A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
The best known productions of phantasy are the so-called "day dreams,"
which we already know, pictured satisfactions of ambitious, of covetous
and erotic wishes, which flourish the more grandly the more reality
admonishes them to modesty and patience. There is unmistakably shown in
them the nature of imaginative happiness, the restoration of the
independence of pleasurable gratification from the acquiescence of
reality. We know such day dreams are nuclei and models for the dreams of
night. The night dream is essentially nothing but a day dream, distorted
by the nocturnal forms of psychological activity, and made available by
the freedom which the night gives to instinctive impulses. We have
already become acquainted with the idea that a day dream is not
necessarily conscious, that there are also unconscious day dreams. Such
unconscious day dreams are as much the source of night dreams as of
neurotic symptoms.
The significance of phantasy for the development of symptoms will become
clear to you by the following: We have said that in a case of
renunciation, the libido occupies regressively the positions once
abandoned by it, to which, nevertheless, it has clung in certain ways.
We shall neither retract this statement nor correct it, but we shall
insert a missing link. How does the libido find its way to these points
of fixation? Well, every object and tendency of the libido that has been
abandoned, is not abandoned in every sense of the word. They, or their
derivatives, are still held in presentations of the phantasy, with a
certain degree of intensity. The libido need only retire to the
imagination in order to find from them the open road to all suppressed
fixations. These phantasies were happy under a sort of tolerance, there
was no conflict between them and the ego, no matter how acute the
contrast, so long as a certain condition was observed--a condition
_quantitative_ in nature that is now disturbed by the flowing back of
the libido to the phantasies. By this addition the accumulation of
energy in the phantasies is heightened to such a degree that they become
assertive and develop a pressure in the direction of realization. But
that makes a conflict between them and the ego inevitable. Whether
formerly conscious or unconscious, they now are subject to suppression
by the ego and are victims to the attraction of the unconscious. The
libido wanders from phantasies now unconscious to their sources in
unconsciousness, and back to its own points of fixation.
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