peculiarity, is on the
one hand hard to comprehend, and on the other hand offers no point for
further investigation. In dreams we perceive a thing for the most part
in visual forms. Can the stimuli furnish a solution for this fact? Is it
actually the stimulus which we experience? Why, then, is the experience
visual when optic stimulation incited the dream only in the rarest
cases? Or can it be proved, when we dream speeches, that during sleep a
conversation or sounds resembling it reached our ear? This possibility I
venture decisively to reject.
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