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'. 

    每個人都愛做夢 想知道夢的成因嗎 

    大多數人夜晚經常做夢，早上醒來便自語：“做了個好奇怪的夢！不知道怎么會夢見這個。”

    有時候夢令人毛骨悚然，有時候夢卻使愿望成真，還有的時候怪夢會來打擾我們，夢里的世界好像亂七八糟，不知所云。

    在夢里我們會做一些醒著的時候絕不會做的事情，我們想的和說的也非平日所思所言。為什么夢會如此怪異和陌生？夢又是從哪兒來的呢？

    迄今為止，除了一個名叫西格蒙特 弗洛伊德的人，沒有人能給出更令人滿意的答案。據他說夢來自于人無法識別和控制的那部分意識，他稱之為“潛意識”。

    西格蒙特 弗洛伊德出生于大約一百年前，一生大部分時間生活在奧地利的維也納，二戰爆發后不久在倫敦終了一生。

    弗洛伊德探索的新世界是人自身的內心世界，因為潛意識就像一口深井，裝滿了各種記憶和情緒。這些記憶和情緒自我們出生之日起就已經儲存在那兒了，而我們有意識的大腦卻已將它們遺忘，直到某次不愉快或不尋常的經歷使我們回憶或讓我們做夢，我們才不懷疑它們的存在。我們會突然看見兒時見過的東西，感覺也一如從前。

    如果我們希望了解人的所作所為，弗洛伊德的這一發現就非常重要，因為我們內心潛意識的力量至少與我們了解的意識力量同樣強大。有的時候我們做事情卻不知道為什么要這么做，原因可能就在我們深層的潛意識里。

    兒時的弗洛伊德就表現出對他人疾苦的關心，所以長大之后做了醫生就不足為奇了。他學習掌握了人體各部分的工作原理，但他卻對人的意識越來越感興趣。于是他去了巴黎，師從法國名醫夏科特。

    那時似乎還沒有人對人的意識有太多的了解。如果一個人瘋了，或“精神失常”了，基本就只能聽之任之了。人們完全不知道這個瘋子怎么了，是魔鬼附體呢，還是因做孽受到上帝的懲罰呢？這些人常常被關起來，同常人隔離，就像他們犯了什么大罪一樣。

    即便現在許多地方還是如此。醫生們更愿意對人體看得見的器官進行檢查、試驗，比如你給一個人的頭部開刀就可以看到大腦，但你卻看不到他的思維、思想或者夢。在弗洛伊德那個時代，幾乎沒有醫生對這些東西感興趣，他卻想知道我們的意識是如何工作的。他從夏科特那兒獲益匪淺。

    1886年他回到維也納，開始了精神病醫生的職業。他成了家，在家里接待的病人越來越多。她們大多是女性，顯得過于激動、焦慮，心病多于體疾，藥物幫不了她們的忙。弗洛伊德對此充滿同情卻無法緩解她們的痛苦。

    有一天一個叫約瑟夫?布律爾的醫生朋友來看弗洛伊德，說起他正在治療的一個女孩。當這個女孩能夠暢談自己的時候她似乎就有所好轉。她把腦子里出現的所有事情都和布律爾醫生談，每次談的時候她都會想起更多兒時的事情。

    弗洛伊德聽完非常激動，他開始嘗試用這種方法來治療他的病人。他詢問他們童年的早期生活，鼓勵他們談自己的經歷和人際關系，而他自己卻言語無幾。

    他就這么聽著，他的病人們常常說著說著就回到了過去，那些憤怒恐懼、愛恨情仇讓他們全身戰栗，仿佛面前的弗洛伊德就是他們的父母或戀人。

    我們的醫生卻不去阻止他們，他只是默默地聽著他們訴說一切，不論好壞。

    其中一位來看病的青年女子，什么都喝不進去，雖然她已非常口渴。一定有什么原因使她無法喝水。

    弗洛伊德發現了此事的根源。一天他們談話的時候，這個女孩回憶起曾見過一只狗在喝她的看護玻璃杯里的水，她不喜歡那個看護，因而沒有告訴她。整個事情她都已經忘了，但突然這一兒時的記憶又回到了腦海。她將這一切都告訴了弗洛伊德醫生 —— 看護、狗，還有那杯水，這時她又可以喝水了。

    弗洛伊德將這樣的治療稱為“傾訴療法”，后被命名為“精神分析”。病人們暢談那些困擾他們的事情時他們的感覺往往就好多了。

    有的時候病人們的傾訴讓弗洛伊德震驚，他發現早期兒童的情感與其父母的情感并無多大差別。一個小男孩對母親的愛戀可能深到想要殺死自己的父親，而同時他又愛自己的父親，因而為自己的想法深感慚愧。這些混雜的情感很難讓人接受，所以它們被淡忘于潛意識里，只有在擾人的夢境中才會重現。

    很難相信人會因為兒時的經歷而失明或失語，因而弗洛伊德的這一發現遭到來自各方面的攻擊，但是他也找到了堅定忠實的朋友。許多人認為他最終找到了一條破解人類意識之謎的途徑，從而幫助了那些備受折磨的人們。他找到了解答人生許多重大問題的答案。

    他成了世界名人，并向他人傳授傾訴療法。他對現代藝術、文學和科學的影響是不可估量的，不論是作家、劇作家、畫家，還是學校、醫院和監獄的工作人員，都從這位發現了通往人類潛意識之路的偉人那兒學到了東西。

    并不是弗洛伊德所有的思想都被當今社會接受，但是沿著他的道路進行探索的人們卻使我們更多地了解了自己。因為他，還有他們，那些曾經被稱為“瘋子”的人如今有了前所未有的希望。