I shall insert an example of a dream in which the indifferent affective tone of the dream content may be explained by a contrast in the dream thoughts. I have the following short dream to relate, which every reader will read with disgust:
IV. A bit of rising ground, and on it something like a toilet in the open; a very long bench, at the end of which is a large toilet aperture. All of the back edge is thickly covered with little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A shrub behind the bench. I urinate upon the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement easily come off and fall into the opening. It seems as though something remained at the end nevertheless.
Why did I experience no disgust in this dream?
Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and satisfying thoughts have co-operated in the formation of this dream. Upon analysing it I immediately think of the Augean stables cleansed by Hercules. I am this Hercules. The rising ground and the shrub belong to Aussee, where my children are now staying. I have discovered the infantile etiology of the neuroses and have thus guarded my own children from becoming ill. The bench (omitting the aperture, of course) is the faithful copy of a piece of furniture which an affectionate female patient has made me a present of. This recalls how my patients honour me. Even the museum of human excrement is susceptible of less disagreeable interpretation. However much I am disgusted with it, it is a souvenir of the beautiful land of Italy, where in little cities, as everyone knows, water-closets are not equipped in any other way. The stream of urine that washes everything clean is an unmistakable allusion to greatness. It is in this manner that Gulliver extinguishes the great fire in Lilliput; to be sure, he thereby incurs the displeasure of the tiniest of queens. In this way, too, Gargantua, the superman in Master Rabelais, takes vengeance upon the Parisians, straddling Notre Dame and training his stream of urine upon the city. Only yesterday I was turning over the leaves of Garnier’s illustrations of Rabelais before I went to bed. And, strangely enough, this is another proof that I am the superman! The platform of Notre Dame was my favourite nook in Paris; every free afternoon I was accustomed to go up into the towers of the church and climb about among the monsters and devil-masks there. The circumstances that all the excrement vanishes so rapidly before the stream correspond to the motto: Afflavit et dissipati sunt, which I shall some day make the title of a chapter on the therapeutics of hysteria.
And now as to the occasion giving rise to the dream. It had been a hot afternoon in summer; in the evening I had given a lecture on the relation between hysteria and the perversions, and everything which I had to say displeased me thoroughly, appeared to me stripped of all value. I was tired, found no trace of pleasure in my difficult task, and longed to get away from this rummaging in human filth, to see my children and then the beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the auditorium to a café, to find some modest refreshment in the open air, for my appetite had left me. But one of my audience went with me; he begged for permission to sit with me while I drank my coffee and gulped down my roll, and began to say flattering things to me. He told me how much he had learned from me, and that he now looked at everything through different eyes, that I had cleansed the Augean stables, i.e. the theory of the neuroses, of its errors and prejudices—in short, that I was a very great man. My mood was ill-suited to his song of praise; I struggled with disgust, and went home earlier in order to extricate myself. Before I went to sleep I turned over the leaves of Rabelais, and read a short story by C. F. Meyer entitled Die Leiden eines Knaben (The Hardships of a Boy).
The dream had been drawn from these materials, and the novel by Meyer added the recollection of childish scenes (cf. the dream about Count Thun, last scene). The mood of the day, characterised by disgust and annoyance, is continued in the dream in the sense that it is permitted to furnish nearly the entire material for the dream content. But during the night the opposite mood of vigorous and even exaggerated self-assertion was awakened, and dissipated the earlier mood. The dream had to take such a form as to accommodate the expression of self-depreciation and exaggerated self-assertion in the same material. This compromise formation resulted in an ambiguous dream content, but likewise in an indifferent strain of feeling owing to the restraint of the contrasts upon each other.
According to the theory of wish-fulfilment this dream could not have happened had not the suppressed, but at the same time pleasurable, train of thought concerning personal aggrandisement been coupled with the opposing thoughts of disgust. For disagreeable things are not intended to be represented by the dream; painful thoughts that have occurred during the day can force their way into the dream only if they lend a cloak to the wish-fulfilment. The dream activity can dispose of the affects in the dream thoughts in still another way, besides admitting them or reducing them to zero. It can change them into their opposite. We have already become acquainted with the rule of interpretation that every element of the dream may be interpreted by its opposite, as well as by itself. One can never tell at the outset whether to set down the one or the other; only the connection can decide this point. A suspicion of this state of affairs has evidently got into popular consciousness; dream books very often proceed according to the principle of contraries in their interpretation. Such transformation into opposites is made possible by the intimate concatenation of associations, which in our thoughts finds the idea of a thing in that of its opposite. Like every other displacement this serves the purposes of the censor, but it is also often the work of the wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists precisely in this substitution of an unwelcome thing by its opposite. The emotions of the dream thoughts may appear in the dream transformed into their opposites just as well as the ideas, and it is probable that this inversion of emotions is usually brought about by the dream censor. The suppression and inversion of affects are useful in social life, as the current analogy for the dream censor has shown us—above all, for purposes of dissimulation. If I converse with a person to whom I must show consideration while I am saying unpleasant things to him, it is almost more important that I should conceal the expression of my emotion from him, than that I modify the wording of my thoughts. If I speak to him in polite words, but accompany them by looks or gestures of hatred and disdain, the effect which I produce upon this person is not very different from what it would have been if I had recklessly thrown my contempt into his face. Above all, then, the censor bids me suppress my emotions, and if I am master of the art of dissimulation, I can hypocritically show the opposite emotion—smiling where I should like to be angry, and pretending affection where I should like to destroy.
We already know of an excellent example of such an inversion of emotion for the purposes of the dream censor. In the dream about my uncle’s beard I feel great affection for my friend R., at the same time that, and because, the dream thoughts berate him as a simpleton. We have drawn our first proof for the existence of the censor from this example of the inversion of emotions. Nor is it necessary here to assume that the dream activity creates a counter emotion of this kind out of nothing; it usually finds it lying ready in the material of the dream thoughts, and intensifies it solely with the psychic force of the resisting impulse until a point is reached where the emotion can be won over for the formation of the dream. In the dream of my uncle, just mentioned, the affectionate counter emotion has probably originated from an infantile source (as the continuation of the dream would suggest), for the relation between uncle and nephew has become the source of all my friendships and hatreds, owing to the peculiar nature of my childish experiences (cf. analysis on p. 334).
There is a class of dreams deserving the designation “hypocritical,” which puts the theory of wish-fulfilment to a severe test. My attention was called to them when Mrs. Dr. M. Hilferding brought up for discussion in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society the dream reported by Rosegger, which is reprinted below.
In Waldheimat, vol. xi., Rosegger writes as follows in his story, Fremd gemacht, p. 303:
“I have usually enjoyed healthful sleep, but I have lost the rest of many a night. With my modest existence as a student and literary man, I have for long years dragged along with me the shadow of a veritable tailor’s life, like a ghost from which I could not become separated. I cannot say that I have occupied myself so often and so vividly with thoughts of my past during the day. An assailer of heaven and earth arising from the skin of the Philistine has other things to think about. Nor did I, as a dashing young fellow, think about my nocturnal dreams; only later, when I got into the habit of thinking about everything or when the Philistine within me again asserted itself, it struck me that whenever I dreamed I was always the journeyman tailor, and was always working in my master’s shop for long hours without any remuneration. As I sat there and sewed and pressed I was quite aware that I no longer belonged there, and that as a burgess of a town I had other things to attend to; but I was for ever having vacations, and going out into the country, and it was then that I sat near my boss and assisted him. I often felt badly, and regretted the loss of time which I might spend for better and more useful purposes. If something did not come up to the measure and cut exactly, I had to submit to a reproach from the boss. Often, as I sat with my back bent in the dingy shop, I decided to give notice that I was going to quit. On one occasion I actually did so, but the boss took no notice of it, and the next time I was again sitting near him and sewing.
“How happy I was when I woke up after such weary hours! And I then resolved that, if this dream came intruding again, I would throw it off with energy and would cry aloud: ‘It is only a delusion, I am in bed, and I want to sleep.’... And the next night I would be sitting in the tailor shop again.
“Thus years passed with dismal regularity. While the boss and I were working at Alpelhofer’s, at the house of the peasant where I began my apprenticeship, it happened that he was particularly dissatisfied with my work. ‘I should like to know where in the world your thoughts are?’ cried he, and looked at me gloomily, I thought the most sensible thing for me to do would be to get up and explain to the boss that I was with him only as a favour, and then leave. But I did not do this. I submitted, however, when the boss engaged an apprentice, and ordered me to make room for him on the bench. I moved into the corner, and kept on sewing. On the same day another tailor was engaged; he was bigoted, as he was a Czech who had worked for us nineteen years before, and then had fallen into the lake on his way home from the public-house. When he tried to sit down there was no room for him. I looked at the boss inquiringly, and he said to me, ‘You have no talent for the tailoring business; you may go; you are free.’ My fright on that occasion was so overpowering that I awoke.
“The morning gray glimmered through the clear window of my beloved home. Objects of art surrounded me; in the tasteful bookcase stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe—all shining and immortal. From the adjoining room resounded the clear little voices of the children, who were waking and prattling with their mother. I felt as if I had found again that idyllically sweet, that peaceful, poetical, and spiritual life which I have so often and so deeply conceived as the contemplative fortune of mankind. And still I was vexed that I had not given my boss notice first, instead of allowing him to discharge me.
“And how remarkable it is; after the night when the boss ‘discharged me’ I enjoyed rest; I no longer dreamed of my tailoring—of this experience which lay in the remote past, which in its simplicity was really happy, and which, nevertheless, threw a long shadow over the later years of my life.”
I. In this dream, the series of the poet who, in his younger years, has been a journeyman tailor, it is hard to recognise the domination of the wish-fulfilment. All the delightful things occurred during the waking state, while the dream seemed to drag along the ghostlike shadow of an unhappy existence which had been long forgotten. My own dreams of a similar nature have put me in a position to give some explanation for such dreams. As a young doctor I for a long time worked in the chemical institute without being able to accomplish anything in that exacting science, and I therefore never think in my waking state about this unfruitful episode in my life, of which I am really ashamed. On the other hand, it has become a recurring dream with me that I am working in the laboratory, making analyses, and having experiences there, &c.; like the examination dreams, these dreams are disagreeable, and they are never very distinct. During the analysis of one of these dreams my attention was directed to the word “analysis,” which, gave me the key to an understanding of these dreams. For I had since become an “analyst.” I make analyses which are highly praised—to be sure, psychoanalyses. I then understood that when I grew proud of these analyses of the waking state, and wanted to boast how much I had accomplished thereby, the dream would hold up to me at night those other unsuccessful analyses of which I had no reason to be proud; they are the punitive dreams of the upstart, like those of the tailor who became a celebrated poet. But how is it possible for the dream to place itself at the service of self-criticism in its conflict with parvenu-pride, and to take as its content a rational warning instead of the fulfilment of a prohibitive wish? I have already mentioned that the answer to this question entails many difficulties. We may conclude that the foundation of the dream was at first formed by a phantasy of overweening ambition, but that only its suppression and its abashment reached the dream content in its stead. One should remember that there are masochistic tendencies in the psychic life to which such an inversion might be attributed. But a more thorough investigation of the individual dreams allows the recognition of still another element. In an indistinct subordinate portion of one of my laboratory dreams, I was just at the age which placed me in the most gloomy and most unsuccessful year of my professional career; I still had no position and no means of support, when I suddenly found that I had the choice of many women whom I could marry! I was, therefore, young again, and, what is more, she was young again—the woman who has shared with me all these hard years. In this way one of the wishes which constantly frets the heart of the ageing man was revealed as the unconscious dream inciter. The struggle raging in the other psychic strata between vanity and self-criticism has certainly determined the dream content, but the more deeply-rooted wish of youth has alone made it possible as a dream. One may say to himself even in the waking state: To be sure it is very nice now, and times were once very hard; but it was nice, too, even then, you were still so young.
In considering dreams reported by a poet one may often assume that he has excluded from the report those details which he perceived as disturbing and which he considered unessential. His dreams, then, give us a riddle which could be readily solved if we had an exact reproduction of the dream content.
O. Rank has called my attention to the fact that in Grimm’s fairy tale of the valiant little tailor, or “Seven at one Stroke,” a very similar dream of an upstart is related. The tailor, who became the hero and married the king’s daughter, dreamed one night while with the princess, his wife, about his trade; the latter, becoming suspicious, ordered armed guards for the following night, who should listen to what was spoken in the dream, and who should do away with the dreamer. But the little tailor was warned, and knew enough to correct his dream.
The complex of processes—of suspension, subtraction, and inversion—through which the affects of the dream thoughts finally become those of the dream, may well be observed in the suitable synthesis of completely analysed dreams. I shall here treat a few cases of emotional excitement in the dream which furnish examples of some of the cases discussed.
In the dream about the odd task which the elder Bruecke gives me to perform—of preparing my own pelvis—the appropriate horror is absent in the dream itself. Now this is a wish-fulfilment in various senses. Preparation signifies self-analysis, which I accomplish, as it were, by publishing my book on dreams, and which has been so disagreeable to me that I have already postponed printing the finished manuscript for more than a year. The wish is now actuated that I may disregard this feeling of opposition, and for that reason I feel no horror (Grauen, which also means to grow grey) in the dream. I should also like to escape the horror—in the other (German) sense—of growing grey; for I am already growing grey fast, and the grey in my hair warns me withal to hold back no longer. For we know that at the end of the dream the thought secures expression in that I should have to leave my children to get to the goal of their difficult journey.
In the two dreams that shift the expression of satisfaction to the moments immediately after awakening, this satisfaction is in the one case motivated by the expectation that I am now going to learn what is meant by “I have already dreamed of it,” and refers in reality to the birth of my first child, and in the other case it is motivated by the conviction that “that which has been announced by a sign” is now going to happen, and the latter satisfaction is the same which I felt at the arrival of my second son. Here the same emotions that dominated in the dream thoughts have remained in the dream, but the process is probably not so simple as this in every dream. If the two analyses are examined a little, it will be seen that this satisfaction which does not succumb to the censor receives an addition from a source which must fear the censor; and the emotion drawn from this source would certainly arouse opposition if it did not cloak itself in a similar emotion of satisfaction that is willingly admitted, if it did not, as it were, sneak in behind the other. Unfortunately, I am unable to show this in the case of the actual dream specimen, but an example from another province will make my meaning intelligible. I construct the following case: Let there be a person near me whom I hate so that a strong feeling arises in me that I should be glad if something were to happen to him. But the moral part of my nature does not yield to this sentiment; I do not dare to express this ill-wish, and when something happens to him which he does not deserve, I suppress my satisfaction at it, and force myself to expressions and thoughts of regret. Everyone will have found himself in such a position. But now let it happen that the hated person draws upon himself a well-deserved misfortune by some fault; now I may give free rein to my satisfaction that he has been visited by a just punishment, and I express opinion in the matter which coincides with that of many other people who are impartial. But I can see that my satisfaction turns out to be more intense than that of the others, for it has received an addition from another source—from my hatred, which has hitherto been prevented by the inner censor from releasing an emotion, but which is no longer prevented from doing so under the altered circumstances. This case is generally typical of society, where persons who have aroused antipathy or are adherents of an unpopular minority incur guilt. Their punishment does not correspond to their transgression but to their transgression plus the ill-will directed against them that has hitherto been ineffective. Those who execute the punishment doubtless commit an injustice, but they are prevented from becoming aware of it by the satisfaction arising from the release within themselves of a suppression of long standing. In such cases the emotion is justified according to its quality, but not according to its quantity; and the self-criticism that has been appeased as to the one point is only too ready to neglect examination of the second point. Once you have opened the doors, more people get through than you originally intended to admit.
The striking feature of the neurotic character, that incitements capable of producing emotion bring about a result that is qualitatively justified but is quantitatively excessive, is to be explained in this manner, in so far as it admits of a psychological explanation at all. The excess is due to sources 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.[FE]
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, namely, that there are revenants who can be put out of the way by a mere wish.
I have not yet mentioned the occasion for this dream. It is an essential one, and goes a long way towards explaining it. I had received the news from my friend in Berlin (whom I have designated as F.) that he is about to undergo an operation and that relatives of his living in Vienna would give me information about his condition. The first few messages after the operation were not reassuring, and caused me anxiety. I should have liked best to go to him myself, but at that time I was affected with a painful disease which made every movement a torture for me. I learn from the dream thoughts that I feared for the life of my dear friend. I knew that his only sister, with whom I had not been acquainted, had died early after the shortest possible illness. (In the dream F. tells about his sister, and says: “In three-quarters of an hour she was dead.”) I must have imagined that his own constitution was not much stronger, and that I should soon be travelling, in spite of my health, in answer to far worse news—and that I should arrive too late, for which I should reproach myself for ever.[FF] This reproach about arriving too late has become the central point of the dream, but has been represented in a scene in which the honoured teacher of my student years—Bruecke—reproaches me for the same thing with a terrible look from his blue eyes. The cause of this deviation from the scene will soon be clear; the dream cannot reproduce the scene itself in the manner in which it occurred to me. To be sure, it leaves the blue eyes to the other man, but it gives me the part of the annihilator, an inversion which is obviously the result of the wish-fulfilment. My concern for the life of my friend, my self-reproach for not having gone to him, my shame (he had repeatedly come to me in Vienna), my desire to consider myself excused on account of my illness—all of this makes up a tempest of feeling which is distinctly felt in sleep, and which raged in every part of the dream thoughts.
But there was another thing about the occasion for the dream which had quite the opposite effect. With the unfavourable news during the first days of the operation, I also received the injunction to speak to no one about the whole affair, which hurt my feelings, for it betrayed an unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I knew, of course, that this request did not proceed from my friend, but that it was due to clumsiness or excessive timidity on the part of the messenger, but the concealed reproach made me feel very badly because it was not altogether unjustified. Only reproaches which “have something in them” have power to irritate, as everyone knows. For long before, in the case of two persons who were friendly to each other and who were willing to honour me with their friendship, I had quite needlessly tattled what the one had said about the other; to be sure this incident had nothing to do with the affairs of my friend F. Nor have I forgotten the reproaches which I had to listen to at that time. One of the two friends between whom I was the trouble-maker was Professor Fleischl; the other one I may name Joseph, a name which was also borne by my friend and antagonist P., who appears in the dream.
Two dream elements, first inconspicuously, and secondly the question of Fl. as to how much of his affairs I have mentioned to P., give evidence of the reproach that I am incapable of keeping anything to myself. But it is the admixture of these recollections which transposes the reproach for arriving too late from the present to the time when I was living in Bruecke’s laboratory; and by replacing the second person in the annihilation scene of the dream by a Joseph I succeed in representing not only the first reproach that I arrive too late, but also a second reproach, which is more rigorously suppressed, that I keep no secrets. The condensing and replacing activity of this dream, as well as the motives for it, are now obvious.
My anger at the injunction not to give anything away, originally quite insignificant, receives confirmation from sources that flow far below the surface, and so become a swollen stream of hostile feelings towards persons who are in reality dear to me. The source which furnishes the confirmation is to be found in childhood. I have already said that my friendships as well as my enmities with persons of my own age go back to my childish relations with my nephew, who was a year older than I. In these he had the upper hand, and I early learned how to defend myself; we lived together inseparably, loved each other, and at the same time, as statements of older persons testify, scuffled with and accused each other. In a certain sense all my friends are incarnations of this first figure, “which early appeared to my blurred sight”; they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned in the years of adolescence, and then we acted Cæsar and Brutus. An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person, not simultaneously, of course, nor in repeated alterations, as had been the case in my first childhood years.
I do not here wish to trace the manner in which a recent occasion for emotion may reach back to one in childhood—through connections like these I have just described—in order to find a substitute for itself, in this earlier occasion for the sake of increased emotional effect. Such an investigation would belong to the psychology of the unconscious, and would find its place in a psychological explanation of neuroses. Let us assume for the purposes of dream interpretation that a childhood recollection makes its appearance or is formed by the fancy, say to the following effect: Two children get into a fight on account of some object—just what we shall leave undecided, although memory or an allusion of memory has a very definite one in mind—and each one claims that he got to it first, and that he, therefore, has first right to it. They come to blows, for might makes right; and, according to the intimation of the dream, I must have known that I was in the wrong (noticing the error myself), but this time I remain the stronger and take possession of the battlefield; the defeated combatant hurries to my father, his grandfather, and accuses me, and I defend myself with the words which I know from my father: “I hit him because he hit me.” Thus this recollection, or more probably fancy, which forces itself upon my attention in the course of the analysis—from my present knowledge I myself do not know how—becomes an intermediary of the dream thoughts that collects the emotional excitements obtaining in the dream thoughts, as the bowl of a fountain collects the streams of water flowing into it. From this point the dream thoughts flow along the following paths: “It serves you quite right if you had to vacate your place for me; why did you try to force me out of my place? I don’t need you; I’ll soon find someone else to play with,” &c. Then the ways are opened through which these thoughts again follow into the representation of the dream. For such an “ôte-toi que je m’y mette” I once had to reproach my deceased friend Joseph. He had been next to me in the line of promotion in Bruecke’s laboratory, but advancement there was very slow. Neither of the two assistants budged from his place, and youth became impatient. My friend, who knew that his time of life was limited, and who was bound by no tie to his superior, was a man seriously ill; the wish for his removal permitted an objectionable interpretation—he might be moved by something besides promotion. Several years before, the same wish for freedom had naturally been more intense in my own case; wherever in the world there are gradations of rank and advancement, the doors are opened for wishes needing suppression. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal cannot get rid of the temptation to see how the crown fits even at the bed of his sick father. But, as may easily be understood, the dream punishes this ruthless wish not upon me but upon him.[FG]
“As he was ambitious, I slew him.” As he could not wait for the other man to make way for him, he himself has been put out of the way. I harbour these thoughts immediately after attending the unveiling of the statue to the other man at the university. A part of the satisfaction which I feel in the dream may therefore be interpreted: Just punishment; it served you right.
At the funeral of this friend a young man made the following remark, which seemed out of place: “The preacher talked as though the world couldn’t exist without this one human being.” The displeasure of the sincere man, whose sorrow has been marred by the exaggeration, begins to arise in him. But with this speech are connected the dream thoughts: “No one is really irreplaceable; how many men have I already escorted to the grave, but I am still living, I have survived them all, I claim the field.” Such a thought at the moment when I fear that when I travel to see him I shall find my friend no longer among the living, permits only of the further development that I am glad I am surviving someone, that it is not I who have died, but he—that I occupy the field as I once did in the fancied scene in childhood. This satisfaction, coming from sources in childhood, at the fact that I claim the field, covers the larger part of the emotion which appears in the dream. I am glad that I am the survivor—I express this sentiment with the naïve egotism of the husband who says to his wife: “If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.” It is such a matter of course for my expectation that I am not to be the one.
It cannot be denied that great self-control is necessary to interpret one’s dreams and to report them. It is necessary for you to reveal yourself as the one scoundrel among all the noble souls with whom you share the breath of life. Thus, I consider it quite natural that revenants exist only as long as they are wanted, and that they can be obviated by a wish. This is the thing for which my friend Joseph has been punished. But the revenants are the successive incarnations of the friend of my childhood; I am also satisfied at the fact that I have replaced this person for myself again and again, and a substitute will doubtless soon be found even for the friend whom I am about to lose. No one is irreplaceable.
But what has the dream censor been doing meanwhile? Why does it not raise the most emphatic objection to a train of thought characterised by such brutal selfishness, and change the satisfaction that adheres to it into profound repugnance? I think it is because other unobjectionable trains of thought likewise result in satisfaction and cover the emotion coming from forbidden infantile sources with their own. In another stratum of thought I said to myself at that festive unveiling: “I have lost so many dear friends, some through death, some through the dissolution of friendship—is it not beautiful that I have found substitutes for them, that I have gained one who means more to me than the others could, whom I shall from now on always retain, at the age when it is not easy to form new friendships?” The satisfaction that I have found this substitute for lost friends can be taken over into the dream without interference, but behind it there sneaks in the inimical satisfaction from the infantile source. Childish affection undoubtedly assists in strengthening the justifiable affection of to-day; but childish hatred has also found its way into the representation.
But besides this there is distinct reference in the dream to another chain of thoughts, which may manifest itself in the form of satisfaction. My friend had shortly before had a little daughter born, after long waiting. I knew how much he had grieved for the sister whom he lost at an early age, and I wrote to him that he would transfer to this child the love he had felt for her. This little girl would at last make him forget his irreparable loss.
Thus this chain also connects with the intermediary thoughts of the latent dream content, from which the ways spread out in opposite directions: No one is irreplaceable. You see, nothing but revenants; all that one has lost comes back. And now the bonds of association between the contradictory elements of the dream thoughts are more tightly drawn by the accidental circumstance that the little daughter of my friend bears the same name as the girl playmate of my own youth, who was just my own age and the sister of my oldest friend and antagonist. I have heard the name “Pauline” with satisfaction, and in order to allude to this coincidence I have replaced one Joseph in the dream by another Joseph, and have not overlooked the similarity in sound between the names Fleischl and F. From this point a train of thought runs to the naming of my own children. I insisted that the names should not be chosen according to the fashion of the day but should be determined by regard for the memory of beloved persons. The children’s names make them “revenants.” And, finally, is not the having of children the only access to immortality for us all?
I shall add only a few remarks about the emotions of the dream from another point of view. An emotional inclination—what we call a mood—may occur in the mind of a sleeping person as its dominating element, and may induce a corresponding mood in the dream. This mood may be the result of the experiences and thoughts of the day, or it may be of somatic origin; in either case it will be accompanied by the chains of thought that correspond to it. The fact that in the one case this presentation content conditions the emotional inclination primarily, and that in the other case it is brought about secondarily by a disposition of feeling of somatic origin remains without influence upon the formation of the dream. This formation is always subject to the restriction that it can represent only a wish-fulfilment, and that it may put its psychic motive force at the service only of the wish. The mood that is actually present will receive the same treatment as the sensation which actually comes to the surface during sleep (cf. p. 198), which is either neglected or reinterpreted so as to signify a wish-fulfilment. Disagreeable moods during sleep become a motive force of the dream by actuating energetic wishes, which the dream must fulfil. The material to which they are attached is worked over until it finally becomes suitable for the expression of the fulfilled wish. The more intense and the more dominating the element of the disagreeable mood in the dream thought, the more surely will the wish-impulses that have been most rigorously suppressed take advantage of the opportunity to secure representation, for they find that the difficult part of the work necessary in securing representation has already been accomplished in that the repugnance is already actually in existence, which they would otherwise have had to produce by their own effort. With this discussion we again touch upon the problem of anxiety dreams, which we may regard as bounding the province of the dream activity.
We may at last proceed to an exposition of the fourth of the factors which take part in the formation of the dream.
If we continue the examination of the dream content, in the manner already outlined—that is, by testing striking occurrences as to their origin in the dream thoughts—we encounter elements which can be explained only by making an entirely new assumption. I have in mind cases where one shows astonishment, anger, or resistance in a dream, and that, too, against a party of the dream content itself. Most of these exercises of the critical faculty in dreams are not directed against the dream content, but prove to be portions of dream material which have been taken over and suitably made use of, as I have shown by fitting examples. Some things of this sort, however, cannot be disposed of in such a way; their correlative cannot be found in the dream material. What, for instance, is meant by the criticism not infrequent in dreams: “Well, it’s only a dream”? This is a genuine criticism of the dream such as I might make if I were awake. Not at all infrequently it is the forerunner to waking; still oftener it is preceded by a painful feeling, which subsides when the certainty of the dream state has been established. The thought: “But it’s only a dream,” occurring during the dream, has the same object which is meant to be conveyed on the stage through the mouth of the beautiful Helen von Offenbach; it wants to minimise what has just occurred and secure indulgence for what is to follow. Its purpose is to reassure and, so to speak, put to sleep a certain instance which at the given moment has every reason to be active and to forbid the continuation of the dream—or the scene. It is pleasanter to go on sleeping and to tolerate the dream, “because it’s only a dream anyway.” I imagine that the disparaging criticism, “But it’s only a dream,” enters into the dream at the moment when the censor, which has never been quite asleep, feels that it has been surprised by the already admitted dream. It is too late to suppress the dream, and the instance therefore carries with it that note of fear or of painful feeling which presents itself in the dream. It is an expression of the esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychic censor.
In this example we have faultless proof that not everything which the dream contains comes from the dream thoughts, but that a psychic function which cannot be differentiated from our waking thoughts may make contributions to the dream content. The question now is, does this occur only in altogether exceptional cases, or does the psychic instance which is usually active only as censor take a regular part in the formation of dreams?
One must decide unhesitatingly for the latter view. It is indisputable that the censoring instance, whose influence we have so far recognised only in limitations and omissions in the dream content, is also responsible for interpolations and amplifications in this content. Often these interpolations are easily recognised; they are reported irresolutely, prefaced by an “as if,” they are not in themselves particularly vivid, and are regularly inserted at points where they may serve to connect two portions of the dream content or improve the sequence between two sections of the dream. They manifest less ability to stick in the memory than genuine products of the dream material; if the dream is subject to forgetting, they are the first to fall away, and I am strongly inclined to believe that our frequent complaint that we have dreamed so much, that we have forgotten most of this and have remembered only fragments of it, rests on the immediate falling away of just these cementing thoughts. In a complete analysis these interpolations are often betrayed by the fact that no material is to be found for them in the dream thoughts. But after careful examination I must designate this case as a rare one; usually interpolated thoughts can be traced to an element in the dream thoughts, which, however, can claim a place in the dream neither on account of its own merit nor on account of over-determination. The psychic function in dream formation, which we are now considering, aspires to the original creations only in the most extreme cases; whenever possible, it makes use of anything available it can find in the dream material.
The thing which distinguishes and reveals this part of the dream activity is its tendency. This function proceeds in a manner similar to that which the poet spitefully attributes to the philosopher; with its scraps and rags, it stops up the breaches in the structure of the dream. The result of its effort is that the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience. But the effort is not always crowned with complete success. Thus dreams occur which may seem faultlessly logical and correct upon superficial examination; they start from a possible situation, continue it by means of consistent changes, and end up—although this is very rare—with a not unnatural conclusion. These dreams have been subjected to the most thorough elaboration at the hands of a psychic function similar to our waking thought; they seem to have a meaning, but this meaning is very far removed from the real signification of the dream. If they are analysed, one is convinced that the secondary elaboration has distorted the material very freely, and has preserved its proper relations as little as possible. These are the dreams which have, so to speak, already been interpreted before we subject them to waking interpretation. In other dreams this purposeful elaboration has been successful only to a certain point; up to this point consistency seems to be dominant, then the dream becomes nonsensical or confused, and perhaps finally it lifts itself for a second time in its course to an appearance of rationality. In still other dreams the elaboration has failed completely; we find ourselves helpless in the presence of a senseless mass of fragmentary contents.
I do not wish to deny to this fourth dream-moulding power, which will soon seem to us a familiar one—it is in reality the only one among the four dream-moulders with which we are familiar,—I do not wish to deny this fourth factor the capability of creatively furnishing the dream with new contributions. But surely its influence, like that of the others, manifests itself preponderatingly in the preferring and choosing of already created psychic material in the dream thoughts. Now there is a case where it is spared the work, for the most part, of building, as it were, a façade to the dream, by the fact that such a structure, waiting to be used, is already to be found complete in the material of the dream thoughts. The element of the dream thoughts which I have in mind, I am in the habit of designating as a “phantasy”; perhaps I shall avoid misunderstanding if I immediately adduce the day dream of waking life as an analogy.[FH] The part played by this element in our psychic life has not yet been fully recognised and investigated by the psychiatrists; in this study M. Benedikt has, it seems to me, made a highly promising beginning. The significance of the day dream has not yet escaped the unerring insight of poets; the description of the day dreams of one of his subordinate characters which A. Daudet gives us in Nabab is universally known. A study of the psychoneuroses discloses the astonishing fact that these phantasies or day dreams are the immediate predecessors of hysterical symptoms—at least of a great many of them; hysterical symptoms directly depend not upon the memories themselves, but upon phantasies built on the basis of memories. The frequent occurrence of conscious day phantasies brings these formations within the scope of our knowledge; but just as there are such conscious phantasies, so there are a great many unconscious ones, which must remain unconscious on account of their content and on account of their origin from repressed material. A more thorough examination into the character of these day phantasies shows with what good reason the same name has been given to these formations as to the products of our nocturnal thought,—dreams. They possess an essential part of their properties in common with nocturnal dreams; an examination of them would really have afforded the shortest and best approach to an understanding of night dreams.
Like dreams, they are fulfilments of wishes; like dreams a good part of them are based upon the impressions of childish experiences; like dreams their creations enjoy a certain amount of indulgence from the censor. If we trace their formation, we see how the wish motive, which is active in their production, has taken the material of which they are built, mixed it together, rearranged it, and composed it into a new unit. They bear the same relation to the childish memories, to which they go back, as some of the quaint palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose freestones and pillars have furnished the material for the structure built in modern form.
In the “secondary elaboration” of the dream content which we have ascribed to our fourth dream-making factor, we again find the same activity which in the creation of day dreams is allowed to manifest itself unhampered by other influences. We may say without further preliminary that this fourth factor of ours seeks to form something like a day dream from the material at hand. Where, however, such a day dream has already been formed in connection with the dream thought, this factor of the dream-work will preferably get control of it, and strive to introduce it into the dream content. There are dreams which consist merely of the repetition of such a day fancy, a fancy which has perhaps remained unconscious—as, for instance, the dream of the boy that he is riding with the heroes of the Trojan war in a war chariot. In my dream “Autodidasker,” at least the second part of the dream is the faithful repetition of a day phantasy—harmless in itself—about my dealings with Professor N. The fact that the phantasy thus provided more often forms only one part of the dream, or that only one part of the phantasy that makes its way to the dream content, has its origin in the complexity of the conditions which the dream must satisfy at its genesis. On the whole, the phantasy is treated like any other component of the latent material; still it is often recognisable in the dream as a whole. In my dreams parts often occur which are emphasized by an impression different from that of the rest. They seem to me to be in a state of flux, to be more coherent and at the same time more transient than other pieces of the same dream. I know that these are unconscious phantasies which get into the dream by virtue of their association, but I have never succeeded in registering such a phantasy. For the rest these phantasies, like all other component parts of the dream thoughts, are jumbled together and condensed, one covered up by another, and the like; but there are all degrees, from the case where they may constitute the dream content or at least the dream façade unchanged to the opposite case, where they are represented in the dream content by only one of their elements or by a remote allusion to such an element. The extent to which the phantasies are able to withstand the demands of the censor and the tendency to condensation are, of course, also decisive of their fate among the dream thoughts.
In my choice of examples for dream analysis I have, wherever possible, avoided those dreams in which unconscious fancies play a somewhat important part, because the introduction of this psychic element would have necessitated extensive discussion of the psychology of unconscious thought. But I cannot entirely omit the “phantasy” even in this matter of examples, because it often gets fully into the dream and still more often distinctly pervades it. I may mention one more dream, which seems to be composed of two distinct and opposed phantasies, overlapping each other at certain places, of which the first is superficial, while the second becomes, as it were, the interpreter of the first.[FI]
The dream—it is the only one for which I have no careful notes—is about to this effect: The dreamer—an unmarried young man—is sitting in an inn, which is seen correctly; several persons come to get him, among them someone who wants to arrest him. He says to his table companions, “I will pay later, I am coming back.” But they call to him, laughing scornfully: “We know all about that; that’s what everybody says.” One guest calls after him: “There goes another one.” He is then led to a narrow hall, where he finds a woman with a child in her arms. One of his escorts says: “That is Mr. Müller.” A commissioner or some other official is running through a bundle of tickets or papers repeating Müller, Müller, Müller. At last the commissioner asks him a question, which he answers with “Yes.” He then takes a look at the woman, and notices that she has grown a large beard.
The two component parts are here easily separated. What is superficial is the phantasy of being arrested; it seems to be newly created by the dream-work. But behind it appears the phantasy of marriage, and this material, on the contrary, has undergone but slight change at the hands of the dream activity. The features which are common to both phantasies come into distinct prominence as in a Galton’s composite photograph. The promise of the bachelor to come back to his place at the club table, the scepticism of the drinking companions, sophisticated in their many experiences, the calling after: “There goes (marries) another one,”—all these features can easily be capable of the other interpretation. Likewise the affirmative answer given to the official. Running through the bundle of papers with the repetition of the name, corresponds to a subordinate but well-recognised feature of the marriage ceremonies—the reading aloud of the congratulatory telegrams which have arrived irregularly, and which, of course, are all addressed to the same name. In the matter of the bride’s personal appearance in this dream, the marriage phantasy has even got the better of the arrest phantasy which conceals it. The fact that this bride finally displays a beard, I can explain from an inquiry—I had no chance to make an analysis. The dreamer had on the previous day crossed the street with a friend who was just as hostile to marriage as himself, and had called his friend’s attention to a beautiful brunette who was coming towards them. The friend had remarked: “Yes, if only these women wouldn’t get beards, as they grow older, like their fathers.”
Of course there is no lack of elements in this dream, on which the dream disfigurement has done more thorough work. Thus the speech: “I will pay later,” may have reference to the conduct of the father-in-law in the matter of dowry—which is uncertain. Obviously all kinds of scruples are preventing the dreamer from surrendering himself with pleasure to the phantasy of marrying. One of these apprehensions—lest one’s freedom be lost when one marries—has embodied itself in the transformation to a scene of arrest.
Let us return to the thesis that the dream activity likes to make use of a phantasy which is finished and at hand, instead of creating one afresh from the material of the dream thoughts; we shall perhaps solve one of the most interesting riddles of the dream if we keep this fact in mind. I have on page 21 related the dream of Maury,[48] who is struck on the back of the neck with a stick, and who awakes in the possession of a long dream—a complete romance from the time of the French Revolution. Since the dream is represented as coherent and as explicable by reference to the disturbing stimulus alone, about the occurrence of which stimulus the sleeper could suspect nothing, only one assumption seems to be left, namely, that the whole richly elaborated dream must have been composed and must have taken place in the short space of time between the falling of the stick on Maury’s cervical vertebra and the awakening induced by the blow. We should not feel justified in ascribing such rapidity to the waking mental activity, and so are inclined to credit the dream activity with a remarkable acceleration of thought as one of its characteristics.
Against this inference, which rapidly becomes popular, more recent authors (Le Lorrain,[45] Egger,[20] and others) have made emphatic objection. They partly doubt the correctness with which the dream was reported by Maury, and partly try to show that the rapidity of our waking mental capacity is quite as great as that which we may concede without reservation to the dream activity. The discussion raises fundamental questions, the settlement of which I do not think concerns me closely. But I must admit that the argument, for instance, of Egger has not impressed me as convincing against the guillotine dream of Maury. I would suggest the following explanation of this dream: Would it be very improbable that the dream of Maury exhibits a phantasy which had been preserved in his memory in a finished state for years, and which was awakened—I should rather say alluded to—at the moment when he became aware of the disturbing stimulus? The difficulty of composing such a long story with all its details in the exceedingly short space of time which is here at the disposal of the dreamer then disappears; the story is already composed. If the stick had struck Maury’s neck when he was awake there would perhaps have been time for the thought: “Why, that’s like being guillotined.” But as he is struck by the stick while asleep, the dream activity quickly finds occasion in the incoming stimulus to construct a wish-fulfilment, as though it thought (this is to be taken entirely figuratively): “Here is a good opportunity to realise the wish phantasy which I formed at such and such a time while I was reading.” That this dream romance is just such a one as a youth would be likely to fashion under the influence of powerful impressions does not seem questionable to me. Who would not have been carried away—especially a Frenchman and a student of the history of civilisation—by descriptions of the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women, the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die with a light heart, and preserved their quick wit and refinement of life until the fatal summons? How tempting to fancy one’s self in the midst of all this as one of the young men who parts from his lady with a kiss of the hand to climb fearlessly upon the scaffold! Or perhaps ambition is the ruling motive of the phantasy—the ambition to put one’s self in the place of one of those powerful individuals who merely, by the force of their thinking and their fiery eloquence, rule the city in which the heart of mankind is beating so convulsively, who are impelled by conviction to send thousands of human beings to their death, and who pave the way for the transformation of Europe; who, meanwhile, are not sure of their own heads, and may one day lay them under the knife of the guillotine, perhaps in the rôle of one of the Girondists or of the hero Danton? The feature, “accompanied by an innumerable multitude,” which is preserved in the memory, seems to show that Maury’s phantasy is an ambitious one of this sort.
But this phantasy, which has for a long time been ready, need not be experienced again in sleep; it suffices if it is, so to speak, “touched off.” What I mean is this: If a few notes are struck and someone says, as in Don Juan: “That is from Figaro’s Wedding by Mozart,” memories suddenly surge up within me, none of which I can in the next moment recall to consciousness. The characteristic phrase serves as an entrance station from which a complete whole is simultaneously put in motion. It need not be different in the case of unconscious thought. The psychic station which opens the way to the whole guillotine phantasy is set in motion by the waking stimulus. This phantasy, however, is not passed in review during sleep, but only afterwards in waking memory. Upon awakening one remembers the details of the phantasy, which in the dream was regarded as a whole. There is, withal, no means of making sure that one really has remembered anything which has been dreamed. The same explanation, namely, that one is dealing with finished phantasies which have been set in motion as wholes by the waking stimulus, may be applied to still other dreams which proceed from a waking stimulus—for instance to the battle dream of Napoleon at the explosion of the bomb. I do not mean to assert that all waking dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated discharge of ideas in dreams is to be altogether solved in this manner.
We must not neglect the relation of this secondary elaboration of the dream content to the other factors in the dream activity. Might the procedure be as follows: the dream-creating factors, the impulse to condense, the necessity of evading the censor, and the regard for dramatic fitness in the psychic resources of the dream—these first of all create a provisional dream content, and this is then subsequently modified until it satisfies the exactions of a second instance? This is hardly probable. It is necessary rather to assume that the demands of this instance are from the very beginning lodged in one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy, and that this condition, just like those of condensation, of censorship, and of dramatic fitness, simultaneously affect the whole mass of material in the dream thoughts in an inductive and selective manner. But of the four conditions necessary for the dream formation, the one last recognised is the one whose exactions appear to be least binding upon the dream. That this psychic function, which undertakes the so-called secondary elaboration of the dream content is identical with the work of our waking thought may be inferred with great probability from the following consideration:—Our waking (foreconscious) thought behaves towards a given object of perception just exactly as the function in question behaves towards the dream content. It is natural for our waking thought to bring about order in the material of perception, to construct relationships, and to make it subject to the requirements of an intelligible coherence. Indeed, we go too far in doing this; the tricks of prestidigitators deceive us by taking advantage of this intellectual habit. In our effort to put together the sensory impressions which are offered to us in a comprehensible manner, we often commit the most bizarre errors and even distort the truth of the material we have before us. Proofs for this are too generally familiar to need more extended consideration here. We fail to see errors in a printed page because our imagination pictures the proper words. The editor of a widely-read French paper is said to have risked the wager that he could print the words “from in front” or “from behind” in every sentence of a long article without any of his readers noticing it. He won the wager. A curious example of incorrect associations years ago caught my attention in a newspaper. After the session of the French chamber, at which Dupuy quelled a panic caused by the explosion of a bomb thrown into the hall by an anarchist by saying calmly, “La séance continue,” the visitors in the gallery were asked to testify as to their impression of the attempted assassination. Among them were two provincials. One of these told that immediately after the conclusion of a speech he had heard a detonation, but had thought that it was the custom in parliament to fire a shot whenever a speaker had finished. The other, who had apparently already heard several speakers, had got the same idea, with the variation, however, that he supposed this shooting to be a sign of appreciation following an especially successful speech.
Thus the psychic instance which approaches the dream content with the demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to preliminary interpretation, and in doing so brings about a complete misunderstanding of it, is no other than our normal thought. In our interpretation the rule will be in every case to disregard the apparent coherence of the dream as being of suspicious origin, and, whether the elements are clear or confused, to follow the same regressive path to the dream material.
We now learn upon what the scale of quality in dreams from confusion to clearness—mentioned above, page 305—essentially depends. Those parts of the dream with which the secondary elaboration has been able to accomplish something seem to us clear; those where the power of this activity has failed seem confused. Since the confused parts of the dream are often also those which are less vividly imprinted, we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is also responsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the individual dream structures.
If I were to seek an object of comparison for the definitive formation of the dream as it manifests itself under the influence of normal thinking, none better offers itself than those mysterious inscriptions with which Die Fliegende Blaetter has so long amused its readers. The reader is supposed to find a Latin inscription concealed in a given sentence which, for the sake of contrast, is in dialect and as scurrilous as possible in significance. For this purpose the letters are taken from their groupings in syllables and are newly arranged. Now and then a genuine Latin word results, at other places we think that we have abbreviations of such words before us, and at still other places in the inscription we allow ourselves to be carried along over the senselessness of the disjointed letters by the semblance of disintegrated portions or by breaks in the inscription. If we do not wish to respond to the jest we must give up looking for an inscription, must take the letters as we see them, and must compose them into words of our mother tongue, unmindful of the arrangement which is offered.
I shall now undertake a résumé of this extended discussion of the dream activity. We were confronted by the question whether the mind exerts all its capabilities to the fullest development in dream formation, or only a fragment of its capabilities, and these restricted in their activity. Our investigation leads us to reject such a formulation of the question entirely as inadequate to our circumstances. But if we are to remain on the same ground when we answer as that on which the question is urged upon us, we must acquiesce in two conceptions which are apparently opposed and mutually exclusive. The psychic activity in dream formation resolves itself into two functions—the provision of the dream thoughts and the transformation of these into the dream content. The dream thoughts are entirely correct, and are formed with all the psychic expenditure of which we are capable; they belong to our thoughts which have not become conscious, from which our thoughts which have become conscious also result by means of a certain transposition. Much as there may be about them which is worth knowing and mysterious, these problems have no particular relation to the dream, and have no claim to be treated in connection with dream problems. On the other hand, there is that second portion of the activity which changes the unconscious thoughts into the dream content, an activity peculiar to dream life and characteristic of it. Now, this peculiar dream-work is much further removed from the model of waking thought than even the most decided depreciators of psychic activity in dream formation have thought. It is not, one might say, more negligent, more incorrect, more easily forgotten, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something qualitatively altogether different from waking thought, and therefore not in any way comparable to it. It does not in general think, calculate, or judge at all, but limits itself to transforming. It can be exhaustively described if the conditions which must be satisfied at its creation are kept in mind. This product, the dream, must at any cost be withdrawn from the censor, and for this purpose the dream activity makes use of the displacement of psychic intensities up to the transvaluation of all psychic values; thoughts must exclusively or predominatingly be reproduced in the material of visual and acoustic traces of memory, and this requirement secures for the dream-work the regard for presentability, which meets the requirement by furnishing new displacements. Greater intensities are (probably) to be provided than are each night at the disposal of the dream thoughts, and this purpose is served by the prolific condensation which is undertaken with the component parts of the dream thoughts. Little attention is paid to the logical relations of the thought material; they ultimately find a veiled representation in the formal peculiarities of the dream. The affects of the dream thoughts undergo lesser changes than their presentation content. As a rule they are suppressed; where they are preserved they are freed from the presentations and put together according to their similarity. Only one part of the dream-work—the revision varying in amount, made by the partially roused conscious thought—at all agrees with the conception which the authors have tried to extend to the entire activity of dream formation.