Anxiety

Anxiety is an affective signal and consequence of conflict in Freud’s account of dreaming: it can arise when the censorship that normally restrains unconscious wishes is overcome, and it can also influence how a dream is interpreted. The same process that ordinarily helps dreams preserve sleep may, under pressure, release distress and bring sleep to an end. Anxiety therefore complicates the theory of wish-fulfilment without simply disproving it: a dream may fulfil a wish in one psychic system while provoking alarm in another.

Anxiety and Dream Censorship

In dreams of the death of a dear relative, Freud argues, a repressed wish may pass into the dream without the distortion ordinarily imposed by censorship. Such dreams are accompanied by grief or pain. Anxiety-dreams likewise occur when censorship has been entirely or partly overcome; current anxiety arising from bodily sources can make that breach easier. Freud takes these cases to reveal the censorship’s purpose: it works to prevent anxiety and other distressing affects by distorting dream material.

This account makes anxiety a sign of a compromise under strain. A dream begins as an attempted fulfilment of an unconscious wish, but the preconscious system may be so disturbed by that fulfilment that it cannot maintain its repose. The dream then ends in awakening. It has ceased to serve as the guardian of sleep and appears instead to disturb it, not because its ordinary function has changed, but because the conditions have changed and the sleeping mind must respond to the disturbance.

Inhibition, Will, and Anxiety

Freud also links anxiety to the sensation of being unable to move. In dreams where motor inhibition is felt, rather than merely represented as a situation, the conflict is expressed as an impulse of willing opposed by a counter-will. Since sleep itself involves inhibition of motor activity, this bodily condition can provide a means of representing conflict and negation in the dream.

In Freud’s proposed explanation, anxiety is an impulse of libido that proceeds from the unconscious and is inhibited by the preconscious. When motor inhibition is combined with anxiety, he infers that the impulse involved was once capable of developing libido and concerns sexual stirrings. The claim belongs to his theory of dream formation: it links the felt obstruction of movement with a psychic opposition between an unconscious impulse and the system that restrains it.

The Release of Unpleasure

Freud proposes that unconscious ideas, if left to develop without restraint, can produce an affect that was originally associated with pleasure but has become unpleasurable through repression. Suppression is meant to prevent that development. In his model, preconscious control inhibits unconscious ideas from transmitting the impulses through which affect develops; if that control is withdrawn, the excitation may release an affect felt as unpleasure or anxiety.

Sleep creates the conditions for this danger because the dream-process can allow unconscious excitation greater freedom. Anxiety may result when repression is in place and suppressed wishful impulses become strong enough to press forward. Freud acknowledges that this explanation reaches beyond the immediate mechanics of dream formation into the psychology of neurosis, but he uses it to show how a wish-fulfilling process can also become distressing.

Dreams, Symptoms, and Anxiety

Freud compares the compromise of a dream with neurotic symptoms. A symptom can give unconscious excitation an outlet while preserving some preconscious control; it both permits expression and contains the threat of anxiety. His example is a person who cannot cross a street alone: forcing the action may provoke an attack of anxiety, suggesting that the phobia has been established to prevent that outbreak. He describes the phobia as a frontier stronghold against anxiety.

The comparison clarifies why distress does not automatically refute wish-fulfilment. The unconscious and preconscious systems may be in conflict, and the dream or symptom can embody a provisional arrangement between them. If that arrangement fails, anxiety becomes manifest; its emergence signals that the existing means of control no longer suffice and that the psychic organization must respond.

Childhood and Recurring Anxiety Dreams

Freud recalls an anxiety dream from around his seventh or eighth year, which he interpreted decades later. He dreamed that his mother, appearing calm and asleep, was carried into a room by two or three elongated figures with birds’ beaks and laid on a bed. He woke crying and screaming, disturbing his parents’ sleep. The figures recalled illustrations in Philippson’s edition of the Bible, which Freud associated with Egyptian figures bearing falcon heads. His later analysis also connected the dream to a boy who had played with the children and to a word Freud associated with sexual meaning.

The dream’s image of his mother’s face, Freud further recalled, resembled his memory of his grandfather, whom he had seen snoring in a coma a few days before his death. In a secondary interpretation, the tomb imagery and his mother’s appearance made the dream seem to announce her death. Freud insists, however, that this interpretation arose under the influence of anxiety: he was not anxious because he had first understood the dream as a prediction of his mother’s death; rather, already anxious, he interpreted it in that preconscious way. He calmed when he saw that his mother was alive. In his analysis, the anxiety could be traced through repression to a dark sexual desire that had found expression in the dream’s visual material.

A second example concerns a man who, from ages eleven to thirteen, repeatedly dreamed with great anxiety that a man carrying a hatchet pursued him. The dreamer wanted to run but felt unable to move. His associations first led to a later story about his uncle being attacked at night, and then to his own childhood memory of hurting himself with a hatchet while chopping kindling. Analysis also brought forward his violence toward his younger brother, including an occasion when he kicked the boy and their mother feared he might kill him.

The dreamer then recalled, from age nine, hearing his parents return late and go to bed while he pretended to sleep. He had understood their sounds and position through an analogy with his own relationship to his brother, interpreting what happened between his parents as violence and fighting. The example gathers fear, inhibited movement, remembered aggression, and a child’s interpretation of parental intimacy into a chain of associations. Freud presents it as an anxiety-dream whose analysis reveals sexual material in its dream-thoughts, rather than as evidence that the dream’s manifest pursuit scene carries its meaning by itself.

Scope and Significance

Freud states that neurotic anxiety arises from sexual sources and uses anxiety-dreams to identify sexual material in their latent thoughts. He nevertheless marks the limits of this discussion: the full theory of anxiety belongs to the psychology of neuroses, and his account here is only a partial approach to the affective processes involved. The index also directs readers to coitus interruptus as a cause of neurotic anxiety and identifies anxiety-dreams with inadmissible sexual desires and psychosexual excitations.

Across these discussions, anxiety occupies several positions at once: it can precede and facilitate a breach in dream censorship, emerge when repressed excitation is released, and govern the dreamer’s later interpretation of what was seen. Its appearance marks the instability of the dream’s compromise between unconscious wish and preconscious restraint. Thus the dream may still be understood as wish-fulfilling while its distress reveals the conflict and the limits of that fulfilment.