The American Journal of Psychology/Volume 21/Freud's Theory of Dreams
FREUD'S THEORY OF DREAMS[1]
By Ernest Jones, M. D. (London), University of Toronto
Freud's theory of dreams occupies a nodal position in his psychology, constituting as it does a point of conjunction for his various conclusions on normal and abnormal mental life. From it as a starting-point he has developed outlooks that call for the earnest consideration of psychologists, for it is extensively conceded that if his conclusions are true they carry with them a revolutionary change in our knowledge of the structure and functions of the mind. These broader aspects of his theory will not here be considered,[2] the present paper being intended merely to delineate the main outlines of the dream theory proper. Owing to the richness of the subject-matter even this purpose can here of necessity be but very imperfectly attained, so that the following description can at best only serve as an introduction to the study of the Traumdeutung[3] No just criticism of the theory can be made without a careful perusal of this volume, in which Freud has in detail entered into all the manifold problems relating to dreams, has presented the evidence on which his conclusions are based, and has fully discussed rival views and anticipated the possible objections that may be raised to his own. A few illustrative examples, drawn from the writer's experience, will accompany the present paper, but in order to economise space no dream-analyses will be detailed, it being proposed to do this in a subsequent article.
The method Freud uses in the investigation of dreams is that termed by him Psycho-Analysis, and on the question of the reliability of this method rests that of the validity of his conclusions. No account of psycho-analysis itself can be given here,[4] for that alone would exact a long exposition, but it should explicitly be stated that the technique of this method is a complex and intricate matter, the acquirement of which is not, as many writers seem over-readily to assume, an easy task, but one requiring much practice, patience and experience. In no branch of science can the testing of the results obtained by the use of an entirely new and difficult technique be satisfactorily submitted to an off-hand trial on the part of some one quite untrained in this, and it is strange that it does not occur to those who do not directly confirm Freud's conclusions as soon as they "try psycho-analysis" that the fact may be due, not, as they hastily infer, to the erroneousness of those conclusions, but to a more humble explanation, namely that they have not mastered the technique. It is at all events striking that up to the present no investigator, in any country, who has taken the trouble to learn the technique of the psycho-analytic method, has reached any conclusions that fail to confirm Freud's in all particulars, although at least fifty thousand dreams have been investigated by this method; this fact in itself speaks for the finished state in which Freud gave the theory to the world.
It is commonly believed in scientific circles that the mental processes of which dreams are composed arise, without any direct psychical antecedent, as the result of irregular excitation of various elements in the cerebral cortex by physiological processes occurring during sleep. This, it is maintained, accounts for the confused and bizarre nature of the mental product, and any apparently logical connection and order that frequently appear to some extent in dreams are explained by the supposition that the mental processes in question are represented in cortical elements that stand in close, anatomical or physiological, relation to one another, and so are simultaneously stimulated by the peripheral stimuli. Hence any problem as to the psychical origin of the mental processes, still more as to the meaning of the dream as a whole, is by the nature of things excluded as being non-existent, and any investigation along such lines is condemned as savouring of antiquated superstitions about the " reading of dreams " unworthy of educated people. To this attitude Freud, as must every consistent philosopher, stands in sharp opposition. He contends that dream processes, like all other mental processes, have their psychical history, that in spite of their peculiar attributes they have a legitimate and comprehensible place in the sequence of mental life, and that their origins can be psychologically traced with as much certainty and precision as those of any other mental processes.
From one point of view dreams may be classified into the following three categories. First may be distinguished those that are at the same time sensible and intelligible; such especially are the dreams of children. The very occurrence of such dreams, in which the mental processes fully resemble those of waking life, although they are never confounded with them, is in itself a strong argument against the view that dreams result from the isolated activity of siugle groups of brain cells. Secondly, there are dreams which are connected and have an evident meaning, but one the content of which is curious and surprising, so that we cannot fit them into the rest of our waking life. A person dreams, for instance, that his brother has been gored to death by a bull; he cannot account for his having come by such a curious notion nor can he relate it to any waking thought. Thirdly, there is the most frequent type of dream, where the mental processes seem disconnected, confused and senseless. These two latter types of dreams have a peculiar quality of strangeness and unreality; they are foreign to the other mental experiences of the subject, and cannot be inserted into any place in his waking thoughts. It is as though the subject has lived through a different range of experience, in another place or in another world, which apparently has no connection with the one to which he is accustomed. Now Freud holds that this sense of foreignness is an illusion, due to very definite causes, and that the mental processes that go to form dreams are in direct continuity with those of waking life.
In tracing the antecedents of dream processes Freud makes use, as has been said, of the psycho-analytic method, which essentially consists in the collecting and ordering of ihzfree associations that occur to the subject when he attends to any given theme and abrogates the selecting control over the incoming thoughts that is instinctively exercised by the conscious mind. If this method is applied to any component part of a dream, however senseless it may appear on the surface, mental processes are reached which are of high personal significance to the subject. The mental processes thus reached Freud terms the "dream thoughts" they constitute the "latent content " of the drea'm in contradistinction to the " manifest content," which is the dream as related by the subject. It is essential to keep distinct these two groups of mental processes, for on the appreciation of the difference between them rests the whole explanation of the puzzling riddles of dreams. The latent content, or dream thought, is a logical and integral part of the subject's mental life, and contains none of the incongruous absurdities and other peculiar features that characterise the manifest content of most dreams. This manifest content is to be regarded as an allegorical expression of the underlying dream thoughts, or latent content. The distortion of the dream thoughts into the dream proper takes place according to certain well-determined psychological laws, and for very precise reasons. The core of Freud's theory, and the most original part of his contribution to the subject, resides in his tracing the cause of this distortion to a "censor" which interposes an obstruction to the becoming conscious of unconscious psychical processes. This conception, he arrived at from the analysis of various abnormal psychical manifestations, psycho-neurotic symptoms, which he found to be constructed on a plan fully analogous to that of dreams. It may be remarked at this point that, quite apart from any views as to the cause of the distortion, the nature and functions of the dream thoughts and other problems, the fact itself of the distortion is certain, and cannot be doubted by any one who carefully observes a few dreams. That, for instance, the vision of a strange room in a dream is a distorted presentation of several rooms that have been actually seen, from each of which various individual features have been abstracted and fused together so as to present a new and therefore strange room, is the kind of observation that can easily be verified. Before considering, therefore, the nature of the latent content it will be well shortly to describe the distorting mechanisms by means of which it becomes transformed into the manifest content.
A dream is not, as it appears to be, a confused and haphazard congeries of mental phenomena, but a distorted and disguised expression of highly significant psychical processes that have a very evident meaning, although in order to appreciate this meaning it is first necessary to translate the manifest content of the dream into its latent content, just as a hieroglyphic script yields its meaning only after it has been interpreted. The mechanisms by means of which the manifest content has been formed from the underlying dream thoughts may be grouped under four headings.
The first of these is called Condensation (Verdichtung). Every element of the manifest content represents several dream thoughts; it is, as Freud puts it, "over-determined" (überdeterminiert). Thus the material obtained by analysis of a dream is far richer and more extensive than the manifest content, and may exceed this in amount by ten or twenty times. Of all the mechanisms it is the easiest to observe, and to it is mainly due the sense of foreignness that dreams give us, for it is a process with which our waking thought is not familiar. The representation in the manifest content of the extensive material comprising the latent content is brought about by a true condensation, rarely by the mere omission of part of the latent content. The condensation is effected in several ways. A figure in a dream may be constituted by the fusion of traits belonging to more than one actual person, and is then called a "collective person" (Sammelperson) . This may occur either by the fusion of some traits belonging to one person with some belonging to another, or by making prominent the traits common to the two and neglecting those not common to them; the latter process produces a result analogous to a Gal ton's composite photograph. The same process frequently occurs with names: thus Freud mentions a dream in which the person seemed to be called Norekdal, which had been formed from the names of two of Ibsen's characters, Nora and Ekdal; I have seen the name Magua formed by fusing Maggie and Edna, and similar instances are common enough. The neologism thus produced closely resembles those met with in the psychoses, particularly in dementia praecox, and like these may refer to things as well as to persons. . Lastly in this, connection it should be remarked that certain of the elements in the manifest content are especially rich in associations, as if they formed particular points of junction (Knotenpunkte); they are in other words the "bestdetermined" elements. These are intimately related to the most significant elements in the underlying dream thoughts, and frequently show the greatest sensorial vividness in the manifest content.
Condensation subserves more than one function. In the first place it is the mechanism by means of which similarity, agreement or identity between two elements in the latent content is expressed in the manifest content; the two elements simply become fused into one, thus forming a new unity. If this fusion has already taken place in the latent content the process is termed Identification, if it takes place during the construction of the dream itself the process is termed Composition (Mischbildung}; the former process rarely concerns things, chiefly persons and places. In the process of identification a person in the dream enters into situations that really are proper to some other person, or behaves in a way characteristic of this second person. In the process of composition the fusion is revealed-in the manifest content in other ways; thus a given person may appear in the dream, but bearing the name of some second one, or the figure in the dream may be composed of traits taken some from the first, others from the second person. The existence of a resemblance between two persons or places may thus be. expressed in the dream by the appearance of a composite person or place built up in the way just mentioned; the important feature that the two have in common, which in this case is the essential constituent in the latent content, need not be present in the manifest content, and indeed usually is not. It is clear that by this means a considerable economy in presentation is effected, for a highly complex and abstract resemblance may be expressed by simply fusing the figures of the persons concerned. Thus, if two persons both show the sentiments of envy, fear and malice towards the subject of the dream these sentiments may be expressed by the appearance in the manifest content of a composite figure of the two persons. In this composite figure there may be traits common to both persons, such as colour of hair or other personal characteristics, but the essential resemblance, which is the cardinal point in the underlying dream thoughts, is as a rule not evident in the dream. The superficial resemblance presented in the dream is frequently thus the cover for a deeper and more significant one, and gives the clue to important constituents of the dream thoughts. The process in question may also represent merely the wish that there were such a resemblance between the two persons, and therefore the wish that they might be exchanged in their relation to the subject. When, for instance, a married lady dreams that she is breakfasting alone with some man friend, the interpretation is often a simple matter. In the second place condensation, like the other distorting mechanisms, subserves the function of evading the censor of consciousness. This is a matter that will presently be further discussed, but it is plain that a repressed and inacceptable wish that two persons or places may resemble each other in an important respect, or may be interchanged, can be expressed in the manifest content of a dream by presenting an insignificant resemblance between the two.
It might be assumed from the description given above that the process of condensation takes place in one direction only, that each element in the manifest content represents a number of elements in the latent content in the same way that a delegate represents the members of his constituency. This, however, is not so, for not only is every element in the manifest content connected with several in the latent content, but every element in the latter is connected with several in the former. In addition to this, frequently associations exist between the different elements of the entire structure of the dream, so that this often has the appearance of a tangled network until the full analysis brings law and order out of the whole.
The second distorting mechanism is that termed Displacement (Verschiebung) . In most dreams it is found after analysis that there is no correspondence between the psychical intensity of a given element in the manifest content and the associated elements in the latent content. An element that stands in the foreground of interest in the former, and seems to be the central feature of the dream, may represent the least significant of the underlying dream thoughts; conversely an apparently unessential and transitory feature in the dream may represent the very core of the dream thoughts. Further, the most prominent affect in the dream, hate, anxiety and so on, as the case may be, often accompanies elements that represent the least important part of the dream thoughts, whereas the dream thoughts that are powerfully invested with this affect may be represented in the manifest content of the dream by elements of feeble affective tone. This disturbing displacement Freud describes, using Nietzsche's phrase, as a "transvaluation of all values. ' ' It is a phenomenon peculiarly frequent in the psycho-neuroses, in which a lively interest or an intense affect may be found associated with an unimportant idea. In both cases a transposition of affect has taken place whereby a highly significant idea is replaced by a previously indifferent and unimportant one. Often the association between the primary and secondary ideas is a very superficial one, and especially common forms of this are witty plays on the speech expression for the two ideas, and other kinds of clang association. As is well known, Jung has demonstrated[5] that this superficial association is usually the cover for a deeper hidden bond of high affective value. This mechanism of displacement is the cause of the puzzling fact that most dreams contain so many indifferent and hardly noticed impressions of the previous day; these, having on account of their unimportance formed but few associations with previous mental processes, are made use of in the dream-making to represent more significant ideas, the affect of which is transferred to them. Displacement also explains much of the bizarreness of dreams, notably the remarkable incongruity between the intensity of the affect and the intellectual content; a person may in a dream be terrified at an apparently indifferent object and quite at ease in the presence of what should be alarming danger.
Condensation and Displacement are the two main mechanisms by means of which is produced the distortion during the passage from the latent to the manifest content. The extent to which a given dream appears confused, bizarre and meaningless varies exactly with the extent to which these two mechanisms have been operative in its formation. The following fragmentary extracts from some dream analyses will illustrate the processes in question.
(1) I recently dreamt that I was travelling in Italy on my way to the next Freudian Congress (which is to be held in March). On looking at my railway ticket I found it was for Lugaro. In reality I know of no place of that name, but I have pleasant memories of the charming Italian resort Lugano. In the dream I had replaced the n of this by the letter r. Now Nuremberg is the meeting-place for the Congress. Lugaro is the name of a well-known Italian psychiatrist. I am to my regret prevented from going to the Congress by having to give a psychiatry course at the time this is to be held. I have often described the neighborhood of Lugano as Ay/ scenery; on my way to Nuremberg (the toy centre of the world) I am arrested (Luga-w0) by the obstacle of my psychiatry course, and replace my destination by a name indicative of that fact. Further than this, I had recently seen the translation of Lugaro's "Modern Problems in Psychiatry," made by Orr and Rows; emphasis is thus cast on the last syllable of Lugaro's name by the play on the sound of "or" and "ro." The volume is chiefly concerned with problems of chemistry and morbid anatomy, and advocates a tendency in psychiatry the relative fruitlessness of which I have disparagingly contrasted with that pursued by Freud and Jung, both in the medical press[6] and, amongst others, in a conversation I had a couple of years ago (about Lugaro) with Dr. Rows. I deplore the translation of the book into English, for it will only serve to strengthen the materialistic trends, useful enough in their proper place, that already too exclusively occupy the thoughts of English psychiatrists. For reasons not under my control, my psychiatry course is likewise chiefly concerned with matters of chemistry and morbid anatomy, so that the enforced displacement of my Freudian interests by the tendency represented by Lugaro also finds expression in the negation of A^uremberg (Luga-#0), and the replacement of it by a word indicating in detail the nature of the interruption. I might further add that Lugaro is professor at Modena, and that a friend of mine, Dr. Modena of Ancona, is the first Italian psychiatrist to accept Freud's views, as I was the first English one. I had just heard that Dr. Mod&nz. is engaged in translating Freud's works into Italian, in a sense a counterbalance to the translation of Lugaro's "Modern Problems" into English; even the other consonant of Modena's name, n, is concerned in the dream-making by its being displaced by the prominent consonant, r, of those of the two English translators, Orr and Rows (Lugaro instead of Lugano).
Associated, therefore, with only one word in the manifest content of the dream, which at first sight appeared to be meaningless enough, are a number of mental processes that occupy a significant place in my waking life. These, and many others which for personal reasons I cannot mention, are connected with the element in the manifest content of the dream by means of exceedingly superficial associations, chiefly ridiculous plays on words of a kind I hope I should never be guilty of when awake. Any one, however, who is interested in the psychology of wit, or familiar with the unconscious phantasies of hysterics or the flight of ideas met with in mania and other psychoses, will not find it strange that the superficial associations and preposterous plays on words so characteristic of those fields of mental activity are common enough in yet another field, namely that of dream formation. The question as to whether the associations that occur during dream analysis are made only then, and take no share in the actual formation of the dream, will not here be discussed; it is one of the objections with which Freud fully deals in the Traumdeutung.
Like the other ones to be quoted, this fragment is only a small part of the full dream, and I might add that the associations here related are only intermediate connections to more remote thoughts, which as the analysis deepened soon left the subject of psychiatry for a more personal one.
(2) I was in the country in Massachusetts, and yet seemed to be in the east not of America but of England. Above a group of people was vaguely outlined the word Olve or Olde (which may be expressed as Olde). This dream affords a particularly striking illustration of displacement, for every element in it directly led in the analysis to thoughts about the Netherlands, although no indication whatever of this country appeared in the manifest content. Massachusetts brought to my mind its capital Boston, and the original Boston in Lincolnshire[7]. That reminded me of Essex,[8] these two counties being the most lowlying (Netherlandish) ones in England. In Essex lives a friend through whom I had got to know well a number of Flemish people. On the day preceding the dream I had written a letter to some one in Maiden, a town in Essex, a name the sound of which brought to my mind Moll of Flanders, The costume of the people in the dream was taken from a picture of Rembrandt's, which brought up a number of recent and old memories. Olde was a condensation of Alva, the tyrant of the Netherlands, and Van der Velde, the name of a Flemish painter whose work (oil paintings, Ol is German for oil) has struck me in the Louvre, and also of a particular Flemish friend: two days previously I had seen in the hospital a Dutchman with a very similar name. In short, turn which way I would, all parts of the dream stubbornly refused to associate themselves with anything but Netherland topics, the analysis of which resolutely led in only one direction.
(3) A patient, a woman of thirty-seven, dreamt that she was sitting in a grand stand as though to watch some spectacle. A military band approached, playing a gay martial air. It was at the head of a funeral, which seemed to be of a Mr. X; the casket rested on a draped gun carriage. She had a lively feeling of astonishment at the absurdity of making such an ado about the death of so insignificant a person. Behind followed the dead man' s brother and one of his sisters, and behind them his two other sisters; they were incongruously dressed in a bright grey check. The brother advanced ^like a savage" dancing and waving his arms; on his back was a yucca tree with a number of young blossoms. This dream is a good example of the second of the three types mentioned above, being perfectly clear and yet apparently impossible to fit into the patient's waking mental life. The true meaning of it, however, became only too clear on analysis. The figure of Mr. X veiled that of her husband. Both men had promised much when they were young, but the hopes their friends had built on them had not been fulfilled; the one had ruined his health and career by his addiction to morphia, the other by his addiction to alcohol. Under the greatest stress of emotion the patient related that her husband's alcoholic habits had completely alienated her wifely feeling for him, and that in his drunken moments he even inspired her with an intense physical loathing. In the dream her repressed wish that he would die was realised by picturing the funeral of a third person whose career resembled that of her husband's, and who like her husband, had one brother and three sisters. Further than this, her almost savage contempt for her husband, which arose from his lack of ambition and other more intimate circumstances, came to expression in the dream by her reflecting how absurd it was that any one should make an ado over the death of such a nonentity, and by the gaiety shown at his funeral not only by all the world (the gay air of the band; her husband is, by the way, an officer in the volunteers, while Mr. X has no connection with the army), but even by his nearest relative (the brother's dancing, the bright clothes). It is noteworthy that no wife appeared in the dream, though Mr. X is married, a fact that illustrates the frequent projection on to others of sentiments that the subject himself experiences but repudiates.
In real life Mr. X, who is still alive, is an indifferent acquaintance, but his brother had been engaged to be married to the patient, and they were deeply attached to each other. Her parents, however, manoeuvred to bring about a misunderstanding between the two, and at their instigation, in a fit of pique, she* married her present husband, to her enduring regret. Mr. X's brother was furiously jealous at this, and the paean of joy he raised in the dream does not appear so incongruous when we relate it to the idea of the death of the patient's husband as it does in reference to his own brother's death. His exuberant movements and ' 'dancing like a savage' ' reminded the patient of native ceremonies she had seen, particularly marriage ceremonies. The yucca tree (a sturdy shrub indigenous to the Western States) proved to be a phallic symbol, and the young blossoms represented offspring. The patient bitterly regrets never having had any children, a circumstance she ascribes to her husband's vices. In the dream, therefore, her husband dies unregretted by any one, she marries her lover and has many children.
(4) The following two dreams illustrate the formation of neologisms. The patient, a woman of thirty-nine, dreamt that she was sitting on a stage with four others, rehearsing a play they were to take part in; it seemed to be called "The Wreck of the Kipperling." Her title rôle was called Kipper. She felt foolish and embarrassed. This feeling she had several times recently experienced, circumstances having placed her in an awkward and compromising situation in regard to a man and woman, for both of whom she cared. Years ago, when in school in France, she had greatly suffered from feeling awkward and silly at having to read aloud in class from French plays, a language she imperfectly pronounced. Three days before the dream she had been reading a volume of satirical poems by Owen Seaman, and being a foreigner had had considerable difficulty in understanding and appreciating them. This had distressed her, for her friends thought very highly of them. Her embarrassment culminated at the reading of one poem, in which Rudyard Kipling is depreciated and entitled "Kipperling;" she much admired Kipling's writings and had felt foolish when her two friends assured her he was crude and vulgar. She resented his being nicknamed Kipperliug, and said "Fancy giving a poet the name of a silly little fish." From the fusion of Kipling and Kipperling, and perhaps influenced by the fact that the latter name had been employed by Seaman, she had coined for herself in the dream the title of Kipper. Kipper (fried herring) is frequently used in London slang to denote foolish people.
(5) In another dream the same patient imagined she was called "Hokerring," a neologism produced by fusing "moke" (a London slang term for donkey, used under the same circumstances as Kipper) with "smoked herring;" this process may be represented thus: (M) OKE
(SM) OKE (D)
H ERRING
(The parentheses indicate letters omitted in the neologism.) The term smoked herring reminded her of bloater, and of a rather vulgar word in her native language meaning nude, bloot (pronounced bloat). This brought up infantile memories of shyness and a sense of foolishness that were connected with nakedness.
The construction of the manifest content out of the latent content Freud terms the Dream-making {Traumarbeif) . In this two other principal mechanisms are concerned in addition to those just mentioned of condensation and displacement. The first of these may be called Dramatisation (Darstellung) . It is a familiar observation that the manifest content of most dreams depicts a situation, or rather an action, so that in this respect a dream may be said to resemble a theatrical representation. This fact exercises a selecting influence on the mental processes that have to be presented {Rucksicht auf Darstellbarkeif}, for dramatisation, like the arts of painting and sculpture, is necessarily subject to definite limitations, and therefore special expedients have to be employed to indicate mental processes that cannot be directly portrayed. Just as a painter has indirectly to convey abstract mental processes by adopting certain technical devices, so a dramatist has to select and modify his material in order to make it conform to the restrictions of his art, as for instance when an action extending over years has to be presented in a couple of hours. In a dream the mental processes are dramatised so that the past and future are unrolled before our eyes in a present action; a wish, for instance, that relates to the future is seen realised in a present situation.
It is further well known that the manifest content of most dreams is predominantly, though not exclusively, of a visual nature, and the particular process of expressing in a dream various thoughts in the form of visual pictures Freud terms Regression, wishing to indicate by this the retrograde movement of abstract mental processes towards their primary perceptions. The network of dream thoughts is in this way resolved into its raw material. This process of regression is characteristic of dreams as contrasted with other mental constructions formed by means of similar mechanisms, such as day-dreams, psycho- neurotic symptoms and so on, though it sometimes occurs in the last named in the form of hallucinatory visions. In his discussion of the nature and function of regression Freud develops a number of important theoretic considerations regarding the structure of the mind, which, however, cannot here be gone into. He traces regression, both in dreams and in visions, to the resistance of the censor of consciousness, and to the attraction exerted for the mental processes thus represented by infantile memories, which, as is known, characteristically preserve their original visual type. In the case of dreams, though not of course in the case of waking visions, it is possible that the regression is further facilitated by the cessation during sleep of the forward movement from the sensorial to the motor side.
Under the heading of dramatisation may also be included the representation of various intellectual processes. We shall presently see that the intellectual operations (judgement, etc.) that are frequently met with in the manifest content of dreams originate not in the dream-making but in the underlying dream thoughts; no intellectual work is performed in the dream-making proper. In the dream thoughts there are of course all kinds of intellectual processes, judgements, arguments, conditions, proofs, objections and so on. None of these, however, finds any special representation in the manifest content of the dream. As a rule they are entirely omitted, only the material content of the dream thoughts being represented in the dream, and not the logical relations of these. The dream-making, however, sometimes makes use of certain special devices to indicate these logical relations indirectly; the extent to which this is done greatly varies in different dreams and in different individuals. The logical relations between the constituents ot the dream thoughts, just as between those of waking thoughts, are displayed by the use of such parts of speech as "if," "although," "either," "because," etc., which, as has just been said, find no direct expression in the manifest content. Instances of the devices in question are the following: Logical concatenation between two thoughts is indicated by the synchronous appearance of the elements representing these in the manifest content; thus, in the third dream related above, the husband's death, the second marriage and the subsequent children, three logically related thoughts, are represented by three groups of elements that synchronously appear in the manifest content. Causal connection between two dream thoughts is usually not indicated at all. When indicated it is done by making the one representing element follow on the other. The commonest way of doing this is by one clause being represented in an introductory dream (Vortraum), the other in the main dream (Haupttraum); it should however be remarked that this splitting of the manifest content does not always indicate causal connection between the corresponding dream thoughts. A less frequent device is the bringing about a transformation of the one element into the other; the transformation must be a direct one, not a mere replacement, as when one scene passes gradually into another, not as when one scene is simply replaced by another. Evident absurdity in the manifest content signifies the existence of mockery or scorn in the dream thoughts, as was illustrated in the third dream related above. An alternative in the dream thoughts is not expressed in the manifest content; the representing elements are merely brought together in the same connection. When an alternative (either or) appears in the manifest content it is the translation of "and" in the dream thoughts; thus in the second dream related above I felt that the third letter in the word outlined was either v or d, and both of these were present in the latent content.
Opposition and contradiction between dream thoughts may be indicated in two ways in the manifest content. When the contrasting thoughts can be linked with the idea of exchange, then the representing elements may be fused into a unity, a process described above under the name of identification. Other cases of opposition, which fall into the category of the converse or reverse, may be indicated in the following curious way; two parts of the already formed dream that are connected with the dream thoughts in question are inverted. Inversion of mental processes in dream-making subserves other functions than the one just mentioned; it is for instance a favourite method of increasing the distortion; the simplest way of disguising a mental process is to replace it by its obverse. Some subjects seem to employ this distorting mechanism to an inordinate extent, and many dreams can be interpreted merely by inverting them. The inversion may concern either space or time. An instance of the former occurred in the third dream related above, where the yucca tree (phallus) was attached dorsally instead of ventrally. Instances of both may be seen in the following dream by the same patient.
(6) She stood at the seashore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. 7 his he did till the water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near the surface. The scene then changed into the crowded hall of an hotel. Her husband left her, and she "entered into conversation with" a stranger. The second half of the dream revealed itself in the analysis as representing a flight from her husband and the entering into intimate relations with a third person, behind whom was plainly indicated Mr. X's brother mentioned in the former dream. The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth phantasy. In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head into the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a revery in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him to a nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her household.
The second half of the dream therefore represented thoughts, concerning the elopement, that belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth phantasy. Besides this inversion in order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the first half the child entered the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dream thoughts first the quickening occurred, and then the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream thoughts she left her husband.
Last among the dream-making mechanisms is that termed Secondary Elaboration (secundäre Bearbeitung). It fundamentally differs from the other three in that it arises from the activity, not of the underlying dream thoughts, but of the more conscious mental processes. This remark will be more comprehensible when we presently consider the forces that go to make a dream. When the dream is apprehended in consciousness it is treated in the same way as any other perceptive content, and is therefore not accepted in its unaltered state but is assimilated to pre-existing conceptions. It is thus to a certain extent remodelled so as to bring it, so far as is possible, into harmony with other conscious mental processes. In other words an attempt, however unsuccessful, is made to modify it so as to render it comprehensible (Rücksicht auf Verständlichkeit). This secondary elaboration is closely allied to the process I have described as rationalisation[9]. As is well known, there is a pronounced tendency on the part of the mind to distort foreign experiences in such a way as to assimilate them to what is already intelligible; in hearing or seeing a sentence in a strange tongue the subject imagines analogies to familiar words in his own, a falsifying process that frequently is carried to excess, leading to curious misunderstandings. To this secondary elaboration is due whatever degree of ordering, sequence and consistency there may be found in a dream.
Reviewing now as a whole the process of dream-making we have above all to lay stress on the fact that in the formation of a dream no intellectual operation of any sort is carried out; the dream-making is concerned solely with translating into another form various underlying dream thoughts that were previously in existence. No creative work whatever is carried out by the process of dream- making; it performs no act of decision, calculation, judgement, comparison, conclusion or any kind of thought. Not even the elaboration of any phantasy occurs in the dream-making, though a previously-existing phantasy may be bodily taken over and woven into the dream, a fact that gives the key to the explanation of highly-wrought and yet momentary dreams such as the well known guillotine one related by Maury. Any part of a dream that appears to indicate an intellectual operation has been taken bodily from the underlying latent content, either directly or in a distorted form; the same applies to numerals and to speech phrases that may occur in a dream. Even some of the waking judgements passed on a dream belong to the latent content. To repeat, there is in the dream-making nothing but transformation of previously formed mental processes.
The dream-making proper is thus a process more distant from waking mental life than even the most determined detractor of dream activities would maintain. It is not merely more careless, incorrect, incomplete, forgetful and illogical than waking thought, but it is something that qualitatively is absolutely different from this, so that the two cannot be compared. Dream-making proceeds by methods quite foreign toour waking mental life; it ignores obvious contradictions, makes use of highly strained analogies, and brings together widely different ideas by means of the most superficial associations, for instance by such a feeble play on words as shocks the waking mind with a keen sense of ridiculousness. The mental processes characteristic of dreams would if they occurred in a conscious waking state at once arouse grave suspicion of impaired intelligence; as Jung has clearly pointed out[10] they are in fact processes that are frequently indistinguishable from those met with in advanced stages of dementia prsecox and other psychoses.
The affect in dreams has many interesting features. The incongruous manner in which it may be present when it is not to be explained by the ideas of the dream, or be absent when from these ideas it might have been expected, has already been noted above, and is quite elucidated by psycho-analysis, which reveals that in the underlying dream thoughts the affect is logically justified and is congruous enough. The apparent incongruity is solely due to the distortion of the conceptual content, whereby a given affect becomes secondarily associated with an inappropriate idea. The third dream mentioned above well illustrates this fact; the incongruity with which Mr. X's death was joyfully celebrated by his brother explains itself as soon as one realises that the figure of Mr. X in the dream represented that of another man in the latent content. The affect investing the latent content is always more intense than that present in the manifest content, so that, although strongly affective dream thoughts may produce an indifferently toned dream, the reverse never occurs, that is to say an affective manifest content never arises from an indifferently toned latent content. Freud attributes this inhibition of the affect in dream formation partly to the cessation in sleep of the forward movement from the sensory to the motor side he regards affective processes as essentially centrifugal and partly to the suppressing effect of the censor, which will presently be further considered. Another important matter is that the nature of the affect as it appears in the manifest content is the same as that of the latent content, although, as has just been said, the intensity of it is always less there than here. The effect of the dream-making on the original affect is thus different from that on the rest of the dream thoughts, in that no distortion of it takes place. As Stekel puts it in a recent article[11], "Im Traume ist der Affekt das einzig Wahre" The affect appears in the same form in the latent as in the manifest content, although through the mechanisms of transference and displacement it is in the latter otherwise associated than in the former. It should however be remarked that a given affect in the manifest content may represent its exact opposite in the latent content, but on closer analysis it will be found that the two opposites were already present in the latent content, and were both of them appropriate to the context; as is so often the case in waking mental life, exactly contrasting mental processes in dream thoughts are intimately associated with each other.
Having mentioned some of the mechanisms that bring about the distortion of the latent into the manifest content we may next shortly consider the material and sources from which a dream is composed. Again we have sharply to distinguish between the sources of the manifest content and those of the underlying dream thoughts; the latter will presently be dealt with apart. Three peculiar features shown by the memory in dreams have especially struck most observers: first the preference shown for recent impressions, secondly that the experiences are otherwise selected than in our waking memory, in that subordinate and hardly noticed incidents seem to be better remembered than essential and important ones, and thirdly the hypermnesia for previously forgotten incidents, especially for those of early childhood life.
The first two of these features may be considered together, for they are intimately connected. In every, dream without exception occur mental processes experienced by the subject in the last waking interval ( Traumtag}; other recent experiences that have not occurred on the day actually preceding the dream are treated in just the same way as more ancient memories. There must therefore be some special quality that is of significance in dream formation attaching to the mental experiences of the preceding day. Closer attention shows that the experience in question may be either psychically significant or quite indifferent; in the latter case, however, it is always associated with some underlying significant experience. The dream-instigator ( Traumerreger) may be (i) a recent significant experience that is directly represented in the manifest content, (2) a recent significant experience that is indirectly represented in the manifest content by the appearance there of an associated indifferent experience, (3) an internal significant process (memory) that regularly is represented in the manifest content by the appearance of an associated, recent, indifferent experience. In each case, therefore, a recent experience (i.e. from the preceding day) appears directly in the dream; it is one either significant in itself or else associated with another (recent or old) significant one. The selection of incidents of subordinate interest applies only to incidents of the day before the dream. Older incidents, that at first sight appear to be unimportant, can always be shown to have already become on the day of their occurrence psychically significant through the secondary transference on to them of the affect of significant mental processes with which they have got associated. The material from which a dream is formed may therefore be either psychically significant or the opposite, and in the latter case it always arises in some experience of the preceding day.
The explanation Freud gives of these facts is shortly as follows. The meaning of the appearance in the manifest content of indifferent mental processes is that these are employed in the dream- making to represent underlying processes of great psychical significance, just as in battle the colours of a regiment, themselves of no intrinsic value, stand for the honour of the army. A more accurate analogy is the frequent occurrence in the psycho-neuroses of the transposition of a given significant affect on to an indifferent idea; for instance, intense dread of a harmless object may arise as a transposition, on to the secondarily associated idea of this object, of a dread that was fully justified in relation to the primary idea. In short, the process is another form of the displacement mechanism described above. Just as in the psycho-neuroses, so also in the dream the primary underlying idea is of such a nature as to be incapable of becoming conscious (bewusstsemsunfdhig), a matter that will presently be further discussed. Freud explains the regular occurrence in the dream of a recent experience by pointing out that this has not yet had time to form many associations, and therefore is more free to become associated with unconscious psychical processes. The circumstance is of interest as indicating that during sleep, and unnoticed by our consciousness, important changes go on in our memory and conceptual material; the familiar advice to sleep over an important matter before coming to a decision has an important basis in fact.
The third feature, namely the hypermnesia particularly for experiences of early childhood, is of cardinal importance. Early memories, which the subject had completely forgotten, but the truth of which can often be objectively confirmed, not infrequently occur with startling fidelity even in the manifest content. This fact in itself should suggest the ontogenetic antiquity of dream processes. In the latent content the appearance of such forgotten memories is far more frequent, and Freud holds it probable that the latent content of every dream is connected with ancient mental processes that extend back to early childhood. The following instance may be given of this. (7) A patient, a man aged 37, dreamt that he was, being attacked by a man who was armed with a number of sharp weapons; the assailant was swarthy, and wore a dark moustache. He struggled and succeeded somehow in inflicting a skin wound on his opponent' s left hand. The name Charles seemed to be related to the man, though not so definitely as if it were his name. The man changed into a fierce dog, which the subject of the dream succeeded in vanquishing by forcibly tearing his jaws apart so as to split his head in two. No one could have been more astonished at the dream than the patient himself, who is a singularly inoffensive person. The name Charles led to the following free associations: a number of indifferent acquaintances having this as their Christian name a man, named Dr. Charles Stuart, whom he had seen at a Scottish reunion, at which he had been present on the day before (this man, however, wears a beard)–another man present at the reunion whose personal appearance had many traits in common with his assailant in the dream the Scottish Stuart Kings Charles I and Charles II.–again the acquaintance Charles Stuart– Cromwell's designation of King Charles I., "that man Charles Stuart"—the medical practitioner of his family, whose name was Stuart Rankings, and who had died when the patient was nine years old. Then came the memory of a painful scene, previously quite forgotten, in which the doctor had roughly extracted two teeth from the terror-stricken patient after forcibly gagging his mouth open; before he could accomplish this the doctor had had his left hand badly bitten. The date of this occurrence could from extrinsic evidence be referred to the patient's fifth year. From a number of reasons that cannot be given here it became clear that the dream thoughts altogether clustered around this childhood experience. The assailant in the dream was no other than the doctor whose treatment of the patient was nearly thirty years after his death thus fearfully revenged in the latter's dream.[12] The play on his name Stuart Rankings (Rank-kings), which enabled him to become identified first with the Stuart King Charles, and then with Charles Stuart, and finally to be called in the dream plain Charles, is interesting. It should be added that the Dr. Charles Stuart mentioned above is a dental surgeon, who a week previously had in the patient's presence performed a painful tooth extraction on the latter's wife; on the day before the dream he had enquired of the patient concerning his wife's health. The identification of the man with the dog in the latter part of the dream was greatly over-determined. The doctor in question was a noted dog fancier, and had given the patient a fine collie to whom he became greatly attached; he led a very irregular life, and the patient often heard his father refer to him as a gay dog; finally he died "like a dog," from an accidental overdose of poison, in the presence of a number of people who were from ignorance powerless to render the slight assistance that would have saved his life.
The source of some dream material is to be found in somatic stimuli during sleep, though by no means so frequently as many writers maintain. They are, however, in no case the cause of the dream, but are merely woven into its fabric in exactly the same way as any other psychical material, and only when they fulfil certain conditions. The exaggerated claims sometimes made out for the importance of these stimuli are easily disproved by, for instance, the following considerations. A sleeper may react to a given somatic stimulation when this is of a lively nature, such as bad pain, in one of several different ways. In the first place he may altogether ignore it, as often occurs in bodily disease, secondly he may feel it during, or even throughout, sleep without dreaming at all, thirdly he may be awakened by it, and fourthly he may weave it into a dream. Even in the last instance it enters into the dream only in a disguised form, and it can be shown that this disguise depends on the nature not of the stimulus but of the rest of the dream. The same stimulus may appear in different dreams, even of the same person, under quite different forms, and analysis of the dream regularly shows that the form adopted is altogether determined by the character and motive of the dream. In short, the dream makes use of the somatic stimulus or not, according to its needs, and only when this fulfils certain requirements.
Having partly answered the question of how a dream is built we may take up the more difficult one of why it is built, or, more accurately put, the problems concerning the forces that go to make a dream. It is impossible to do this without first referring to Freud's views on psychical repression (Verdrängung) and unconscious mental processes; these views in themselves call for a detailed exposition which cannot here be given, so that this part of the present paper will be even more incomplete than the rest. Freud uses the term "conscious " to denote mental processes of which we are at a given moment conscious, "fore-conscious" (vorbewusste) to denote mental processes of which we can spontaneously and voluntarily become conscious (e.g., a memory out of one's mind for the moment, but which can readily be recalled), and "unconscious" to denote mental processes which the subject cannot spontaneously recall to consciousness, but which can be reproduced by employing special devices (e.g., hypnosis, psychoanalysis, etc.). He concludes that the force that has to be overcome in the act of making the last named processes conscious is the same as that which had previously opposed an obstacle to their becoming conscious, i. e., had repressed them into the unconscious. This force or resistance is a defensive mechanism which has kept from consciousness mental processes that were either primarily or secondarily (through association and transposition) of an inacceptable nature; in other words these processes are inassimilable in consciousness. Returning now to the subject of dreams, we have first to remark that Freud empirically found an intimate and legitimate relation between the degree of confusion and incomprehensibility present in a given dream and the difficulty the patient experienced in communicating the free associations leading to the dream thoughts. He therefore concluded that the distortion which had obviously occurred in the dream-making was related to the resistance that prevented the unconscious dream thoughts from becoming conscious; that it was in fact a result of this resistance. He speaks of the resistance that keeps certain mental processes unconscious as the " endopsychic censor." In the waking state the unconscious processes cannot come to external expression, except under certain abnormal conditions. In sleep, however, the activity of the censor, like that of all other conscious processes, is diminished, though it is never entirely abrogated. This fact permits the unconscious processes (the latent content) to reach expression in the form of a dream, but as they still have to contend with some degree of activity on the part of the censor they can only reach expression in an indirect way. The distortion in the dream-making is thus a means of evading the censor, in the same way that a veiled phraseology is a means of evading a social censor, which would not permit a disagreeable truth to be openly expressed. The dream is a compromise between the dream thoughts on the one hand and the endopsychic censor on the other, and could not arise at all were it not for the diminished activity of the latter during sleep.
Distortion of the dream thoughts by means of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement is far from being the only way in which the censor manifests itself, nor is this distortion the only way in which the censor can be evaded by the dream processes. In the first place we have already noticed above, one of its manifestations under the name of secondary elaboration. This process continues even in the waking state, so that the account of a dream as related directly after waking differs from that related some time after. The fact of this change in the subsequent memory of a dream is sometimes urged as an objection to the interpretation by psycho-analysis, but the change is just as rigorously determined and the mechanism is as precisely to be defined as those of any other process in the dream-making. For instance, if the two accounts are compared, it will be found that the altered passage concerns what might be called a weak place in the disguise of the dream thoughts; the disguise is strengthened by the subsequent elaboration by the censor, but the fact of the change points to the need for distortion at that given spot, a point of some value in the analysis. Instead of subsequently altering this weak place the censor may act by interposing doubt in the subject's mind as to the reliability of his memory about it; he may say "The person in the dream seemed to carry such and such an object, but lam not sure that I haven't imagined that in thinking over the dream." In such cases one is always safe in accepting the dubiously given point as unhesitatingly as the most vivid memory; the doubt is only one of the stages in the disguise of the underlying dream thoughts. An interesting way in which the censor may act is by the subject receiving the assurance during the dream that "it is only a dream." The explanation of this is that the action of the censor has set in too late, after the dream has already been formed; the mental processes which have, as it were unwittingly, reached consciousness are partly divested of their significance by the subject treating them lightly as being "only a dream." Freud wittily describes this after-thought on the part of the censor as an esprit d'escalier. The last manifestation of the censor is more important, namely the tendency to forget dreams or part of them; it is an extension of the doubting process mentioned above. Freud traces this tendency to forget, as also that shown in many forgetting acts of waking life,[13] to the repressing action of the censor. This explanation can readily be experimentally confirmed. When a patient informs the physician that he had a dream the night before, but that he cannot recall anything of it, it frequently happens that the overcoming of a given resistance during the psycho-analytic treatment removes the barrier to the recollection of the dream, provided of course, that the resistance concerns the same topic in the two cases; the patient then says "Ah, now I can recall the dream I had." Similarly he may suddenly during the analysis of the dream, or at any time subsequent to the relation of the dream, supply a previously forgotten fragment (Nachtrag); this later fragment invariably corresponds with those dream thoughts that have undergone the most intense repression, and therefore those of greatest significance. This occurrence is extremely frequent, and may be illustrated by the following examples.
(8) A patient, a man aged 26, dreamt that he saw a man standing in front of a hoarding, with a gate entrance on his left. He approached the man, who received him cordially and '"entered into conversation" with him. During the analysis he suddenly recalled that the hoarding seemed to be the wall of an "exhibition," into which the man was entering to join a number of others. The significance of this added fragment will be evident when I mention that the patient was a pronounced voyeur, and had frequently indulged in pædicatio.
(9) A patient, a woman aged 36, dreamt that she was standing in a crowd of school girls. One of them said " Why do you wear such untidy skirts?" and turned up the patient* s skirt to show how worn the underskirt was. During the analysis, three days after relating the dream, the patient for the first time recalled that the underskirt in the dream seemed to be a nightdress, and analysis of this led to the evocation of several painful memories in which lifting a nightdress played an important part; the two most significant of these had for many years been forgotten.
As was mentioned above, the censor can be evaded by the dream thoughts in other ways than the usual ones of distortion. They may appear in the manifest content in their unaltered form, but their significance be misunderstood by the subject when he recalls the dream. For instance, a person may dream that he sees his brother dead, the actual dream thoughts being the wish that the brother may die. The subject fails to realise that the picture corresponds with a wish, even a suppressed one, partly because the nature of this is so horribly unlikely that it does not occur to him, and partly because the dream is accompanied by an emotion, dread, which is apparently incongruous with a wish. Such dreams are always intensely distressing (Angstträume), and in a sense it may be said that the dread here replaces the distorting mechanisms of condensation and displacement.
We have finally to consider the most important problems of all, those relating to the latent content or dream thoughts. The first thing that strikes one about these is their intense psychical significance. A dream never proceeds from trifles, but only from the mental processes that are of the greatest moment and interest to the subject. "Der Traum gibt sick nie mil Kleinigkeiten ab." The explanation of why incidents of apparently subordinate interest occur in the manifest content has been given above. More than this, the dream thoughts are processes of the greatest personal interest, and are thus invariably egocentric. We never dream about matters that concern others, however deeply, but only about matters that concern ourselves. It has already been mentioned that the underlying dream thoughts are perfectly logical and consistent, and that the affect accompanying them is entirely congruous to their nature. Freud, therefore, not only agrees with those writers who disparage the mental quality of dreams, holding as he does that the dream-making proper contains no intellectual operation and proceeds only by means of the lower forms of mental activity, but he also agrees with those other writers who maintain that dreams are a logical continuance of the most important part of our waking mental life. We dream at night only about those matters that have most concerned us by day, though on account of the distortion that takes place in the dream-making this fact is not evident. Lastly it may be added that all the dreams occurring in a given night arise from the same group of latent dream thoughts, though they often present different aspects of these.
There are certain differences between the dreams of a young child and those of an adult. In the child, at all events before the age of four, no distortion takes place, so that the manifest content is identical with the latent content. In correspondence with this fact we find that child dreams are logical and coordinate, an observation that is hard to reconcile with the commonly received opinion that dream processes arise from a dissociated activity of the brain cells, for one can see no reason why dreams should be a meaningless conglomeration of disordered and lowered mental functioning in adults when they are obviously not so in the child. Further, with young children it is easy to recognise that the dream represents the imaginary fulfilment of an ungratified wish. Now Freud maintains that the latent content of every dream represents nothing else than the imaginary fulfilment of an ungratified wish. In the child the wish is an ungratified one, but it has not undergone repression, that is to say it is not of such a nature as to be inacceptable in consciousness; in the adult the wish is not merely one that could not be gratified, but is of such a nature as to be inassimilable in consciousness, and so has become repressed. It frequently happens that even in the adult a wish- fulfilment appears in the manifest content, and still more frequently that a wish-fulfilment not present in the manifest content, but revealed by psycho-analysis, concerns a wish of which the subject is quite conscious; in both these cases, however, full analysis always discloses that these wishes are merely reinforcements of deeper, unconscious ones of an associated nature. No wish, therefore, is able to produce a dream unless it is either unconscious (bewusstseinsunfahig) or else associated with an allied unconscious one.
It has sometimes been alleged by Freud's opponents that his generalisation of all dreams representing a wish- fulfilment is the outcome of observing a few child dreams, and that his analyses merely consist in arbitrarily twisting the dream, to serve some private ends, until a wish can be read into it. We have seen that this absurd suggestion is historically untrue, for Freud came to the analysis of adult dreams from the analysis, not of child dreams, but of adult psycho-neuroses. He found that his patients' symptoms arose as a compromise between two opposing wishes, one of which was conscious, the other unconscious, and that they allegorically represented the imaginary fulfilment of these two wishes. He further found that an essential factor in their production was a conflict between the two wish-systems, of such a kind that the unconscious one was forcibly prevented from becoming conscious; it was unconscious because it was repressed. It frequently happened that the psycho-analysis of the patients' symptoms directly led to their dreams, and on submitting these to the analysis in exactly the same way as any other mental material he discovered that the construction of them showed close resemblances to that of the neurotic symptoms. In both cases the material examined proved to be an allegorical expression of deeper mental processes, and in both cases these deeper processes were unconscious, and had in reaching expression undergone distortion by the endopsychic censor. The mechanisms by means of which this distortion is brought about is very similar in the two cases, the chief difference being that representation by visual pictures is much more characteristic of dreams. In both cases the unconscious mental processes always arise in early childhood and constitute a repressed wish, as do all unconscious processes, and the symptom or dream represents the imaginary fulfilment of that wish in a form in which is also fused the fulfilment of the opposing wish.
Dreams differ from psycho-neurotic symptoms in that the opposing wish is always of the same kind, namely the wish to sleep. A dream is thus the guardian of sleep, and its function is to satisfy the activity of unconscious mental processes that otherwise would disturb sleep. The fact that sometimes a horrid dream may not only disturb sleep, but may actually wake the sleeper, in no way vitiates this conclusion. In such cases the activity of the endopsychic censor, which is diminished during sleep, is insufficient to keep from consciousness the dream thoughts, or to compel such distortion of them as to render them unrecognisable, and recourse has to be had to the acces>ion of energy that the censor is capable of exerting in the waking state; metaphorically expressed, the watchman guarding the sleeping household is overpowered, and has to wake it in calling for help.
Freud couples with his discussion of dream problems a penetrating enquiry into many allied topics, such as the nature of the unconscious and the function of consciousness, that cannot here be even touched upon. I would conclude this imperfect sketch of his theory of dreams by quoting a remark of his to the effect that "Die Traumdeutung ist die Via Regia zur Kenntniss des Unbewussten im Seelenleben"
- ↑ Amplified from a paper read before the American Psychological Association, Dec. 29, 1909.
- ↑ A general sketch of Freud's psychology is given in the April number of the Psychological Bulletin.
- ↑ 1st ed. 1900, 2d ed. 1909.
- ↑ Without considering any questions of technique I have elsewhere given brief accounts of it (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, June-July, 1909, and Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1910). Freud's account of the original technique, which has later been considerably elaborated and modified, may be found in Dr. A. A. Brill's translation, entitled Selected Papers on Hysteria (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Monograph Series, No. 4, 1909).
- ↑ Diagnostische Associationsstudien. Bd. 1, 1906.
- ↑ Lancet: July 24, 1909.
- ↑ That in the dream-making I was presumptuous enough to confound an American State with an English County is an illustration of the irresponsible liberties taken by the mental processes concerned in this production, and shows how completely they differ from our waking thoughts.
- ↑ I might add that the latter part of the word Massachusetts has a sound not very dissimilar to that of Essex, further that the signification of the first part of it, chu (chew, which in Boston is pronounced as if it were spelt chu) resembles that of the other word (ess is the stem of the German verb "to eat").
- ↑ Journal of Abnormal Psychology. June-July. 1908.
- ↑ Psychologie der Dementia prœcox, 1907. Translated by Peterson and Brill (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Monograph Series, 1909).
- ↑ Jahrbuch f. psychoanalytische u. psychopathologische Forschungen. Bd. 1, S. 485.
- ↑ The deeper interpretation of the dream will be easy to those familiar with psycho-analysis, especially when I add that the dream was accompanied by appalling dread, and that an early association to "hand" was "neck."
- ↑ Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. 3e Ausg., 1910.