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A METAPSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPLEMENT TO THE THEORY OF DREAMS ¹

We shall discover in various connections how much our enquiries benefit if certain states and phenomena which may be regarded as normal prototypes of pathological affections are brought up for purposes of comparison. Among these we may include such affective states as grief and being in love, as well as the state of sleep and the phenomenon of dreaming.

We are not in the habit of devoting much thought to the fact that every night human beings lay aside the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin, as well as anything which they may use as a supplement to their bodily organs (so far as they have succeeded in making good those organs’ deficiencies by substitutes), for instance, their spectacles, their false hair and teeth, and so on. We may add that when they go to sleep they carry out an entirely analogous undressing of their minds and lay aside most of their psychical acquisitions. Thus on both counts they approach remarkably close to the situation in which they began life. Somatically, sleep is a reactivation of intrauterine existence, fulfilling as it does the conditions of repose, warmth and exclusion of stimulus; indeed, in sleep many people resume the foetal posture. The psychical state of a sleeping person is characterized by an almost complete withdrawal from the surrounding world and a cessation of all interest in it.

In investigating psychoneurotic states, we find ourselves led to emphasize in each of them what are known as temporal regressions, i.e. the amount of developmental recession peculiar to it. We distinguish two such regressions - one affecting the development of the ego and the other that of the libido. In the state of sleep, the latter is carried to the point of restoring primitive narcissism, while the former goes back to the stage of hallucinatory satisfaction of wishes.

¹ This paper and the following one are derived from a collection which I originally intended to publish in book form under the title ‘Zur Vorbereitung einer Metapsychologie’ [‘Preliminaries to a Metapsychology’]. They follow on some papers which were printed in Volume III of the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse (‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, ‘Repression’ and ‘The Unconscious’). The intention of the series is to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded.