Headings and Sub-headings

Chapter
I THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE DEALING WITH THE PROBLEMS OF DREAMS 1
(A) The Relation of Dreams to Waking Life 7
(B) The Material of Dreams—Memory in Dreams 11
(C) The Stimuli and Sources of Dreams 22
(1) External Sensory Stimuli 23
(2) Internal (Subjective) Sensory Excitations 30
(3) Internal Organic Somatic Stimuli 33
(4) Psychical Sources of Stimulation 39
(D) Why Dreams are Forgotten after Waking 43
(E) The Distinguishing Psychological Characteristics of Dreams 48
(F) The Moral Sense in Dreams 66
(G) Theories of Dreaming and its Function 75
(H) The Relations between Dreams and Mental Diseases 88
Postscript, 1909 93
Postscript, 1914 95

Publication & Availability

– Notes & information at The Interpretation of Dreams : 6th November 1899 (published as 1900) : Sigmund Freud, this site /3 Sigmund Freud (18991106)
– Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com / home page – 1. The complete bilingual of THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS and ON DREAMS
contains Chapters I – IV, Chapter V, Chapter VI, Chapter VII, Bibliography & Indices for SE IV & V

Citations by Jacques Lacan of Chapter I, Interpretation of Dreams

None known as yet
Sigmund Freud’s References

A work in progress…..

Citation

***

Reference to Section (G) Theories of Dreaming and its Function
SE IV p78-80

***

-Studies on Hysteria : 1893-1895 : Sigmund Freud, see this site /3 Sigmund Freud (18930101)

SE II p67-70, (2) Frau Emmy von N. (Freud) Footnote 1

SE II p69, the penultimate paragraph of this Footnote 1, Not long ago I was able to convince myself of the strength of a compulsion of this kind towards association from some observations made in a different field. For several weeks I found myself obliged to exchange my usual bed for a harder one, in which I had more numerous or more vivid dreams, or in which, it may be, I was unable to reach the normal depth of sleep. In the first quarter of an hour after waking I remembered all the dreams I had had during the night, and I took the trouble to write them down and try to solve them. I succeeded in tracing all these dreams back to two factors: (1) to the necessity for working out any ideas which I had only dwelt upon cursorily during the day – which had only been touched upon and not finally dealt with; and (2) to the compulsion to link together any ideas that might be present in the same state of consciousness. The senseless and contradictory character of the dreams could be traced back to the uncontrolled ascendancy of this latter factor.

[SE II p70, James Strachey notes: The last paragraph but one (Not long ago…) of this footnote gives us the earliest published report of a tentative approach by Freud to the problem of the interpretation of dreams. Both the two factors which he brings forward here were given a place in his ultimate analysis, though only a secondary one. The first of them was the theory championed by Robert and was discussed in Chapter I (G) of The Interpretation of dreams (1900a), SE IV p78-80, and was partly accepted by Freud in Chapter VII (D), ibid., V p579. The second of the factors brought forward here will be found mentioned in Chapter V (a), ibid., IV, pp179.]

SE IV p78-80, Chapter I of Interpretation of Dreams, This ruling theory, which regards dreams as a somatic process, underlies a most interesting hypothesis put forward for the first time by Robert in 1886. [Robert, W. (1886) Der Traum als Naturnotwendigkeit erklärt, Hamburg] It is particularly attractive since it is able to suggest a function, a utilitarian purpose, for dreaming. Robert takes as the groundwork of his theory two facts of observation which we have already considered in the course of our examination of the material of dreams (see above, SE IV p. 18 ff.), namely that we dream so frequently of the most trivial daily impressions and that we so rarely carry over into our dreams our important daily interests. Robert (1886, 10) asserts that it is universally true that things which we have thoroughly thought out never become instigators of dreams but only things which are in our minds in an uncompleted shape or which have merely been touched upon by our thoughts in passing: “The reason why it is usually impossible to explain dreams is precisely because they are caused by sensory impressions of the preceding day which failed to attract enough of the dreamer’s attention.’ [Ibid., 19-20.] Thus the condition which determines whether an impression shall find its way into a dream is whether the process of working over the impression was interrupted or whether the impression was too unimportant to have a right to be worked over at all.

Robert describes dreams as ‘a somatic process of excretion of which we become aware in our mental reaction to it’. [Ibid., 9.] Dreams are excretions of thoughts that have been stifled at birth. ‘A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would in course of time become mentally deranged, because a great mass of uncompleted, unworked-out thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain and would be bound by their bulk to smother the thoughts which should be assimilated into his memory as completed wholes’ [Ibid., 10.] Dreams serve as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. They possess the power to heal and relieve. (Ibid., 32.)

We should be misunderstanding Robert if we were to ask him how it can come about that the mind is relieved through the presentation of ideas in dreams. What Robert is clearly doing is to infer from these two features of the material of dreams that by some means or other an expulsion of worthless impressions is accomplished during sleep as a somatic process, and that dreaming is not a special sort of psychical process but merely the information we receive of that expulsion. Moreover, excretion is not the only event which occurs in the mind at night. Robert himself adds that, besides this, the suggestions arising during the previous day are worked out and that ‘whatever parts of the undigested thoughts are not excreted are bound together into a rounded whole by threads of thought borrowed from the imagination and thus inserted in the memory as a harmless imaginative picture’ (Ibid., 23.)

But Robert’s theory is diametrically opposed to the ruling one in its estimate of the nature of the sources of dreams. According to the latter, there would be no dreaming at all if the mind were not being constantly wakened by external and internal sensory stimuli. But in Robert’s view the impulsion to dreaming arises in the mind itself-in the fact of its becoming overloaded and requiring relief; and he concludes with perfect logic that causes derived from somatic conditions play a subordinate part as determinants of dreams, and that such causes would be quite incapable of provoking dreams in a mind in which there was no material for the construction of dreams derived from waking consciousness. The only qualification he makes is to admit that the phantasy-images arising in dreams out of the depths of the mind may be affected by nervous stimuli. (Ibid., 48.) After all, therefore, Robert does not regard dreams as so completely dependent upon somatic events. Nevertheless, in his view dreams are not psychical processes, they have no place among the psychical processes of waking life; they are somatic processes occurring every night in the apparatus that is concerned with mental activity, and they have as their function the task of protecting that apparatus from excessive tension—or, to change the metaphor—of acting as scavengers to the mind.” [1]

1 [James Strachey, Robert’s theory is further discussed on SE IV pp. 164 n., 177 f . and SE V 579. -In the course of a footnote to Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895), quoted in the Editor’s Introduction to this volume, SE IV p . xiv f., Freud accepted this theory of Robert’s as describing one of the two main factors in the production of dreams.]