Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/79

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
LITERATURE OF THE DREAM
61

qui constituent le rêve, me sont suggérées par les incitations que je ressens et que ma volonté absente ne cherche pas à réfouler" (p. 113).

If one believes in the capacity of the dream to reveal an actually existing but repressed or concealed immoral disposition of the dreamer, he could not emphasize his opinion more strongly than with the words of Maury (p. 115): "En rêve l'homme se révèle donc tout entier à soi-même dans sa nudité et sa misère natives. Des qu'il suspend l'exercice de sa volonté, il dévient le jouet de toutes les passions contre lesquelles, à l'etat de veille, la conscience, le sentiment d'honneur, la crainte nous défendent." In another place he finds the following striking words (p. 462): "Dans le rêve, c'est surtout l'homme instinctif que se révèle.... L'homme revient pour ainsi dire á l'état de nature quand il rêve; mais moins les idées acquises ont pénétre dans son esprit, plus les penchants en désaccord avec elles conservent encore sur lui d'influence dans le rêve." He then mentions as an example that his dreams often show him as a victim of just those superstitions which he most violently combats in his writing.

The value of all these ingenious observations for a psychological knowledge of the dream life, however, is marred by Maury through the fact that he refuses to recognise in the phenomena so correctly observed by him any proof of the "automatisme psychologique" which in his opinion dominates the dream life. He conceives this automatism as a perfect contrast to the psychic activity.

A passage in the studies on consciousness by Strieker77 reads: "The dream does not consist of delusions merely; if, e.g., one is afraid of robbers in the dream, the robbers are, of course, imaginary, but the fear is real. One's attention is thus called to the fact that the effective development in the dream does not admit of the judgment which one bestows upon the rest of the dream content, and the problem arises what part of the psychic processes in the dream may be real, i.e. what part of them may demand to be enrolled among the psychic processes of the waking state?"

(g) Dream Theories and Functions of the Dream.—A statement concerning the dream which as far as possible attempts to explain from one point of view many of its noted characters, and