Even without going very high we find that the ardently moved members of the endocrine system at times cease to trouble in the absence of exterior physical stimuli, and a different type of autocoid than the burning one makes its appearance in the blood-stream. Those who pretend that lack of indulgence perpetually increases the store of sexual desire and capacity, conscious or unconscious, run the risk of being likened to that boastful bridegroom so inimitably described by Montaigne, who, because of the sheer extravagance of his claims, was eventually adjudged “unfamiliar with the practice” under consideration. A particular wish, then, is a wish with a direction--a direction which may be changed. The belief that a grown man has an unappeased longing to be fed once more at the breast or the bottle--a longing suppressed in his primary psychic apparatus--deserves itself to be classed as a psycho-neurotic symptom. And now we may resume our suppositions. 4. MORE SUPPOSITIONS _Fifth Assumption_: That dreams open the road for the discovery of festering wish-thoughts in the unconscious. “The dream is the distorted fulfillment of a suppressed wish.... The wish manifested in the dream must be an infantile one.”[70] The ingenuity which our author has expended in the attempt to prove that “dreams are never nonsense” passes belief. To begin, he makes a sharp distinction between “manifest” and “latent” content, between the dream as it appears and the dream as it secretly is. Then he divides the modes of disguise which this latent content or meaning of the unconscious mind adopts in sneaking its obscenities past the censor for the production of the manifest dream-show into three categories: (a) Condensation; (b) Displacement; (c) Regard for Presentability--which means presentability in pictures or symbols. The word “distortion” sufficiently covers these three processes. Then there is a fourth category, (e) called Secondary Elaboration. “A psychic function which cannot be differentiated from our waking thoughts may make contributions to the dream content.... It is an expression of the _esprit d’escalier_ on the part of the psychic censor.... The result is that the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence [given it by distortion] and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience.”[71] That is, we half wake up, and give to the manifest dream a specious logic--which the psycho-analyst warns us to ignore. Now it is clear that the principle of symbolical interpretation, if once admitted, will open wide the gates for whatever “meanings” it is necessary to find in order to establish the general theory. For these are not “arbitrary” symbols, like “those used in stenography.” They are such symbols as may be taken from “folk-lore,” or any other available source, their meanings loosely worn. All that is required of them is that they shall yield a general sexual significance whenever sufficiently squeezed.