A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
This dreamer had for a long time been familiar with the claims of dream
interpretation. Otherwise he might have taken exception to the fact that
so trivial a detail as the shape of a table should be taken as the
basis of the investigation. As a matter of fact we judge nothing in the
dream as accidental or indifferent, and we expect to reach our
conclusion by the explanation of just such trivial and unmotivated
details. Perhaps you will be surprised that the dream work should arouse
the thought "we are in exactly the same position as they are," just by
the choice of the table. But even this becomes clear when you learn that
the name of the family in question is _Tischler_. By permitting his own
family to sit at such a table, he intends to express that they too are
_Tischler_. Please note how, in relating such a dream interpretation,
one must of necessity become indiscreet. Here you have arrived at one of
the difficulties in the choice of examples that I indicated before. I
could easily have substituted another example for this one, but would
probably have avoided this indiscretion at the cost of committing
another one in its place.
The time has come to introduce two new terms, which we could have used
long ago. We shall call that which the dream relates, the manifest
content of the dream; that which is hidden, which we can only reach by
the analysis of ideas we shall call latent dream thoughts. We may now
consider the connection between the manifest dream content and the
latent dream thoughts as they are revealed in these examples. Many
different connections can exist. In examples 1 and 2 the manifest
content is also a constituent part of the latent thought, but only a
very small part of it. A small piece of a great composite psychic
structure in the unconscious dream thought has penetrated into the
manifest dream, like a fragment of it, or in other cases, like an
allusion to it, like a catchword or an abbreviation in the telegraphic
code. The interpretation must mould this fragment, or indication, into a
whole, as was done most successfully in example 2. One sort of
distortion of which the dream mechanism consists is therefore
substitution by means of a fragment or an allusion. In the third,
moreover, we must recognize another relation which we shall see more
clearly and distinctly expressed in the following examples:
4. The dreamer "_pulls a certain woman of his acquaintance from behind a
bed_." He finds the meaning of this dream element himself by his first
association. It means: This woman "has a pull" with him.[26]
5. Another man dreams that "_his brother is in a closet_." The first
association substitutes _clothes-press_ for closet, and the second gives
the meaning: his brother is _close-pressed_ for money.[27]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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