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In the very text of Sophocles’s tragedy there is an unmistakable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend originates in an extremely old dream material, which consists of the painful disturbance of the relation toward...
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“For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams to think themselves partners of their mother’s bed. But he passes most easily through life to whom these circumstances are trifles” (Act iv. sc. 3).
The dream of having sexual intercourse with one’s mother occurred at that time, as it does to-day, to many people, who tell it with indignation and astonishment. As may be understood, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams, and just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and self-chastisement.
Dr. Paul Federn (Vienna) has propounded the fascinating theory that a great many flying dreams are erection dreams, since the remarkable phenomena of erection which so constantly occupy the human phantasy must strongly impress upon it a notion of the suspension of gravity (see the winged phalli of the ancients).
Dreams of falling are most frequently characterised by fear. Their interpretation, when they occur in women, is subject to no difficulty because women always accept the symbolic sense of falling, which is a circumlocution for the indulgence of an erotic temptation.
People who dream often of swimming, of cleaving the waves, with great enjoyment, etc., have usually been persons who wetted their beds, and they now repeat in the dream a pleasure which they have long since learned to forgo.
place. The dream is reserved, paltry, and laconic when compared with the range and copiousness of the dream thoughts.
that the dream elements are constructed from the entire mass of the dream thoughts and that every one of them appears in relation to the dream thoughts to have a multiple determination.
I pass over the striking circumstance that here, as elsewhere in the analysis of dreams, associations of the most widely different values are employed for the establishment of thought connections as though they were equivalent, and I yield to the temptation to regard the process by which amyls in the dream thoughts are replaced by propyls, as though it were plastic in the dream content.
Dream displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream.
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.
The manner in which the factors of displacement, condensation, and over-determination play into one another in the formation of the dream,
the absurdity of dreams has furnished the opponents of dream investigation with their chief argument for considering the dream nothing but the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary activity of the mind.
According to the testimony of our feelings, the emotion experienced in the dream is in no way less valid than one of like intensity experienced in waking life, and the dream makes its claim to be taken up as a part of our real mental experiences, more energetically on account of its emotional content than on account of its ideal content.
The restraint of affects would accordingly be the second result of the dream censor as the disfigurement of the dream was the first.
The suppression and inversion of affects are useful in social life, as the current analogy for the dream censor has shown us—above all, for purposes of dissimulation.
If I converse with a person to whom I must show consideration while I am saying unpleasant things to him, it is almost more important that I should conceal the expression of my emotion from him, than that I modify the wording of my thoughts. If I speak to him in polite words, but accompany them by looks or gestures of hatred and disdain, the effect which I produce upon this person is not very different from what it would have been if I had recklessly thrown my contempt into his face.
Above all, then, the censor bids me suppress my emotions, and if I am master of the art of dissimulation, I can hypocritically show the opposite emotion—smiling where I should like to be angry, and...
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Who would not have been carried away—especially a Frenchman and a student of the history of civilisation—by descriptions of the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women, the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die with a light heart, and preserved their quick wit and refinement of life until the fatal summons? How tempting to fancy one’s self in the midst of all this as one of the young men who parts from his lady with a kiss of the hand to climb fearlessly upon the scaffold! Or perhaps ambition is the ruling motive of the phantasy—the ambition to put one’s
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It is true that we distort the dream in our attempt to reproduce it; and herein we find another instance of what we have designated as the often misunderstood secondary elaboration of the dream through the influence of normal thinking.
But this distortion is itself only a part of the elaboration to which the dream thoughts are regularly subjected by virtue of the dream censor.
The authorities have here divined or observed that part of the dream distortion most obviously at work; to us this is of little importance, for we know that a more prolific work of distortion, not so easily comprehensible, has already chosen the dream from among the concealed thoughts as its object. The authorities err only in considering the modifications of the dream while it is being recalled and put i...
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Whenever one psychic element is connected with another through an obnoxious or superficial association, there also exists a correct and more profound connection between the two which succumbs to the resistance of the censor.
The structure of the dream thoughts is in the regression broken up into its raw material.
Aristotle, the dream is a continuation of thinking in sleep (in so far as one sleeps). Considering that during the day our thoughts produce such a diversity of psychic acts—judgments, conclusions, contradictions, expectations, intentions, etc.—why should our sleeping thoughts be forced to confine themselves to the production of wishes?
the conscious wish is a dream inciter only if it succeeds in arousing a similar unconscious wish which reinforces it.
unconscious wishes are always active and ready for expression whenever they find an opportunity to unite themselves with an emotion from conscious life, and that they transfer their greater intensity to the lesser intensity of the latter.
The dream is a fragment of the abandoned psychic life of the child.
an hysterical symptom originates only where two contrasting wish-fulfilments, having their source in different psychic systems, are able to combine in one expression.
throughout our entire sleeping state we are just as certain that we are dreaming as we are certain that we are sleeping.
the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
Plato, that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
