A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
But to return, you are right only if you admit that you have made use of
an abbreviated form of speech, and if you do not believe that you must
connect the many-sidedness we have mentioned with the essence of the
dream. When you speak of the dream you must mean either the manifest
dream, i.e., the product of the dream-work, or at most the dream-work
itself--that psychic occurrence which forms the manifest dream out of
the latent dream thought. Any other use of the word is a confusion of
concept that can only cause trouble. If your assertions refer to the
latent thoughts back of the dream, say so, and do not cloud the problem
of the dream by using such a faulty means of expression. The latent
dream thoughts are the material which the dream-work remolds into the
manifest dream. Why do you insist upon confusing the material with the
work that makes use of it? Are you any better off than those who knew
only the product of this work, and could explain neither where it came
from nor how it was produced?
The only essential thing in the dream is the dream-work that has had
its influence upon the thought-material. We have no right to disregard
it theoretically even if, in certain practical situations, we may fail
to take it into account. Analytic observation, too, shows that the
dream-work never limits itself to translating these thoughts in the
archaic or regressive mode of expression known to you. Rather it
regularly adds something which does not belong to the latent thoughts of
waking, but which is the essential motive of dream-formation. This
indispensable ingredient is at the same time the unconscious wish, for
the fulfillment of which the dream content is rebuilt. The dream may be
any conceivable thing, if you take into account only the thoughts
represented by it, warning, resolution, preparation, etc.; it is also
always the fulfillment of an unknown wish, and it is this only if you
look upon it as the result of the dream-work. A dream is never itself a
resolution, a warning, and no more--but always a resolution, etc.,
translated into an archaic form of expression with the help of the
unconscious wish, and changed about for the purpose of fulfilling this
wish. The one characteristic, wish-fulfillment, is constant; the other
may vary; it may itself be a wish at times, so that the dream, with the
aid of an unconscious wish, presents as fulfilled a latent wish out of
waking hours.
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