synthesis only of the dreams of such persons as are unknown to the
reading public. Since, however, only neurotic patients furnish me with
the means for doing this, this part of the description of the dream must
be postponed until I can carry the psychological explanation of neuroses
far enough—elsewhere—to be able to show their connection with the
subject matter under consideration.[DT]
From my attempts synthetically to construct dreams from the dream
thoughts, I know that the material which is obtained from interpretation
varies in value. For a part of it consists of the essential dream
thoughts which would, therefore, completely replace the dream, and which
would in themselves be sufficient for this replacement if there were no
censor for the dream. The other part may be summed up under the term
“collaterals”; taken as a whole they represent the means by which the
real wish that arises from the dream thoughts is transformed into the
dream-wish. A first part of these “collaterals” consists of allusions to
the actual dream thoughts, which, considered schematically, correspond
to displacements from the essential to the non-essential. A second part
comprises the thoughts which connect these non-essential elements, that
have become significant through displacement with one another, and which
reach from them into the dream content. Finally a third part contains
the ideas and thought connections which (in the work of interpretation)
conduct us from the dream content to the intermediary collaterals, _all
of which_ need not _necessarily_ have participated in the formation of
the dream.
At this point we are interested exclusively in the essential dream
thoughts. These are usually found to be a complex of thoughts and
memories of the most intricate possible construction, and to possess all
the properties of the thought processes which are known to us from
waking life. Not infrequently they are trains of thought which proceed
from more than one centre, but which do not lack points of connection;
almost regularly a chain of thought stands next to its contradictory
correlative, being connected with it by contrast associations.
The individual parts of this complicated structure naturally stand in
the most manifold logical relations to one another. They constitute a
foreground or background, digressions, illustrations, conditions, chains
of argument, and objections. When the whole mass of these dream thoughts
is subjected to the pressure of the dream activity, during which the
parts are turned about, broken up, and pushed together, something like
drifting ice, there arises the question, what becomes of the logical
ties which until now had given form to the structure? What
representation do “if,” “because,” “as though,” “although,” “either—or,”
and all the other conjunctions, without which we cannot understand a
phrase or a sentence, receive in the dream?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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