On The Id, The Ego, And The Superego:
According [with the analogy of political censorship], we would assume two psychical forces (currents, systems) to be the originators of dream-formation in the individual; one of these forms the wish uttered by the dream, while the other imposes a censorship on the dream-wish and by this censorship distorts its expression…. nothing from the first system can become conscious which has not previously been passed by the second agency, and the second agency lets nothing pass without exercising its rights and making whatever changes it thinks fit to the applicant for consciousness. Saying this reveals a quite distinct conception of the ‘nature’ of consciousness: in our view, the entry of something into consciousness constitutes a specific psychical act, different from the process by which ideas are generated or imagined and independent of it; and we regard consciousness as a sensory organ perceiving a content given from elsewhere. It can be shown that psychopathology simply cannot do without this basic assumption.
In this way my second agency [the superego], which rules over access to consciousness, bestows a distinction on my friend R. by an outpouring of excessive affection, because the wishful endeavors of the first system [the id], in their particular all-absorbing interest, would slander him as a numbskull. Perhaps at this point we have a presentiment that the interpretation of dreams is capable of providing us with information about the structure of our psychical apparatus which till now we have sought in vain from philosophy…. Taking into account our assumptions about the two psychical agencies, we can now also add that distressing dreams in fact do contain something which is distressing to the second agency but at the same time fulfills a wish of the first agency.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Dream-Distortion, page 113, 114).
It is the censorship between the Unconscious and the Preconscious that we must acknowledge and honor as the guardian of our mental health…. [even while we sleep] his slumber is not deep – he also closes the gateway to movement.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 371).
[Questionable Inferences]:
According to this dream I was wrong: so it was her wish that I should be wrong, and the dream showed her that her wish was fulfilled.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Dream-Distortion, page 119).
[Note: Convenient…]
‘The butcher’s shop was already shut strikes one as a description of the experience. But wait: is that not a rather vulgar phrase which refers – or rather its opposite does – to an [unzipped fly] in a man’s dress? The dreamer, by the way, did not use these words; perhaps she avoided them…
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams, page 140-141).
[Note: This would be a stretch in most situations in my culture.]
It is in the nature of all censorship that in speaking of forbidden things one is permitted to say things that are not true sooner than the truth.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams, page 279).
[Note: Sure, but you failed to make the case that the former was necessary in order to prevent the latter from being expressed.]
Whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance…… That is why, when analyzing a dream, I insist that any scale indicating degrees of certainty should be abandoned entirely, and the slightest possibility that something of one sort or another might have occurred in the dream should be treated as absolutely definite.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 336).
[Note: But if you reject Bayesian methods, what assurances do you have of forming true beliefs?]
The best-interpreted dreams often have a passage that has to be left in the dark…. This is the dream’s navel, and the place beneath which lies the Unknown…. Out of a denser patch in this tissue the dream-wish then arises like a mushroom from its mycelium.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 341).
[Note: For Freud the root of the unconscious smells like mysticism, looks like mysticism…]
On How To Interpret Dreams:
Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, before me: a house with a boat on its roof, then a single letter of the alphabet, then a running figure with his head conjured away, and the like. Now I could fall into the trap of objecting that this combination and its constituent parts are nonsense. A boat does not belong on the roof of a house and a person without a head cannot run…. Obviously the correct solution to the rebus can only be reached if I raise no such objections to the whole or to the details, but take the trouble to replace each picture by a syllable or a word which, through some association, can be represented by the picture. The words connected in this way are no longer nonsense, but can yield the most beautiful and meaningful poetic saying. The dream is a picture-puzzle of this kind, and our predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation made the mistake of judging the rebus as if it were a pictorial composition. As such, it seemed to them to have no meaning or value.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Dream-Work, page 212).
On The Purpose Of Dreams:
Thus the wish to sleep must always be included among the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfillment of this wish.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 181).
On Dream-Contents And Dream-Thoughts (Latent vs. Manifest):
Applying our method of dream interpretation has enabled us to uncover the existence of a latent dream-content which is far more significant than the manifest dream-content.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 126).
On The Oedipus Complex:
A man mostly dreams of his father’s death, a woman of her mother’s. [This rule is] required to be explained by a factor of general significance. Put crudely, it as though a sexual preference were established very early, as though the boy saw a rival for love in his father, and the girl in her mother, and removing them could only be of benefit to the child.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 197).
[In this example, the superego] creates the excessive concern for her mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and defensive phenomenon. In this connection, it is not longer inexplicable why hysterical girls so often cling to their mothers with such extravagant tenderness… Being in love with one parent and hating the other belong to the indispensable stock of psychical impulses being formed at that time which are so important for the later neurosis. But I do not believe that in this respect psychoneurotics are to be sharply distinguished from other children of Adam…. It is far more likely – and this is supported by occasional observations of normal children – that with these loving and hostile wishes towards their parents too, psychoneurotics are only revealing to us, by magnifying it, what goes on less clearly and less intensely in the inner life of most children.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 200,201).
Like Oedipus we live in ignorance of those wishes, offensive to morality and forced upon us by Nature, and once they have been revealed, there is little doubt we would all rather turn our gaze away from the scenes of our childhood.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 203).
On Ideas Derived From Psychoanalysis And Their Underlying Dream-Thoughts:
The new associations are, as it were, parallel connections, short-circuits made possible by the existence of other and deeper connecting paths.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 213).
On Clarity Of Dream-Content:
[Like the work of the artist Galton], the features [of the dream-objects painted on an over-determined item of dream-content] have in common emerge more prominently, and those that do not match obliterate each other, and become blurred in the image.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 225).
[Note: Reminiscent of wave interference]
On Anxiety:
Anxiety is an impulse of the libido, proceeding from the unconscious and inhibited by the preconscious.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Dream-Work, page 254).
On Autobiography:
My own dreams have in general fewer sensory elements than I have to reckon with in the dreams of others.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 358).
On Reception To His Ideas:
I find it distressing to think that many of the premises at the basis of my psychological solution to the psychoneuroses will produce incredulity and laughter once I have published them.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Dream-Work, page 291).
The reader will always be inclined to accuse the author of overloading every rift with ore; but anyone who has gained experience of interpretation himself will have learned better.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 340).
That the dream [wish] always originates from the Unconscious, as we have admitted, can neither be proved to be universally applicable, though it cannot be disproved either.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 394).
On Consciousness:
All thinking is only a roundabout way from the memory of a satisfaction, adopted as its purposive idea, to an identical charge of the same memory, which, it is intended, will be regained by way of motor experiences… Thinking, then, must move towards freeing itself more and more from the exclusive regulation of the unpleasure-principle….
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 397).
On Why We Forget Our Youth:
As a consequence of this belated entry of the secondary processes, a wide field of memory-material also remains inaccessible to preconscious charging.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 398).