Strange to say, yes. This meaning is disguised only in a special way so
that one does not recognize it immediately. Hanold learns in the dream
that the girl sought lives in the city and in his own day. That is, of
course, true of Zoë Bertgang, only that in his dream the city is not the
German university-city, but Pompeii, the time not the present, but the
year 79, according to our reckoning. It is a kind of disfigurement by
displacement; not Gradiva is transported to the present, but the dreamer
to the past; but we are also given the essential and new fact _that he
shares locality and time with the girl sought_. Whence, then, this
dissimulation and disguise which must deceive us as well as the dreamer
about the peculiar meaning and content of the dream? Well, we have
already means at hand to give us a satisfactory answer to this question.
Let us recall all that we have heard about the nature and origin of
fancies, these preliminaries of delusion. They are substitution for and
remnants of different repressed memories, which a resistance does not
allow to push into consciousness, which, however, become conscious by
heeding the censor of resistance, by means of transformations and
disfigurements. After this compromise is completed, the former memories
have become fancies, which may easily be misunderstood by the conscious
person, that is, may be understood to be the ruling psychic force. Now
let us suppose that the dream-pictures are the so-called physiological
delusion-products of a man, the compromise-results of that struggle
between what is repressed and what is dominant, which exist probably
even in people absolutely normal in the daytime. Then we understand that
we have to consider the dream something disfigured behind which there is
to be sought something else, not disfigured, but, in a sense, something
offensive, like Hanold’s repressed memories behind his fancies. One
expresses the admitted opposition by distinguishing what the dreamer
remembers on waking, as _manifest dream-content_, from what formed the
basis of the dream before the censor’s disfigurement, _the latent
dream-thoughts_. To interpret a dream, then, means to translate the
manifest dream-content into the latent dream-thoughts, which make
retrogressive the disfigurement that had to be approved by the
resistance censor. When we turn these deliberations to the dream which
is occupying us, we find that the latent dream-thoughts must have been
as follows: “The girl who has that beautiful walk, whom you are seeking,
lives really in this city with you;” but in this form the thought could
not become conscious; in its way there stood the fact that a fancy had
established, as a result of a former compromise, the idea that Gradiva
was a Pompeiian girl, and therefore nothing remained, if the actual fact
of her living in the same locality and at the same time was to be
perceived, but to assume the disfigurement: you are living in Pompeii at
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