Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Sigmund Freud was the pioneer who first tried to explore empirically the unconscious background of consciousness. He worked on the general assumption that dreams are not a matter of chance but are associated with conscious thoughts and problems. This assumption was not in the least arbitrary. It was based upon the conclusion of eminent neurologists (for instance, Pierre Janet) that neurotic symptoms are related to some conscious experience. They even appear to be split-off areas of the conscious mind, which, at another time and under different conditions, can be conscious. Before the beginning of this century, Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms -hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior- are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself just as it may in dreams and they are equally symbolic. A patient, for instance, who is confronted with an intolerable situation may develop a spasm whenever he tries to swallow: He “can’t swallow it.” Under similar conditions of psychological stress, another patient has an attack of asthma: He “can’t breathe the atmosphere at home.” A third suffers from a peculiar paralysis of the legs: He can’t walk, i.e., “he can’t go on any more.” A fourth, who vomits when he eats, “cannot digest” some unpleasant fact. I could cite many examples of this kind, but such physical reactions are only one form in which the problems that trouble us unconsciously may express themselves. They more often find expression in our dreams. Any psychologist who has listened to numbers of people describing their dreams knows that dream symbols have much greater variety than the physical symptoms of neurosis. They often consist of elaborate and picturesque fantasies. But if the analyst who is confronted by this dream material uses Freud’s original technique of “free association” he finds that dreams can eventually be reduced to certain basic patterns. This technique played an important part in the development of psychoanalysis for it enabled Freud to use dreams as the starting point from which the unconscious problem of the patient might be explored. Freud made the simple but penetrating observation that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on talking about his dream images and the thoughts that these prompt in his mind he will give himself away and reveal the unconscious background of his ailments in both what he says and what he deliberately omits saying. His ideas may seem irrational and irrelevant but after a time it becomes relatively easy to see what it is that he is trying to avoid what unpleasant thought or experience he is suppressing. No matter how he tries to camouflage it, everything he says points to the core of his predicament. A doctor sees so many things from the seamy side of life that he is seldom far from the truth when he interprets the hints that his patient produces as signs of an uneasy conscience. What he eventually discovers, unfortunately, confirms his expectations. Thus far, nobody can say anything against Freud’s theory of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism. Freud attached particular importance to dreams as the point of departure for a process of “free association.” But after a time I began to feel that this was a misleading and inadequate use of the rich fantasies that the unconscious produces in sleep. My doubts really began when a colleague told me of an experience he had during the course of a long train journey in Russia. Though he did not know the language and could not even decipher the Cyrillic script he found himself musing over the strange letters in which the railway notices were written and he fell into a reverie in which he imagined all sorts of meanings for them. One idea led to another, and in his relaxed mood he found that this “free association” had stirred up many old memories. Among them he was annoyed to find some long-buried disagreeable topics things he had wished to forget and had forgotten consciously. He had in fact arrived at what psychologists would call his “complexes” that is, repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances or even, in many cases, the symptoms of a neurosis. This episode opened my eyes to the fact that it was not necessary to use a dream as the point of departure for the process of “free association” if one wished to discover the complexes of a patient. It showed me that one can reach the center directly from any point of the compass. One could begin from Cyrillic letters, from mediations upon a crystal ball, a prayer wheel, or a modern painting or even from casual conversation about some quite trivial event. The dream was no more and no less useful in this respect than any other possible starting point. Nevertheless, dreams have a particular significance even though they often arise from an emotional upset in which the habitual complexes are also involved. The habitual complexes are the tender spots of the psyche which react most quickly to an external stimulus or disturbance. That is why free association can lead one from any dream to the critical secret thoughts. At this point, however, it occurred to me that (if I was right so far) it might reasonably follow that dreams have some special and more significant function of their own. Very often dreams have a definite, evidently purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention – though, as a rule, the latter is not immediately comprehensible. I therefore began to consider whether one should pay more attention to the actual form and content of a dream rather than allowing “free” association to lead one off through a train of ideas to complexes that could as easily be reached by other means. This new thought was a turning-point in the development of my psychology. It meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream. I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say. The change in my attitude toward dreams involved a change of method; the new technique was one of that I could take account of all the various wider aspects of a dream. A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different. To understand it you must examine it from every aspect just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape. Perhaps I have now said enough to show how I came increasingly to disagree with “free” association as Freud first employed it: I wanted to keep as close as possible to the dream itself and to exclude all the irrelevant ideas and associations that it might evoke. True, these could lead one toward the complexes of a patient but I had a more far-reaching purpose in mind than the discovery of complexes that cause neurotic disturbances. There are many other means by which these can be identified: The psychologist, for instance, can get all the hints he needs by using word-association tests (by asking the patient what he associates to a given set of words, and by studying his responses). But to know and understand the psychic life-process of an individual’s whole personality it is important to realize that his dreams and their symbolic images have a much more important role to play. Almost everyone knows, for example, that there is an enormous variety of images by which the sexual act can be symbolized (or, one might say, represented in the form of an allegory). Each of these images can lead, by a process of association, to the idea of sexual intercourse and to specific complexes that any individual may have about his own sexual attitudes. But one could just as well unearth such complexes by day-dreaming on a set of indecipherable Russian letters. I was thus led to the assumption that a dream can contain some message other than the sexual allegory and that it does so for definite reasons. To illustrate this point: A man may dream of inserting a key in a lock, of wielding a heavy stick or of breaking down a door with a battering ram. Each of these can be regarded as a sexual allegory. But the fact that his unconscious for its own purposes has chosen one of these specific images -it may be the key, the stick, or the battering ram- is also of major significance. The real task is to understand why the key has been preferred to the stick, or the stick to the ram. And sometimes this might even lead one to discover that it is not the sexual act at all that is represented but some quite different psychological point. From this line of reasoning, I concluded that only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream should be used in interpreting it. The dream has its own limitation. Its specific form itself tells us what belongs to it and what leads away from it. While “free” association lures one away from that material in a kind of zigzag line the method I evolved is more like a circumambulation whose center is the dream picture. I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it. Time and time again, in my professional work, I have had to repeat the words: “Let’s get back to your dream. What does the dream say?” For instance, a patient of mine dreamed of a drunken and disheveled vulgar woman. In the dream, it seemed that this woman was his wife, though in real life his wife was totally different. On the surface, therefore, the dream was shockingly untrue and the patient immediately rejected it as dream nonsense. If I, as his doctor, had let him start a process of association he would inevitably have tried to get as far away as possible from the unpleasant suggestion of his dream. In that case, he would have ended with one of his staple complexes -a complex, possibly, that had nothing to do with his wife- and we should have learned nothing about the special meaning of his particular dream. What then, was his unconscious trying to convey by such and obviously untrue statement? Clearly it somehow expressed the idea of a degenerate female who was closely connected with the dreamer’s life: but since the projection of this image on to his wife was unjustified and factually untrue I had to look elsewhere before I found out what this repulsive image represented. In the Middle Ages, long before the physiologists demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure there both male and female elements in all of us it was said that “every man carries a woman within himself.” It is this female element in every male that I have called the “anima.” This “feminine” aspect is essentially a certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings and particularly to women, which is kept carefully concealed from others as well as from oneself. In other words, though an individual’s visible personality may seem quite normal he may well be concealing from others -or even from himself- the deplorable condition of “the woman within.” That was the case with this particular patient: His female side was not nice. His dream was actually saying