Most people often dream at night. When they wake in the morning they say to themselves, “What a strange dream I had! I wonder what made me dream that.”
Sometimes dreams are frightening. Sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. At other times we are troubled by strange dreams in which the world seems to have been turned upside-down1and nothing makes sense.
In dreams we do things which we would never do when we’re awake. We think and say things we would never think and say. Why are dreams so strange and unfamiliar? Where do dreams come from?
No one has produced a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. He said that dreams come from a part of one’s mind which one can neither recognize nor control. He named this the “unconscious mind.”
Sigmund Freud was born about a hundred years ago. He lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but ended his days in London, soon after the beginning of the Second World War.
The new worlds Freud explored were inside man himself. For the unconscious mind is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. These memories and feelings have been stored there from the moment of our birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not suspect that they are there until some unhappy or unusual experience causes us to remember, or to dream dreams. Then suddenly we see the same thing and feel the same way we felt when we were little children.
This discovery of Freud’s is very important if we wish to understand why people act as they do. For the unconscious forces inside us are at least as powerful as the conscious forces we know about. Sometimes we do things without knowing why. If we don’t, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds.
When Freud was a child he cared about the sufferings of others, so it isn’t surprising that he became a doctor when he grew up. He learned all about the way in which the human body works. But he became more and more curious about the human mind. He went to Paris to study with a famous French doctor, Charcot.
At that time it seemed that no one knew very much about the mind. If a person went mad, or ’out of his mind’, there was not much that could be done about it. People didn’t understand at all what was happening to the madman. Had he been possessed by a devil or evil spirit? Was God punishing him for wrong-doing? Often such people were shut away from the ordinary people as if they had done some terrible crime.
This is still true today in many places. Doctors prefer to experiment on those parts of a man which they can see and examine. If you cut a man’s head open you can see his brain. But you can’t see his thoughts or ideas or dreams. In Freud’s day few doctors were interested in these subjects. Freud wanted to know how our minds work. He learned a lot from Charcot.
He returned to Vienna in 1886 and began work as a doctor in nerve diseases. He got married and began to receive more and more patients at home. Most of the patients who came to see him were women. They were over-excited and anxious, sick in mind rather than in body. Medicine did not help them. Freud was full of sympathy but he could do little to make them better.
Then one day a friend, Dr Josef Breuer, came to see him. He told Freud about a girl he was looking after. The girl seemed to get better when she was allowed to talk about herself. She told Dr Breuer everything that came into her mind. And each time she talked to him she remembered more about her life as a little child.
Freud was excited when he heard this. He began to try to cure his patients in the same way. He asked about the events of their early childhood. He urged them to talk about their own experiences and relationships. He himself said very little.
Often, as he listened, his patients relived moments from their past life. They trembled with anger and fear, hate and love. They acted as though Freud was their father or mother or lover.
The doctor did not make any attempt to stop them. He quietly accepted whatever they told him, the good things and the bad.
One young woman who came to him couldn’t drink anything, although she was very thirsty. Something prevented her from drinking.
Freud discovered the reason for this. One day, as they were talking, the girl remembered having seen a dog drink from her nurse’s glass. She hadn’t told the nurse, whom she disliked. She had forgotten the whole experience. But suddenly this childhood memory returned to mind. When she had told it all to Dr Freud—the nurse, the dog, the glass of water —the girl was able to drink again.
Freud called this treatment the ’talking cure’. Later it was called psychoanalysis. When patients talked freely about the things that were troubling them they often felt better.
The things that patients told him sometimes gave Freud a shock. He discovered that the feelings of very young children are not so different from those of their parents. A small boy may love his mother so much that he wants to kill his father. At the same time he loves his father and is deeply ashamed of this wish. It is difficult to live with such mixed feelings, so they fade away1into the unconscious mind and only return in troubled dreams.
It was hard to believe that people could become blind, or lose the power of speech, because of what had happened to them when they were children. Freud was attacked from all sides for what he discovered. But he also found firm friends. Many people believed that he had at last found a way to unlock the secrets of the human mind, and to help people who were very miserable. He had found the answer to many of life’s great questions.
He became famous all over the world and taught others to use the talking cure. His influence on modern art, literature and science cannot be measured. People who wrote books and plays, people who painted pictures, people who worked in schools, hospitals and prisons; all these learned something from the great man who discovered a way into the unconscious mind.
Not all of Freud’s ideas are accepted today. But others have followed where he led and have helped us to understand ourselves better. Because of him, and them, there is more hope today than there has ever been before for people who were once just called ’crazy’.
每个人都爱做梦 想知道梦的成因吗
大多数人夜晚经常做梦，早上醒来便自语：“做了个好奇怪的梦!不知道怎么会梦见这个。”
有时候梦令人毛骨悚然，有时候梦却使愿望成真，还有的时候怪梦会来打扰我们，梦里的世界好像乱七八糟，不知所云。
在梦里我们会做一些醒着的时候绝不会做的事情，我们想的和说的也非平日所思所言。为什么梦会如此怪异和陌生?梦又是从哪儿来的呢?
迄今为止，除了一个名叫西格蒙特?弗洛伊德的人，没有人能给出更令人满意的答案。据他说梦来自于人无法识别和控制的那部分意识，他称之为“潜意识”。
西格蒙特?弗洛伊德出生于大约一百年前，一生大部分时间生活在奥地利的维也纳，二战爆发后不久在伦敦终了一生。
弗洛伊德探索的新世界是人自身的内心世界，因为潜意识就像一口深井，装满了各种记忆和情绪。这些记忆和情绪自我们出生之日起就已经储存在那儿了，而我们有意识的大脑却已将它们遗忘，直到某次不愉快或不寻常的经历使我们回忆或让我们做梦，我们才不怀疑它们的存在。我们会突然看见儿时见过的东西，感觉也一如从前。
如果我们希望了解人的所作所为，弗洛伊德的这一发现就非常重要，因为我们内心潜意识的力量至少与我们了解的意识力量同样强大。有的时候我们做事情却不知道为什么要这么做，原因可能就在我们深层的潜意识里。
儿时的弗洛伊德就表现出对他人疾苦的关心，所以长大之后做了医生就不足为奇了。他学习掌握了人体各部分的工作原理，但他却对人的意识越来越感兴趣。于是他去了巴黎，师从法国名医夏科特。
那时似乎还没有人对人的意识有太多的了解。如果一个人疯了，或“精神失常”了，基本就只能听之任之了。人们完全不知道这个疯子怎么了，是魔鬼附体呢，还是因做孽受到上帝的惩罚呢?这些人常常被关起来，同常人隔离，就像他们犯了什么大罪一样。
即便现在许多地方还是如此。医生们更愿意对人体看得见的器官进行检查、试验，比如你给一个人的头部开刀就可以看到大脑，但你却看不到他的思维、思想或者梦。在弗洛伊德那个时代，几乎没有医生对这些东西感兴趣，他却想知道我们的意识是如何工作的。他从夏科特那儿获益匪浅。
1886年他回到维也纳，开始了精神病医生的职业。他成了家，在家里接待的病人越来越多。她们大多是女性，显得过于激动、焦虑，心病多于体疾，药物帮不了她们的忙。弗洛伊德对此充满同情却无法缓解她们的痛苦。
有一天一个叫约瑟夫?布律尔的医生朋友来看弗洛伊德，说起他正在治疗的一个女孩。当这个女孩能够畅谈自己的时候她似乎就有所好转。她把脑子里出现的所有事情都和布律尔医生谈，每次谈的时候她都会想起更多儿时的事情。
弗洛伊德听完非常激动，他开始尝试用这种方法来治疗他的病人。他询问他们童年的早期生活，鼓励他们谈自己的经历和人际关系，而他自己却言语无几。
他就这么听着，他的病人们常常说着说着就回到了过去，那些愤怒恐惧、爱恨情仇让他们全身战栗，仿佛面前的弗洛伊德就是他们的父母或恋人。
我们的医生却不去阻止他们，他只是默默地听着他们诉说一切，不论好坏。
其中一位来看病的青年女子，什么都喝不进去，虽然她已非常口渴。一定有什么原因使她无法喝水。
弗洛伊德发现了此事的根源。一天他们谈话的时候，这个女孩回忆起曾见过一只狗在喝她的看护玻璃杯里的水，她不喜欢那个看护，因而没有告诉她。整个事情她都已经忘了，但突然这一儿时的记忆又回到了脑海。她将这一切都告诉了弗洛伊德医生 —— 看护、狗，还有那杯水，这时她又可以喝水了。
弗洛伊德将这样的治疗称为“倾诉疗法”，后被命名为“精神分析”。病人们畅谈那些困扰他们的事情时他们的感觉往往就好多了。
有的时候病人们的倾诉让弗洛伊德震惊，他发现早期儿童的情感与其父母的情感并无多大差别。一个小男孩对母亲的爱恋可能深到想要杀死自己的父亲，而同时他又爱自己的父亲，因而为自己的想法深感惭愧。这些混杂的情感很难让人接受，所以它们被淡忘于潜意识里，只有在扰人的梦境中才会重现。
很难相信人会因为儿时的经历而失明或失语，因而弗洛伊德的这一发现遭到来自各方面的攻击，但是他也找到了坚定忠实的朋友。许多人认为他最终找到了一条破解人类意识之谜的途径，从而帮助了那些备受折磨的人们。他找到了解答人生许多重大问题的答案。
他成了世界名人，并向他人传授倾诉疗法。他对现代艺术、文学和科学的影响是不可估量的，不论是作家、剧作家、画家，还是学校、医院和监狱的工作人员，都从这位发现了通往人类潜意识之路的伟人那儿学到了东西。
并不是弗洛伊德所有的思想都被当今社会接受，但是沿着他的道路进行探索的人们却使我们更多地了解了自己。因为他，还有他们，那些曾经被称为“疯子”的人如今有了前所未有的希望。
