Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/400

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382
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of emotion which have remained unconscious and have hitherto been suppressed, which can establish in the associations a connection with the actual incitement, and which can thus find release for its emotions through the vent which the unobjectionable and admitted source of emotion opens. Our attention is thus called to the fact that we may not consider the relation of mutual restraint as obtaining exclusively between the suppressed and the suppressing psychic judgment. The cases in which the two judgments bring about a pathological emotion by co-operation and mutual strengthening deserve just as much attention. The reader is requested to apply these hints regarding the psychic mechanism for the purpose of understanding the expressions of emotion in the dream. A satisfaction which makes its appearance in the dream, and which may readily be found at its proper place in the dream thoughts, may not always be fully explained by means of this reference. As a rule it will be necessary to search for a second source in the dream thoughts, upon which the pressure of the censor is exerted, and which under the pressure would have resulted not in satisfaction, but in the opposite emotion—which, however, is enabled by the presence of the first source to free its satisfaction affect from suppression and to reinforce the satisfaction springing from the other source. Hence emotions in the dream appear as though formed by the confluence of several tributaries, and as though over-determined in reference to the material of the dream thoughts; sources of affect which can furnish the same affect join each other in the dream activity in order to produce it.[1]

Some insight into these tangled relations is gained from analysis of the admirable dream in which "Non vixit" constitutes the central point (cf. p. 333). The expressions of emotion in this dream, which are of different qualities, are forced together at two points in the manifest content. Hostile and painful feelings (in the dream itself we have the phrase, "seized by strange emotions") overlap at the point where I destroy my antagonistic friend with the two words. At the end of the dream I am greatly pleased, and am quite ready to believe in a possibility which I recognise as absurd when I am awake,

  1. As analogy to this, I have since explained the extraordinary effect of pleasure produced by "tendency" wit.