Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. *(2)
At any rate, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life.
* Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment of the subject, which I have deliberately left, because to fill them up would, on the one hand, require excessive labour, and, on the other hand, I should have to depend on material which is foreign to the dream. Thus, for example, I have avoided stating whether I give the word suppressed a different meaning from that of the word repressed. No doubt, however, it will have become clear that the latter emphasizes more than the former the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the problem, which obviously arises, of why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the censorship even when they abandon the progressive path to consciousness, and choose the path of regression. And so with other similar omissions. I have, above all, sought to give some idea of the problems to which the further dissection of the dream- work leads, and to indicate the other themes with which these are connected. It was, however, not always easy to decide just where the pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-sexual life plays in the dream, and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an obviously sexual content, is due to a special reason- which may not perhaps be that which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views and my neuropathological doctrines to regard the sexual life as a pudendum with which neither the physician nor the scientific investigator should concern himself. To me, the moral indignation which prompted the translator of Artemidorus of Daldis to keep from the reader’s knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the Symbolism of Dreams is merely ludicrous. For my own part, what decided my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation of sexual dreams I should be bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained problems of perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason that I reserved this material for treatment elsewhere.
*(2) If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.
By the analysis of dreams we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvellous and most mysterious of instruments; it is true that this only takes us a little way, but it gives us a start which enables us, setting out from the angle of other (properly pathological) formations, to penetrate further in our disjoining of the instrument. For disease- at all events that which is rightly called functional- does not necessarily presuppose the destruction of this apparatus, or the establishment of new cleavages in its interior: it can be explained dynamically by the strengthening and weakening of the components of the play of forces, so many of the activities of which are covered up in normal functioning. It might be shown elsewhere how the fact that the apparatus is a combination of two instances also permits of a refinement of its normal functioning which would have been impossible to a single system. *
* The dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our psycho-pathology on psychology. In a short unfinished series of articles in the Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie (“uber den psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit,” 1898, and “uber Deckerinnerungen,” 1899) I attempted to interpret a number of psychic manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception. (These and other articles on “Forgetting,” “Lapses of Speech,” etc., have now been published in the Psycho- pathology of Everyday Life.)
