I think we also have an easy task in recognising the psychic force which
makes itself felt in the circumstances of dream displacement. The result
of this displacement is that the dream content no longer resembles the
core of the dream thoughts at all, and that the dream reproduces only a
disfigured form of the dream-wish in the unconscious. But we are already
acquainted with dream disfigurement; we have traced it back to the
censorship which one psychic instance in the psychic life exercises upon
the other. Dream displacement is one of the chief means for achieving
this disfigurement. _Is fecit, cui profuit._ We may assume that dream
displacement is brought about by the influence of this censor, of the
endopsychic repulsion.[DS]
The manner in which the factors of displacement, condensation, and
over-determination play into one another in the formation of the dream,
which is the ruling factor and which the subordinate one, all this will
be reserved as the subject of later investigations. For the present we
may state, as a second condition which the elements must satisfy in
order to get into the dream, that _they must be withdrawn from the
censor of resistance_. From now on we shall take account of dream
displacement as an unquestionable fact in the interpretation of dreams.
(_c_) _Means of Representation in the Dream_
Besides the two factors of dream condensation and dream displacement
which we have found to be active in the transformation of the latent
dream material into the manifest content, we shall come in the course of
this investigation upon two other conditions which exercise an
unquestionable influence upon the selection of the material which gets
into the dream. Even at the risk of seeming to stop our progress, I
should like to glance at the processes by which the interpretation of
dreams is accomplished. I do not deny that I should succeed best in
making them clear, and in showing that they are sufficiently reliable to
insure them against attack, by taking a single dream as a paradigm and
developing its interpretation, as I have done in Chapter II. in the
dream of “Irma’s Injection,” and then putting together the dream
thoughts which I have discovered, and reconstructing the formation of
the dream from them—that is to say, by supplementing the analysis of
dreams by a synthesis of them. I have accomplished this with several
specimens for my own instruction; but I cannot undertake to do it here
because I am prevented by considerations, which every right-minded
person must approve of, relative to the psychic material necessary for
such a demonstration. In the analysis of dreams these considerations
present less difficulty, for an analysis may be incomplete and still
retain its value even if it leads only a short way into the thought
labyrinth of the dream. I do not see how a synthesis could be anything
short of complete in order to be convincing. I could give a complete
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