Here I will stop in order that I may recapitulate the results of the
analysis of the dream. By following the associations which were linked
to the single elements of the dream torn from their context, I have been
led to a series of thoughts and reminiscences where I am bound to
recognise interesting expressions of my psychical life. The matter
yielded by an analysis of the dream stands in intimate relationship with
the dream content, but this relationship is so special that I should
never have been able to have inferred the new discoveries directly from
the dream itself. The dream was passionless, disconnected, and
unintelligible. During the time that I am unfolding the thoughts at the
back of the dream I feel intense and well-grounded emotions. The
thoughts themselves fit beautifully together into chains logically bound
together with certain central ideas which ever repeat themselves. Such
ideas not represented in the dream itself are in this instance the
antitheses _selfish, unselfish, to be indebted, to work for nothing_. I
could draw closer the threads of the web which analysis has disclosed,
and would then be able to show how they all run together into a single
knot; I am debarred from making this work public by considerations of a
private, not of a scientific, nature. After having cleared up many
things which I do not willingly acknowledge as mine, I should have much
to reveal which had better remain my secret. Why, then, do not I choose
another dream whose analysis would be more suitable for publication, so
that I could awaken a fairer conviction of the sense and cohesion of the
results disclosed by analysis? The answer is, because every dream which
I investigate leads to the same difficulties and places me under the
same need of discretion; nor should I forgo this difficulty any the more
were I to analyse the dream of someone else. That could only be done
when opportunity allowed all concealment to be dropped without injury to
those who trusted me.
The conclusion which is now forced upon me is that the dream is a _sort
of substitution_ for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought
which I attained after complete analysis. I do not yet know the process
by which the dream arose from those thoughts, but I perceive that it is
wrong to regard the dream as psychically unimportant, a purely physical
process which has arisen from the activity of isolated cortical elements
awakened out of sleep.
I must further remark that the dream is far shorter than the thoughts
which I hold it replaces; whilst analysis discovered that the dream was
provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening before the dream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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