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Title: On dreams

Author: Sigmund Freud

Author of introduction, etc.: W. Leslie Mackenzie

Translator: M. D. Eder

Release date: February 10, 2025 [eBook #75333]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Rebman Company, 1914

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75333

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Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON DREAMS
***

Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.

ON DREAMS

BY
PROF. DR. SIGM. FREUD
ONLY AUTHORISED ENGLISH TRANSLATION
BY
M. D. EDER
FROM THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.A., M.D., LL.D.
MEDICAL MEMBER OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD FOR SCOTLAND; LATE
FERGUSON SCHOLAR IN PHILOSOPHY; LATE EXAMINER IN MENTAL PHILOSOPHY,
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

NEW YORK
REBMAN COMPANY
HERALD SQUARE BUILDING
141–145 WEST 36TH STREET

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

PAGE
I. THE SCIENTIFIC AND POPULAR VIEWS OF DREAMS CONTRASTED 1
II. DREAMS HAVE A MEANING—ANALYSIS OF A DREAM—MANIFEST
AND LATENT CONTENT OF DREAMS 6
III. THE DREAM AS REALISATION OF UNFULFILLED DESIRES—
INFANTILE TYPE OF DREAMS 21
IV. THE DREAM-MECHANISM—CONDENSATION—DRAMATISATION 33
V. THE DREAM-MECHANISM CONTINUED—DISPLACEMENT—
TRANSVALUATION OF ALL PSYCHICAL VALUES 45
VI. THE DREAM-MECHANISM CONTINUED—THE EGO IN THE DREAM 54
VII. THE DREAM-MECHANISM CONTINUED—REGARD FOR
INTELLIGIBILITY 68
VIII. RELATION OF DREAMS TO OTHER UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL
PROCESSES—REPRESSION 78
IX. THREE CLASSES OF DREAMS 84
X. WHY THE DREAM DISGUISES THE DESIRES—THE CENSORSHIP 88
XI. THE DREAM THE GUARDIAN OF SLEEP 92
XII. DREAM SYMBOLISM—MYTHS AND FOLKLORE 100
XIII. ELEMENTS COMMON TO NORMAL AND ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 107

INTRODUCTION

“The interpretation of dreams,” says Professor Freud in one place, “is the
royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in the mental
life.”
Even standing alone this statement is sufficiently striking; it is at once a
theory and a challenge. But it does not stand alone. It comes at the end of
many years of research among every class of mental diseases. It comes,
therefore, with the authentication of experience. It is not to be lightly set
aside; it claims our study; and the study of it will not go unrewarded. The
short essay here translated by Dr. Eder is but an introduction to the vast
field opened up by Professor Sigm. Freud and his colleagues. Already the
journals of clinical psychology, normal or morbid, are full of the
discussions of Professor Freud’s methods and results. There is a “Freud
School.” That alone is a proof that the method is novel if not new. There
are, of course, violent opponents and critical students. The opponents may
provoke, but it is to the critical students that Professor Freud will prefer to
speak. “The condemnation,” said Hegel, “that a great man lays upon the
world is to force it to explain him.” Of a new method, either of research or
of treatment—and the Freud method is both—the same may be said. It is
certain that, whatever our prejudice against details may be, the theory of
“psycho-analysis” and the treatment based upon it deserves, if only as a
mental exercise, our critical consideration. But Professor Freud is not alone
in the world of morbid psychology. Let me digress for a moment.
Over twenty years ago it was my special business to study and criticise
several textbooks on insanity. To the study of these textbooks I came after
many years of discipline in normal psychology and the related sciences.
When I came to insanity proper, I found that practically not a single
textbook made any systematic effort to show how the morbid symptoms we

classified as “mental diseases” had their roots in the mental processes of the
normal mind. In his small book, “Sanity and Insanity,” Dr. Charles Mercier
did make an effort to lay out, as it were, the institutes of insanity, the normal
groundwork out of which the insanities grew, the groups of ideas that to-day
serve to direct our conduct and to-morrow lose their adjustment to any but a
specially adapted environment. In his later works, particularly in
“Psychology, Normal and Morbid,” Dr. Mercier has followed up the central
ideas of the early study. All the more recent textbooks in English contain
efforts in the same direction; but with a few striking exceptions they are
studies rather of physical symptoms associated with mental processes than
of morbid psychology proper. It was not until there came from across the
Channel Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully elaborated studies on Hysteria that I
realised what a wealth of psychological material had remained hidden in
our asylums, in our nervous homes, even in our ordinary hospitals, and in
the multitudes of strange cases that occur in private practice. Janet, a pupil
of the Charcot School—Charcot, who made la Salpetrière famous—pushed
the minute analysis of morbid mental states into regions practically hitherto
untouched. He was not alone. His colleague, Professor Raymond, and
others in France and Germany, all work with the same main ideas. Janet’s
books read like romances. His studies on Psychological Automatism, the
Mental State of Hystericals, Neuroses and Fixed Ideas, and many others on
the part played by the unconscious, were such rich mines of fact and
suggestion that Professor William James, in his “Principles of Psychology,”
said of them: “All these facts taken together, form unquestionably the
beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new light into the very
abysses of our nature.” Curiously, not in this country—the country of great
psychologists, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid, Dugald
Stewart, Adam Smith, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among
the dead, and whole schools of distinguished psychologists among the
living—not in this country, but in America, was the value of the new
material seriously considered. Here and there, within recent years, in this
country, Janet’s elaborate studies have not been fruitless; but I could not
readily name any clinician in this country that has produced similar studies.
It is to the continents of Europe and America, which in this field are in
intimate touch, that we must go if we are to see the rich outgrowths of
morbid psychology. I do not say that the work done by our English students
of insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as important as any done in the

world, but it is none the less true that, until a few years ago, the methods of
Janet, Raymond, Bernheim, Beaunis, not to speak of Moll, Forel, and
Oppenheim, were practically unstudied here. In America it has been entirely
different. Even the names of the men are now familiar in our English
magazines—Muensterberg, Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, Ernest Jones, J.
Mark Baldwin, not to mention William James and Stanley Hall. It looks as
if every new idea unearthed in the Old World is put to the test by someone
in the new. Britain remains curiously cold.
It would be interesting to ask the reason. Is it our metaphysical training?
Is it the failure of the philosophical schools to realize the value of all this
new raw material of study? Is it, perhaps, the fear that “the unity of
consciousness” may be endangered by the study of Double Personality,
Multiple Personality, Dissociation of Consciousness, Dormant Complexes,
Hysterias, Phobias, Obsessions, Psychoneuroses, Fixed Ideas, Hysterical
Amnesias, Hypermnesias, and the masses of other notions correlated,
roughly, under the term “unconscious”? The suggestion of fear is not mere
conjecture. Many years ago a distinguished student of philosophy, a pupil
and friend of Sir William Hamilton, indicated to me, when I spoke to him of
some recent work on Double Personality, that he had difficulty in placing
the new work, feeling that, in admitting the possibility of multiple
personality, he was sacrificing the primary concept of philosophy, the unity
of consciousness. It did not perhaps occur to him that, when two so-called
“persons” speak together, there are, in popular language, “two
personalities”—each, no doubt, in a separate body, but each having his own
“unity of consciousness.”
If this be a fact, is there any greater difficulty in explaining the other fact
that two persons may be, as James put it, under the same hat? The
metaphysical difficulty, if there be a difficulty, is neither more nor less in
the one case than in the other. But it is needless to ask why a whole field of
study has been, relatively, neglected in this country. For now we have begun
to make up leeway.
This translation by Dr. Eder is an introduction to the latest phase of the
study of the unconscious. It brings us back to the point I began with, the
relation of the normal to the morbid. Dreams are a part of everyone’s
normal experience, yet they are shown here to be of the same tissue, of the
same mental nature, as other phenomena that are undoubtedly morbid.

Dreams therefore offer in the normal a budding-point for the study of
morbid growths. And the study of dreams by Freud came long after his
studies of such neuroses as the phobias, hysterias, and the rest. To dreams
he applied the same method of investigation and treatment as to the others,
and he found that dreams offered an unlimited field for the same kind of
study.
Perhaps, before going further, I should attempt to disarm criticism about
the term “unconscious.” We speak of subconsciousness, co-consciousness,
unconscious mind, unconscious cerebration; or what other terms should we
use? Here it is better to avoid discussion, for we are concerned less with
theory than with practice. And in Freud’s work, whether we accept his
theory or not, the practice is of primary importance. He takes the view that
no conscious experience is entirely lost; what seems to have vanished from
the current consciousness has really passed into a subconsciousness, where
it lives on in an organised form as real as if it were still part of the
conscious personality. This view, with various modifications, is adopted by
many students of morbid psychology. But there is another view.
Muensterberg, for instance, maintains that it is unnecessary to speak of
“subconsciousness,” for every fact can be explained in terms of physiology.
He would accept the term “co-conscious” or “co-consciousness”; but in one
chapter he ends the discussion by saying: “But whether we prefer the
physiological account or insist on the co-conscious phenomena, in either
case is there any chance for the subconscious to slip in? That a content of
consciousness is to a high degree dissociated, or that the idea of the
personality is split off, is certainly a symptom of pathological disturbance,
but it has nothing to do with the constituting of two different kinds of
consciousness, or with breaking the continuous sameness of consciousness
itself. The most exceptional and most uncanny occurrences of the hospital
teach after all the same which our daily experience ought to teach us: there
is no subconsciousness” (“Psychotherapy,” p. 157).
There are many refinements of distinction that we could make here, and
if any reader is anxious to consider them, he will find some of them in a
small volume on “Subconscious Phenomena,” by Muensterberg, Ribot, and
others (Rebman, London).
Here it is not of primary importance to come to any conclusion on the
best term to use or the complement theory of the facts. The discussion is far

from an end; but the harvest of facts need not wait for the end of the
discussion.
Meanwhile, let it be said that Professor Freud has been steeped in this
whole subject from his student days. It is, however, less important to
discuss his theory than to understand his method. The method is called
“psycho-analysis.” The name is not inviting, and it might apply to any form
of mental analysis; but it is at least consistently Greek in etymology, and
has taken on a technical meaning in the medical schools. What is the
method?
Let it be granted that a person has undergone a strongly emotional
experience—for example, a sudden shock or fright. If the person is highly
nervous, the shock may result in some degree of dissociation. This may take
the form of a loss of memory for certain parts of the experience. Let it be
so. The ultimate result may be an unreasonable fear of some entirely
harmless object or situation. The person is afraid of a crowd, or afraid of a
closed door, or has an intense fear of some animal or person. For this fear
he can give no reason; he cannot tell when it began nor why it persists. He
may more or less overcome it; but he may not. All through his future life he
will go about with a helplessly unreasonable fear of a closed door
(claustrophobia) or of a crowd (agoraphobia). Minor varieties of such an
affection are to be found in every person’s experience. On investigation,
however, the root of the fear can be discovered: it is the product of the
original emotional shock. The intellectual details of the emotional
experience have completely vanished from the memory, but the emotion
remains, and it is attached to some accidental object or circumstance
present in the original experience. Thousands of illustrations could be
given. They are, unfortunately, only too numerous. In this essay on the
Interpretation of Dreams the reader will find many simple cases.
If, now, the person so affected is placed in a quiet room, if he is requested
to concentrate his mind on the disturbing object or idea associated with his
fear, if he is encouraged to observe passively the chance ideas which float
up to him when he thus concentrates himself, if he utters, under the
direction of his medical attendant, every such idea as it comes into his
mind, there is a strange result. These ideas, coming apparently by chance
from nowhere in particular, are, when carefully studied, found to be linked
up with some past experience, dating, perhaps, from months or years away.

If each idea as it emerges is followed up, if the other ideas dragged into
consciousness by it are carefully recorded, it is found that sooner or later
entirely forgotten experiences come into clear consciousness. There are
many ways of helping this process. One of the ways is this: Let a series of
words be arranged; let the doctor speak one of them to the patient; let the
patient, in the shortest time possible to him, say right out whatever idea is
suggested to him by the word; let the time taken to make the response be
recorded in seconds and fractions of a second—a thing easy enough to do
with a stop-watch. Then, when the responses to a long series of words are
all recorded, and the time each response has taken, it is found that some
responses have taken much longer than others. This prolongation of the
response-time is always found whenever the test word has stirred up a
memory associated with emotion. By following up further the ideas stirred
by this word, more ideas of a related kind are discovered, often to the
patient’s surprise. Things long forgotten come back to memory;
circumstances that apparently had no relation to the present consciousness
are found to be linked in sequence with it—emotions, unreasoning fears,
anxieties, that apparently had no relation to any particular experience, are
found at last to be part and parcel of things that happened long ago. Once
the doctor has his cue, he can range in many directions, and probe the mind
again and again, until he reveals multitudes of suppressed memories,
forgotten ideas, forgotten elements of experience. He can even get back into
early childhood, which, to the patient himself, leaves many and many a
blank area in the memory. But always the doctor lights, sooner or later, on
some complex experience in which the particular fear or anxiety arose.
But now, if the case is a suitable one, a still stranger thing happens. When
the forgotten experience has thus artfully been brought into the full light of
consciousness, the patient finds himself satisfied with the explanation, and
loses his particular fear. He can now go back over the whole history of its
genesis; he can link up the old experience to the new, and so he attains once
more satisfaction and peace of mind. Up till now he could not be reasoned
out of his anxiety; he had always an answer for any explanation; he had
always a fresh foolish reason for his fear. Now all this vanishes. He finds
his mind once more running smoothly, and his “phobia” gone. The
unreasoning dread has been tracked back to its lair, and its lair has been
destroyed in the process.

There are many other methods of achieving the same result; let this
generalised sketch suffice.
What now is the theory? The theory is that the mental experience or
“complex” had, for some reason and by some mechanism, been submerged,
or suppressed, or forgotten. Freud maintains that there is a fundamental
tendency in the mind to suppress every experience that is associated with
painful emotion. This doctrine is allied to Bain’s “Law of Conservation”—
that painful experiences depress the vitality and tend to disappear, while
pleasant experiences exalt the vitality and tend to remain in memory. At any
rate, by some process the painful experience disappears from conscious
memory, but it does not cease to exist. It may lie dormant, or it may work
subconsciously, and throw up the emotional bubbles that continue, without
a known reason, to excite the ordinary consciousness. But the complex,
though deep and partly dormant, never gets beyond reach. By the method of
concentration, by the use of “free associations,” by the following up of all
the clues offered by the ideas “fished up,” the submerged complex can,
element by element, be brought back. When once it is brought back the
patient is restored, the dormant complexes once more resume their place in
the total current of his experience, and the mind flows at peace.
This is, roughly, the method of psycho-analysis. It has been applied in
various types of neurosis—hysterias, obsessions, phobias, etc. It has not
always succeeded in removing the morbid conditions, but it has succeeded
so often that it may legitimately be regarded as a method of treatment. As a
matter of discovery it is arduous, and demands the highest skill and
invention if it is to succeed. Incidentally it reveals masses of unpleasant
ideas, of painful ideas, even of disgusting ideas; but, in the right hands, it
leads to the healing of the mind.

Ma How does your patient, doctor?
cbe
Not so sick, my lord,
th.
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,
Do
cto That keep her from her rest.
r.
Cure her of that;
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d;

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Ma Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
cbe
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
th.
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
And here, insensibly, we have passed into the World of Dreams. The
morbid and the normal have come together. Dreams are the awaking of
dormant complexes; they are transfigured experiences; they come into
consciousness trailing clouds of emotion, and fill the dreamer’s
Do
cto
imagination with mysterious images. It is here that the method of
r.
psycho-analysis most fascinates the student. It looks as if once more
the “interpretation of dreams” had become a reality. The results of
psycho-analysis, even when the method is applied with a master hand
and the details are interpreted with a skill that comes only of a quick
imagination, are not entirely convincing; but they are certainly such as to
make more and more observation desirable. In the present short essay
Professor Freud gives a sketch of psycho-analysis as it is applied to the
interpretations of dreams. His examples, if they are enough to illustrate the
theory, are hardly enough to prove it, but they are intended as an
introduction to his more elaborate studies; and, hitherto, observers as they
have increased in experience have gained in conviction. That the method
goes a long way to prove that dreams are not a chaotic sport of the brain,
but are a manifestation of ordered mental experience, is beyond doubt. It
would be easy to show where the theory does not cover facts, but it is
equally easy to show many facts that it does cover.
What, then, is the theory? Briefly this, that dreams are very largely the
expressions of unfulfilled desires. Where, as in children, the waking
experience and the sleeping experience differ from each other by very little,
the dream, or sleeping experience, readily takes the form of the ungratified
desires of the day. But as the mind grows older the dream expression of a
desire gets more intricate. By-and-by it is too intricate to be deciphered

from direct memory, and then there is a chance for the method of psycho-
analysis. What of the dream is remembered gives the cue for the analysis.
Take a remembered element of a dream, track it back and back by free
association or other method, and you will find that, at one or two removes,
the remembered element stirs up forgotten elements, and ultimately brings
coherence out of incoherence.
This appears simple, but let the reader study the dreams analysed in this
essay, and he will find himself stirred by a thousand suggestions. For
Professor Freud has constructed empirical laws out of his masses of
material. The dream as it appears to the dreamer he calls the manifest dream
ideas. But as these are too absurd to form a coherent reality, he gives
ground for believing that they represent latent dream ideas. The manifest
dream is a mass of symbols representing elements in the latent dream ideas.
How the latent dream ideas generate the manifest dream is discovered by
psycho-analysis, the translation from the latent to the manifest is the effect
of the dream work. The dream work is the very core of the difficulty. It is
round this that Professor Freud’s greatest subtleties of method are focussed.
He shows that every dream is linked to something that occurs on the
previous day, some recent experience, but the experience emerges in the
dream as part of the current panorama of the subjective life, and there is no
date to the beginning of the panorama—it may go back to any point in the
individual’s history, even into the preconscious days of early infancy. The
day’s experience and the life’s experience flow in a single stream, and the
images that appear in dreams are but the symbols of all the latent ideas of
that experience. How, by displacement of this element or that, compound
symbols are formed; how, by the foreshortening of experience and the
linking of the past with the present in a single idea, masses of old memories
are clotted into a single point; how, in the freedom of the dream world,
where the tension of the waking life is relaxed, where the exacting
stimulations of the day are reduced, where the consciousness of duty to be
done in the highly organised conditions of social conduct is lowered, where,
in a word, the censor is drowsy or asleep, where the dream symbols shape
themselves into dramatic scenes of endless variety—these it is that
Professor Freud’s theory endeavours to set forth. Displacement,
condensation, dramatisation—these are the short names for these long and
complicated processes. In the course of his expositions, Professor Freud
uses these processes almost as if they were demons, and he admits frankly

their figurative character. But he pleads that they represent real processes,
and is ready to accept better names when he finds them. To trace back the
dream images to a definite meaning in experience is the aim of the psycho-
analysis of dreams. And the successes in these must be tested by the facts.
Sometimes the results are highly persuasive, sometimes they look highly
fanciful, always they are full of suggestion and keep close to realities.
The dream symbolism, in particular, it is easy to criticise; but, after all,
dream symbolism is a reality. The point to investigate is, what dream
images are legitimately considered symbolic and what not. One has only to
remember that every word spoken or written is a symbol, and a symbol in
much the same sense as the symbolism of dreams, for every written or
spoken word is a complicated series of motions that express meanings. The
dream images are complicated series of images that express meanings. The
difficulty of symbolism is no greater in the one case than in the other. But
the variety of dream symbols is so immense that the difficulties of tracing
their meaning are enormous. It is here that the method meets its greatest
difficulties; but, equally, it is here that it scores its greatest triumphs.
Spoken or written language is a technically organised system of symbols;
dream language is as yet a poorly organised system of symbols. The method
of psycho-analysis aims at organising them. Some test results are described
in this essay; multitudes of others are to be found in the literature that is
flowing from the application of the psycho-analytic method. Time alone
will show how far the organisation of dream symbols into a definite
“language of dreams” is, in any given society, actual or possible. But the
effort of organisation has led Professor Freud to another fine fetch of theory,
for his dream symbolism suggests many curious explanations for the
mythologies of all ages and all countries. Myth symbols, that seem to defy
explanation, he traces back to their roots in the “unconscious” of primitive
man.
That the emotions of sex should play an enormous part in the processes
of analysis is to be expected; for the sex emotions are among the deepest, if
not the deepest, of our nature, and colour every experience. From their
proximate beginning in infancy—and Freud’s theory here is of immense
significance—to their multiform derivatives in adult life, the sex emotions
exercise an influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or
another, are themselves a normal index of the stages of development. It is
therefore reasonable to expect that they should play a great part in the

formation of obsessions, of fixed ideas, of perversions, of repressed
complexes. In every civilisation, as Freud indicates, the sex emotions are
the most difficult to control, and have demanded the greatest amount of
restraint.
Restraints lead to repressions, repressions lead to dissociations,
dissociations lead to irregularities of action. When, therefore, as in dreams,
the restraints of the social day are withdrawn, naturally the repressed ideas
tend to emerge once more. How much these ideas account for in the
hysterias, how much “the shocks of despised love” affect even the normal
life, needs no emphasis, but Freud pushes his analysis farther, and tracks the
sex emotions, like many other fundamental emotions, into a thousand by-
paths of ordinary experience. But it would be foolishness to say that sex
emotions are everything in the ruins of the “Buried Temple.” Far from it.
What is true of the sex emotions is true of all other emotions in their
varying degrees, and often what looks like predominant sex emotions may
turn out to be accidental rather than causative, a concomitant symptom
rather than the initiatory centre of disturbance. But these points are all
controversial. It is the object of Freud to put them to the test. If his general
theory be true, the dream-world will more and more become the revealer of
our deepest and oldest experience.
It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrative items and relative
criticisms, but that is not the purpose of an introduction. Here I am
concerned simply to recommend this essay to the careful study of all those
interested in the mental history of the individual, and in the blotting out
from the mind of needless fears and anxieties. And no one need hesitate to
enter on this study, whatever his metaphysical theories may be. Even the
“unity of consciousness” will not suffer, for, through his unending efforts to
link the experiences of the day with the whole experience of the individual
life, Professor Freud, by the union of buried consciousness, restores to the
mind a new unity of consciousness.
Dr. Eder, whose studies in this field have been long and varied, does well
to present to British readers this essay which serves as an introduction to the
more elaborate studies of Freud and his school, and I am glad to have the
privilege of saying so.
W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.

I.

In what we may term “prescientific days” people were in no uncertainty
about the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after
awakening they were regarded as either the friendly or hostile manifestation
of some higher powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific
thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to
psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons
who doubt that the dream is the dreamer’s own psychical act.
But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation
of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship
to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances
which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many
peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its
images and the feelings they engender; then the dream’s evanescence, the
way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something
bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and
many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers
which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the
question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself
double-sided. There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its
position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological
function; secondly, has the dream a meaning—can sense be made of each
single dream as of other mental syntheses?
Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Many
philosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which at
the same time preserves something of the dream’s former over-valuation.
The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar state of psychical
activity, which they even celebrate as elevation to some higher state.

Schubert, for instance, claims: “The dream is the liberation of the spirit
from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the
fetters of matter.” Not all go so far as this, but many maintain that dreams
have their origin in real spiritual excitations, and are the outward
manifestations of spiritual powers whose free movements have been
hampered during the day (“Dream Phantasies,” Scherner, Volkelt). A large
number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of
extraordinary achievements—at any rate, in certain fields (“Memory”).
In striking contradiction with this the majority of medical writers hardly
admit that the dream is a psychical phenomenon at all. According to them
dreams are provoked and initiated exclusively by stimuli proceeding from
the senses or the body, which either reach the sleeper from without or are
accidental disturbances of his internal organs. The dream has no greater
claim to meaning and importance than the sound called forth by the ten
fingers of a person quite unacquainted with music running his fingers over
the keys of an instrument. The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, “as a
physical process always useless, frequently morbid.” All the peculiarities of
dream life are explicable as the incoherent effort, due to some physiological
stimulus, of certain organs, or of the cortical elements of a brain otherwise
asleep.
But slightly affected by scientific opinion and untroubled as to the origin
of dreams, the popular view holds firmly to the belief that dreams really
have got a meaning, in some way they do foretell the future, whilst the
meaning can be unravelled in some way or other from its oft bizarre and
enigmatical content. The reading of dreams consists in replacing the events
of the dream, so far as remembered, by other events. This is done either
scene by scene, according to some rigid key, or the dream as a whole is
replaced by something else of which it was a symbol. Serious-minded
persons laugh at these efforts—“Dreams are but sea-foam!”

II.

One day I discovered to my amazement that the popular view grounded
in superstition, and not the medical one, comes nearer to the truth about
dreams. I arrived at new conclusions about dreams by the use of a new
method of psychological investigation, one which had rendered me good
service in the investigation of phobias, obsessions, illusions, and the like,
and which, under the name “psycho-analysis,” had found acceptance by a
whole school of investigators. The manifold analogies of dream life with
the most diverse conditions of psychical disease in the waking state have
been rightly insisted upon by a number of medical observers. It seemed,
therefore, a priori, hopeful to apply to the interpretation of dreams methods
of investigation which had been tested in psychopathological processes.
Obsessions and those peculiar sensations of haunting dread remain as
strange to normal consciousness as do dreams to our waking consciousness;
their origin is as unknown to consciousness as is that of dreams. It was
practical ends that impelled us, in these diseases, to fathom their origin and
formation. Experience had shown us that a cure and a consequent mastery
of the obsessing ideas did result when once those thoughts, the connecting
links between the morbid ideas and the rest of the psychical content, were
revealed which were heretofore veiled from consciousness. The procedure I
employed for the interpretation of dreams thus arose from psychotherapy.
This procedure is readily described, although its practice demands
instruction and experience. Suppose the patient is suffering from intense
morbid dread. He is requested to direct his attention to the idea in question,
without, however, as he has so frequently done, meditating upon it. Every
impression about it, without any exception, which occurs to him should be
imparted to the doctor. The statement which will be perhaps then made, that
he cannot concentrate his attention upon anything at all, is to be countered

by assuring him most positively that such a blank state of mind is utterly
impossible. As a matter of fact, a great number of impressions will soon
occur, with which others will associate themselves. These will be invariably
accompanied by the expression of the observer’s opinion that they have no
meaning or are unimportant. It will be at once noticed that it is this self-
criticism which prevented the patient from imparting the ideas, which had
indeed already excluded them from consciousness. If the patient can be
induced to abandon this self-criticism and to pursue the trains of thought
which are yielded by concentrating the attention, most significant matter
will be obtained, matter which will be presently seen to be clearly linked to
the morbid idea in question. Its connection with other ideas will be
manifest, and later on will permit the replacement of the morbid idea by a
fresh one, which is perfectly adapted to psychical continuity.
This is not the place to examine thoroughly the hypothesis upon which
this experiment rests, or the deductions which follow from its invariable
success. It must suffice to state that we obtain matter enough for the
resolution of every morbid idea if we especially direct our attention to the
unbidden associations which disturb our thoughts—those which are
otherwise put aside by the critic as worthless refuse. If the procedure is
exercised on oneself, the best plan of helping the experiment is to write
down at once all one’s first indistinct fancies.
I will now point out where this method leads when I apply it to the
examination of dreams. Any dream could be made use of in this way. From
certain motives I, however, choose a dream of my own, which appears
confused and meaningless to my memory, and one which has the advantage
of brevity. Probably my dream of last night satisfies the requirements. Its
content, fixed immediately after awakening, runs as follows:
“Company; at table or table d’hôte.... Spinach is served. Mrs. E. L.,
sitting next to me, gives me her undivided attention, and places her hand
familiarly upon my knee. In defence I remove her hand. Then she says: ‘But
you have always had such beautiful eyes.’... I then distinctly see something
like two eyes as a sketch or as the contour of a spectacle lens....”
This is the whole dream, or, at all events, all that I can remember. It
appears to me not only obscure and meaningless, but more especially odd.
Mrs. E. L. is a person with whom I am scarcely on visiting terms, nor to my
knowledge have I ever desired any more cordial relationship. I have not

seen her for a long time, and do not think there was any mention of her
recently. No emotion whatever accompanied the dream process.
Reflecting upon this dream does not make it a bit clearer to my mind. I
will now, however, present the ideas, without premeditation and without
criticism, which introspection yielded. I soon notice that it is an advantage
to break up the dream into its elements, and to search out the ideas which
link themselves to each fragment.
Company; at table or table d’hôte. The recollection of the slight event
with which the evening of yesterday ended is at once called up. I left a
small party in the company of a friend, who offered to drive me home in his
cab. “I prefer a taxi,” he said; “that gives one such a pleasant occupation;
there is always something to look at.” When we were in the cab, and the
cab-driver turned the disc so that the first sixty hellers were visible, I
continued the jest. “We have hardly got in and we already owe sixty hellers.
The taxi always reminds me of the table d’hôte. It makes me avaricious and
selfish by continuously reminding me of my debt. It seems to me to mount
up too quickly, and I am always afraid that I shall be at a disadvantage, just
as I cannot resist at table d’hôte the comical fear that I am getting too little,
that I must look after myself.” In far-fetched connection with this I quote:
“To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us,
To guilt ye let us heedless go.”

Another idea about the table d’hôte. A few weeks ago I was very cross
with my dear wife at the dinner-table at a Tyrolese health resort, because
she was not sufficiently reserved with some neighbours with whom I
wished to have absolutely nothing to do. I begged her to occupy herself
rather with me than with the strangers. That is just as if I had been at a
disadvantage at the table d’hôte. The contrast between the behaviour of my
wife at that table and that of Mrs. E. L. in the dream now strikes me:
“Addresses herself entirely to me.”
Further, I now notice that the dream is the reproduction of a little scene
which transpired between my wife and myself when I was secretly courting
her. The caressing under cover of the tablecloth was an answer to a wooer’s
passionate letter. In the dream, however, my wife is replaced by the
unfamiliar E. L.

Mrs. E. L. is the daughter of a man to whom I owed money! I cannot help
noticing that here there is revealed an unsuspected connection between the
dream content and my thoughts. If the chain of associations be followed up
which proceeds from one element of the dream one is soon led back to
another of its elements. The thoughts evoked by the dream stir up
associations which were not noticeable in the dream itself.
Is it not customary, when someone expects others to look after his
interests without any advantage to themselves, to ask the innocent question
satirically: “Do you think this will be done for the sake of your beautiful
eyes?” Hence Mrs. E. L.’s speech in the dream. “You have always had such
beautiful eyes,” means nothing but “people always do everything to you for
love of you; you have had everything for nothing.” The contrary is, of
course, the truth; I have always paid dearly for whatever kindness others
have shown me. Still, the fact that I had a ride for nothing yesterday when
my friend drove me home in his cab must have made an impression upon
me.
In any case, the friend whose guests we were yesterday has often made
me his debtor. Recently I allowed an opportunity of requiting him to go by.
He has had only one present from me, an antique shawl, upon which eyes
are painted all round, a so-called Occhiale, as a charm against the
Malocchio. Moreover, he is an eye specialist. That same evening I had
asked him after a patient whom I had sent to him for glasses.
As I remarked, nearly all parts of the dream have been brought into this
new connection. I still might ask why in the dream it was spinach that was
served up. Because spinach called up a little scene which recently occurred
at our table. A child, whose beautiful eyes are really deserving of praise,
refused to eat spinach. As a child I was just the same; for a long time I
loathed spinach, until in later life my tastes altered, and it became one of
my favourite dishes. The mention of this dish brings my own childhood and
that of my child’s near together. “You should be glad that you have some
spinach,” his mother had said to the little gourmet. “Some children would
be very glad to get spinach.” Thus I am reminded of the parents’ duties
towards their children. Goethe’s words—
“To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us,
To guilt ye let us heedless go”—

take on another meaning in this connection.

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.

Naturally, I would not draw such far-reaching conclusions if only one
analysis were known to me. Experience has shown me that when the
associations of any dream are honestly followed such a chain of thought is
revealed, the constituent parts of the dream reappear correctly and sensibly
linked together; the slight suspicion that this concatenation was merely an
accident of a single first observation must, therefore, be absolutely
relinquished. I regard it, therefore, as my right to establish this new view by
a proper nomenclature. I contrast the dream which my memory evokes with
the dream and other added matter revealed by analysis: the former I call the
dream’s manifest content; the latter, without at first further subdivision, its
latent content. I arrive at two new problems hitherto unformulated: (1)
What is the psychical process which has transformed the latent content of
the dream into its manifest content? (2) What is the motive or the motives
which have made such transformation exigent. The process by which the
change from latent to manifest content is executed I name the dream work.
In contrast with this is the work of analysis, which produces the reverse
transformation. The other problems of the dream—the inquiry as to its
stimuli, as to the source of its materials, as to its possible purpose, the
function of dreaming, the forgetting of dreams—these I will discuss in
connection with the latent dream content.
I shall take every care to avoid a confusion between the manifest and the
latent content, for I ascribe all the contradictory as well as the incorrect
accounts of dreamlife to the ignorance of this latent content, now first laid
bare through analysis.

III.

The conversion of the latent dream thoughts into those manifest deserves
our close study as the first known example of the transformation of
psychical stuff from one mode of expression into another. From a mode of
expression which, moreover, is readily intelligible into another which we
can only penetrate by effort and with guidance, although this new mode
must be equally reckoned as an effort of our own psychical activity. From
the standpoint of the relationship of latent to manifest dream content,
dreams can be divided into three classes. We can, in the first place,
distinguish those dreams which have a meaning and are, at the same time,
intelligible, which allow us to penetrate into our psychical life without
further ado. Such dreams are numerous; they are usually short, and, as a
general rule, do not seem very noticeable, because everything remarkable or
exciting surprise is absent. Their occurrence is, moreover, a strong
argument against the doctrine which derives the dream from the isolated
activity of certain cortical elements. All signs of a lowered or subdivided
psychical activity are wanting. Yet we never raise any objection to
characterising them as dreams, nor do we confound them with the products
of our waking life.
A second group is formed by those dreams which are indeed self-
coherent and have a distinct meaning, but appear strange because we are
unable to reconcile their meaning with our mental life. That is the case
when we dream, for instance, that some dear relative has died of plague
when we know of no ground for expecting, apprehending, or assuming
anything of the sort; we can only ask ourself wonderingly: “What brought
that into my head?” To the third group those dreams belong which are void
of both meaning and intelligibility; they are incoherent, complicated, and
meaningless. The overwhelming number of our dreams partake of this

character, and this has given rise to the contemptuous attitude towards
dreams and the medical theory of their limited psychical activity. It is
especially in the longer and more complicated dream-plots that signs of
incoherence are seldom missing.
The contrast between manifest and latent dream content is clearly only of
value for the dreams of the second and more especially for those of the third
class. Here are problems which are only solved when the manifest dream is
replaced by its latent content; it was an example of this kind, a complicated
and unintelligible dream, that we subjected to analysis. Against our
expectation we, however, struck upon reasons which prevented a complete
cognizance of the latent dream thought. On the repetition of this same
experience we were forced to the supposition that there is an intimate bond,
with laws of its own, between the unintelligible and complicated nature of
the dream and the difficulties attending communication of the thoughts
connected with the dream. Before investigating the nature of this bond, it
will be advantageous to turn our attention to the more readily intelligible
dreams of the first class where, the manifest and latent content being
identical, the dream work seems to be omitted.
The investigation of these dreams is also advisable from another
standpoint. The dreams of children are of this nature; they have a meaning,
and are not bizarre. This, by the way, is a further objection to reducing
dreams to a dissociation of cerebral activity in sleep, for why should such a
lowering of psychical functions belong to the nature of sleep in adults, but
not in children? We are, however, fully justified in expecting that the
explanation of psychical processes in children, essentially simplified as they
may be, should serve as an indispensable preparation towards the
psychology of the adult.
I shall therefore cite some examples of dreams which I have gathered
from children. A girl of nineteen months was made to go without food for a
day because she had been sick in the morning, and, according to nurse, had
made herself ill through eating strawberries. During the night, after her day
of fasting, she was heard calling out her name during sleep, and adding:
“Tawberry, eggs, pap.” She is dreaming that she is eating, and selects out of
her menu exactly what she supposes she will not get much of just now.
The same kind of dream about a forbidden dish was that of a little boy of
twenty-two months. The day before he was told to offer his uncle a present

of a small basket of cherries, of which the child was, of course, only
allowed one to taste. He woke up with the joyful news: “Hermann eaten up
all the cherries.”
A girl of three and a half years had made during the day a sea trip which
was too short for her, and she cried when she had to get out of the boat. The
next morning her story was that during the night she had been on the sea,
thus continuing the interrupted trip.
A boy of five and a half years was not at all pleased with his party during
a walk in the Dachstein region. Whenever a new peak came into sight he
asked if that were the Dachstein, and, finally, refused to accompany the
party to the waterfall. His behaviour was ascribed to fatigue; but a better
explanation was forthcoming when the next morning he told his dream: he
had ascended the Dachstein. Obviously he expected the ascent of the
Dachstein to be the object of the excursion, and was vexed by not getting a
glimpse of the mountain. The dream gave him what the day had withheld.
The dream of a girl of six was similar; her father had cut short the walk
before reaching the promised objective on account of the lateness of the
hour. On the way back she noticed a signpost giving the name of another
place for excursions; her father promised to take her there also some other
day. She greeted her father next day with the news that she had dreamt that
her father had been with her to both places.
What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy
wishes excited during the day which remain unrealised. They are simply
and undisguisedly realisations of wishes.
The following child-dream, not quite understandable at first sight, is
nothing else than a wish realised. On account of poliomyelitis a girl, not
quite four years of age, was brought from the country into town, and
remained over night with a childless aunt in a big—for her, naturally, huge
—bed. The next morning she stated that she had dreamt that the bed was
much too small for her, so that she could find no place in it. To explain this
dream as a wish is easy when we remember that to be “big” is a frequently
expressed wish of all children. The bigness of the bed reminded Miss Little-
Would-be-Big only too forcibly of her smallness. This nasty situation
became righted in her dream, and she grew so big that the bed now became
too small for her.

Even when children’s dreams are complicated and polished, their
comprehension as a realisation of desire is fairly evident. A boy of eight
dreamt that he was being driven with Achilles in a war-chariot, guided by
Diomedes. The day before he was assiduously reading about great heroes. It
is easy to show that he took these heroes as his models, and regretted that
he was not living in those days.
From this short collection a further characteristic of the dreams of
children is manifest—their connection with the life of the day. The desires
which are realised in these dreams are left over from the day or, as a rule,
the day previous, and the feeling has become intently emphasised and fixed
during the day thoughts. Accidental and indifferent matters, or what must
appear so to the child, find no acceptance in the contents of the dream.
Innumerable instances of such dreams of the infantile type can be found
among adults also, but, as mentioned, these are mostly exactly like the
manifest content. Thus, a random selection of persons will generally
respond to thirst at night-time with a dream about drinking, thus striving to
get rid of the sensation and to let sleep continue. Many persons frequently
have these comforting dreams before waking, just when they are called.
They then dream that they are already up, that they are washing, or already
in school, at the office, etc., where they ought to be at a given time. The
night before an intended journey one not infrequently dreams that one has
already arrived at the destination; before going to a play or to a party the
dream not infrequently anticipates, in impatience, as it were, the expected
pleasure. At other times the dream expresses the realisation of the desire
somewhat indirectly; some connection, some sequel must be known—the
first step towards recognising the desire. Thus, when a husband related to
me the dream of his young wife, that her monthly period had begun, I had
to bethink myself that the young wife would have expected a pregnancy if
the period had been absent. The dream is then a sign of pregnancy. Its
meaning is that it shows the wish realised that pregnancy should not occur
just yet. Under unusual and extreme circumstances, these dreams of the
infantile type become very frequent. The leader of a polar expedition tells
us, for instance, that during the wintering amid the ice the crew, with their
monotonous diet and slight rations, dreamt regularly, like children, of fine
meals, of mountains of tobacco, and of home.

It is not uncommon that out of some long, complicated and intricate
dream one specially lucid part stands out containing unmistakably the
realisation of a desire, but bound up with much unintelligible matter. On
more frequently analysing the seemingly more transparent dreams of adults,
it is astonishing to discover that these are rarely as simple as the dreams of
children, and that they cover another meaning beyond that of the realisation
of a wish.
It would certainly be a simple and convenient solution of the riddle if the
work of analysis made it at all possible for us to trace the meaningless and
intricate dreams of adults back to the infantile type, to the realisation of
some intensely experienced desire of the day. But there is no warrant for
such an expectation. Their dreams are generally full of the most indifferent
and bizarre matter, and no trace of the realisation of the wish is to be found
in their content.
Before leaving these infantile dreams, which are obviously unrealised
desires, we must not fail to mention another chief characteristic of dreams,
one that has been long noticed, and one which stands out most clearly in
this class. I can replace any of these dreams by a phrase expressing a desire.
If the sea trip had only lasted longer; if I were only washed and dressed; if I
had only been allowed to keep the cherries instead of giving them to my
uncle. But the dream gives something more than the choice, for here the
desire is already realised; its realisation is real and actual. The dream
presentations consist chiefly, if not wholly, of scenes and mainly of visual
sense images. Hence a kind of transformation is not entirely absent in this
class of dreams, and this may be fairly designated as the dream work. An
idea merely existing in the region of possibility is replaced by a vision of its
accomplishment.

IV.

We are compelled to assume that such transformation of scene has also
taken place in intricate dreams, though we do not know whether it has
encountered any possible desire. The dream instanced at the
commencement, which we analysed somewhat thoroughly, did give us
occasion in two places to suspect something of the kind. Analysis brought
out that my wife was occupied with others at table, and that I did not like it;
in the dream itself exactly the opposite occurs, for the person who replaces
my wife gives me her undivided attention. But can one wish for anything
pleasanter after a disagreeable incident than that the exact contrary should
have occurred, just as the dream has it? The stinging thought in the analysis,
that I have never had anything for nothing, is similarly connected with the
woman’s remark in the dream: “You have always had such beautiful eyes.”
Some portion of the opposition between the latent and manifest content of
the dream must be therefore derived from the realisation of a wish.
Another manifestation of the dream work which all incoherent dreams
have in common is still more noticeable. Choose any instance, and compare
the number of separate elements in it, or the extent of the dream, if written
down, with the dream thoughts yielded by analysis, and of which but a trace
can be refound in the dream itself. There can be no doubt that the dream
working has resulted in an extraordinary compression or condensation. It is
not at first easy to form an opinion as to the extent of the condensation; the
more deeply you go into the analysis, the more deeply you are impressed by
it. There will be found no factor in the dream whence the chains of
associations do not lead in two or more directions, no scene which has not
been pieced together out of two or more impressions and events. For
instance, I once dreamt about a kind of swimming-bath where the bathers
suddenly separated in all directions; at one place on the edge a person stood

bending towards one of the bathers as if to drag him out. The scene was a
composite one, made up out of an event that occurred at the time of puberty,
and of two pictures, one of which I had seen just shortly before the dream.
The two pictures were The Surprise in the Bath, from Schwind’s Cycle of
the Melusine (note the bathers suddenly separating), and a picture of The
Flood, by an Italian master. The little incident was that I once witnessed a
lady, who had tarried in the swimming-bath until the men’s hour, being
helped out of the water by the swimming-master. The scene in the dream
which was selected for analysis led to a whole group of reminiscences, each
one of which had contributed to the dream content. First of all came the
little episode from the time of my courting, of which I have already spoken;
the pressure of a hand under the table gave rise in the dream to the “under
the table,” which I had subsequently to find a place for in my recollection.
There was, of course, at the time not a word about “undivided attention.”
Analysis taught me that this factor is the realisation of a desire through its
contradictory and related to the behaviour of my wife at the table d’hôte. An
exactly similar and much more important episode of our courtship, one
which separated us for an entire day, lies hidden behind this recent
recollection. The intimacy, the hand resting upon the knee, refers to a quite
different connection and to quite other persons. This element in the dream
becomes again the starting-point of two distinct series of reminiscences, and
so on.
The stuff of the dream thoughts which has been accumulated for the
formation of the dream scene must be naturally fit for this application.
There must be one or more common factors. The dream work proceeds like
Francis Galton with his family photographs. The different elements are put
one on top of the other; what is common to the composite picture stands out
clearly, the opposing details cancel each other. This process of reproduction
partly explains the wavering statements, of a peculiar vagueness, in so
many elements of the dream. For the interpretation of dreams this rule holds
good: When analysis discloses uncertainty as to either—or read and, taking
each section of the apparent alternatives as a separate outlet for a series of
impressions.
When there is nothing in common between the dream thoughts, the
dream work takes the trouble to create a something, in order to make a
common presentation feasible in the dream. The simplest way to
approximate two dream thoughts, which have as yet nothing in common,

consists in making such a change in the actual expression of one idea as
will meet a slight responsive recasting in the form of the other idea. The
process is analogous to that of rhyme, when consonance supplies the
desired common factor. A good deal of the dream work consists in the
creation of those frequently very witty, but often exaggerated, digressions.
These vary from the common presentation in the dream content to dream
thoughts which are as varied as are the causes in form and essence which
give rise to them. In the analysis of our example of a dream, I find a like
case of the transformation of a thought in order that it might agree with
another essentially foreign one. In following out the analysis I struck upon
the thought: I should like to have something for nothing. But this formula is
not serviceable to the dream. Hence it is replaced by another one: “I should
like to enjoy something free of cost.”[1] The word “kost” (taste), with its
double meaning, is appropriate to a table d’hôte; it, moreover, is in place
through the special sense in the dream. At home if there is a dish which the
children decline, their mother first tries gentle persuasion, with a “Just taste
it.” That the dream work should unhesitatingly use the double meaning of
the word is certainly remarkable; ample experience has shown, however,
that the occurrence is quite usual.
1. “Ich möchte gerne etwas geniessen ohne ‘Kosten’ zu haben.” A pun upon the word “kosten,”
which has two meanings—“taste” and “cost.” In “Die Traumdeutung,” third edition, p. 71 footnote,
Professor Freud remarks that “the finest example of dream interpretation left us by the ancients is
based upon a pun” (from “The Interpretation of Dreams,” by Artemidorus Daldianus). “Moreover,
dreams are so intimately bound up with language that Ferenczi truly points out that every tongue has
its own language of dreams. A dream is as a rule untranslatable into other languages.”—Translator.
Through condensation of the dream certain constituent parts of its
content are explicable which are peculiar to the dream life alone, and which
are not found in the waking state. Such are the composite and mixed
persons, the extraordinary mixed figures, creations comparable with the
fantastic animal compositions of Orientals; a moment’s thought and these
are reduced to unity, whilst the fancies of the dream are ever formed anew
in an inexhaustible profusion. Everyone knows such images in his own
dreams; manifold are their origins. I can build up a person by borrowing
one feature from one person and one from another, or by giving to the form
of one the name of another in my dream. I can also visualise one person, but
place him in a position which has occurred to another. There is a meaning in
all these cases when different persons are amalgamated into one substitute.
Such cases denote an “and,” a “just like,” a comparison of the original

person from a certain point of view, a comparison which can be also
realised in the dream itself. As a rule, however, the identity of the blended
persons is only discoverable by analysis, and is only indicated in the dream
content by the formation of the “combined” person.
The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its
solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents,
examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite
disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of
perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent
the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail.
Prominence is given to the common character of the combination. Analysis
must also generally supply the common features. The dream says simply:
All these things have an “x” in common. The decomposition of these mixed
images by analysis is often the quickest way to an interpretation of the
dream. Thus I once dreamt that I was sitting with one of my former
university tutors on a bench, which was undergoing a rapid continuous
movement amidst other benches. This was a combination of lecture-room
and moving staircase. I will not pursue the further result of the thought.
Another time I was sitting in a carriage, and on my lap an object in shape
like a top-hat, which, however, was made of transparent glass. The scene at
once brought to my mind the proverb: “He who keeps his hat in his hand
will travel safely through the land.” By a slight turn the glass hat reminded
me of Auer’s light, and I knew that I was about to invent something which
was to make me as rich and independent as his invention had made my
countryman, Dr. Auer, of Welsbach; then I should be able to travel instead
of remaining in Vienna. In the dream I was travelling with my invention,
with the, it is true, rather awkward glass top-hat. The dream work is
peculiarly adept at representing two contradictory conceptions by means of
the same mixed image. Thus, for instance, a woman dreamt of herself
carrying a tall flower-stalk, as in the picture of the Annunciation (Chastity-
Mary is her own name), but the stalk was bedecked with thick white
blossoms resembling camellias (contrast with chastity: La dame aux
Camelias).
A great deal of what we have called “dream condensation” can be thus
formulated. Each one of the elements of the dream content is
overdetermined by the matter of the dream thoughts; it is not derived from
one element of these thoughts, but from a whole series. These are not

necessarily interconnected in any way, but may belong to the most diverse
spheres of thought. The dream element truly represents all this disparate
matter in the dream content. Analysis, moreover, discloses another side of
the relationship between dream content and dream thoughts. Just as one
element of the dream leads to associations with several dream thoughts, so,
as a rule, the one dream thought represents more than one dream element.
The threads of the association do not simply converge from the dream
thoughts to the dream content, but on the way they overlap and interweave
in every way.
Next to the transformation of one thought in the scene (its
“dramatisation”), condensation is the most important and most
characteristic feature of the dream work. We have as yet no clue as to the
motive calling for such compression of the content.

V.

In the complicated and intricate dreams with which we are now
concerned, condensation and dramatisation do not wholly account for the
difference between dream contents and dream thoughts. There is evidence
of a third factor, which deserves careful consideration.
When I have arrived at an understanding of the dream thoughts by my
analysis I notice, above all, that the matter of the manifest is very different
from that of the latent dream content. That is, I admit, only an apparent
difference which vanishes on closer investigation, for in the end I find the
whole dream content carried out in the dream thoughts, nearly all the dream
thoughts again represented in the dream content. Nevertheless, there does
remain a certain amount of difference.
The essential content which stood out clearly and broadly in the dream
must, after analysis, rest satisfied with a very subordinate rôle among the
dream thoughts. These very dream thoughts which, going by my feelings,
have a claim to the greatest importance are either not present at all in the
dream content, or are represented by some remote allusion in some obscure
region of the dream. I can thus describe these phenomena: During the
dream work the psychical intensity of those thoughts and conceptions to
which it properly pertains flows to others which, in my judgment, have no
claim to such emphasis. There is no other process which contributes so
much to concealment of the dream’s meaning and to make the connection
between the dream content and dream ideas irrecognisable. During this
process, which I will call the dream displacement, I notice also the
psychical intensity, significance, or emotional nature of the thoughts
become transposed in sensory vividness. What was clearest in the dream
seems to me, without further consideration, the most important; but often in

some obscure element of the dream I can recognise the most direct
offspring of the principal dream thought.
I could only designate this dream displacement as the transvaluation of
psychical values. The phenomena will not have been considered in all its
bearings unless I add that this displacement or transvaluation is shared by
different dreams in extremely varying degrees. There are dreams which take
place almost without any displacement. These have the same time,
meaning, and intelligibility as we found in the dreams which recorded a
desire. In other dreams not a bit of the dream idea has retained its own
psychical value, or everything essential in these dream ideas has been
replaced by unessentials, whilst every kind of transition between these
conditions can be found. The more obscure and intricate a dream is, the
greater is the part to be ascribed to the impetus of displacement in its
formation.
The example that we chose for analysis shows, at least, this much of
displacement—that its content has a different centre of interest from that of
the dream ideas. In the forefront of the dream content the main scene
appears as if a woman wished to make advances to me; in the dream idea
the chief interest rests on the desire to enjoy disinterested love which shall
“cost nothing”; this idea lies at the back of the talk about the beautiful eyes
and the far-fetched allusion to “spinach.”
If we abolish the dream displacement, we attain through analysis quite
certain conclusions regarding two problems of the dream which are most
disputed—as to what provokes a dream at all, and as to the connection of
the dream with our waking life. There are dreams which at once expose
their links with the events of the day; in others no trace of such a connection
can be found. By the aid of analysis it can be shown that every dream,
without any exception, is linked up with our impression of the day, or
perhaps it would be more correct to say of the day previous to the dream.
The impressions which have incited the dream may be so important that we
are not surprised at our being occupied with them whilst awake; in this case
we are right in saying that the dream carries on the chief interest of our
waking life. More usually, however, when the dream contains anything
relating to the impressions of the day, it is so trivial, unimportant, and so
deserving of oblivion, that we can only recall it with an effort. The dream
content appears, then, even when coherent and intelligible, to be concerned

with those indifferent trifles of thought undeserving of our waking interest.
The depreciation of dreams is largely due to the predominance of the
indifferent and the worthless in their content.
Analysis destroys the appearance upon which this derogatory judgment is
based. When the dream content discloses nothing but some indifferent
impression as instigating the dream, analysis ever indicates some significant
event, which has been replaced by something indifferent with which it has
entered into abundant associations. Where the dream is concerned with
uninteresting and unimportant conceptions, analysis reveals the numerous
associative paths which connect the trivial with the momentous in the
psychical estimation of the individual. It is only the action of displacement
if what is indifferent obtains recognition in the dream content instead of
those impressions which are really the stimulus, or instead of the things of
real interest. In answering the question as to what provokes the dream, as to
the connection of the dream, in the daily troubles, we must say, in terms of
the insight given us by replacing the manifest latent dream content: The
dream does never trouble itself about things which are not deserving of our
concern during the day, and trivialities which do not trouble us during the
day have no power to pursue us whilst asleep.
What provoked the dream in the example which we have analysed? The
really unimportant event, that a friend invited me to a free ride in his cab.
The table d’hôte scene in the dream contains an allusion to this indifferent
motive, for in conversation I had brought the taxi parallel with the table
d’hôte. But I can indicate the important event which has as its substitute the
trivial one. A few days before I had disbursed a large sum of money for a
member of my family who is very dear to me. Small wonder, says the
dream thought, if this person is grateful to me for this—this love is not cost-
free. But love that shall cost nothing is one of the prime thoughts of the
dream. The fact that shortly before this I had had several drives with the
relative in question puts the one drive with my friend in a position to recall
the connection with the other person. The indifferent impression which, by
such ramifications, provokes the dream is subservient to another condition
which is not true of the real source of the dream—the impression must be a
recent one, everything arising from the day of the dream.
I cannot leave the question of dream displacement without the
consideration of a remarkable process in the formation of dreams in which

condensation and displacement work together towards one end. In
condensation we have already considered the case where two conceptions
in the dream having something in common, some point of contact, are
replaced in the dream content by a mixed image, where the distinct germ
corresponds to what is common, and the indistinct secondary modifications
to what is distinctive. If displacement is added to condensation, there is no
formation of a mixed image, but a common mean which bears the same
relationship to the individual elements as does the resultant in the
parallelogram of forces to its components. In one of my dreams, for
instance, there is talk of an injection with propyl. On first analysis I
discovered an indifferent but true incident where amyl played a part as the
excitant of the dream. I cannot yet vindicate the exchange of amyl for
propyl. To the round of ideas of the same dream, however, there belongs the
recollection of my first visit to Munich, when the Propylæa struck me. The
attendant circumstances of the analysis render it admissible that the
influence of this second group of conceptions caused the displacement of
amyl to propyl. Propyl is, so to say, the mean idea between amyl and
propylæa; it got into the dream as a kind of compromise by simultaneous
condensation and displacement.
The need of discovering some motive for this bewildering work of the
dream is even more called for in the case of displacement than in
condensation.

VI.

Although the work of displacement must be held mainly responsible if
the dream thoughts are not refound or recognised in the dream content
(unless the motive of the changes be guessed), it is another and milder kind
of transformation which will be considered with the dream thoughts which
leads to the discovery of a new but readily understood act of the dream
work. The first dream thoughts which are unravelled by analysis frequently
strike one by their unusual wording. They do not appear to be expressed in
the sober form which our thinking prefers; rather are they expressed
symbolically by allegories and metaphors like the figurative language of the
poets. It is not difficult to find the motives for this degree of constraint in
the expression of dream ideas. The dream content consists chiefly of visual
scenes; hence the dream ideas must, in the first place, be prepared to make
use of these forms of presentation. Conceive that a political leader’s or a
barrister’s address had to be transposed into pantomime, and it will be easy
to understand the transformations to which the dream work is constrained
by regard for this dramatisation of the dream content.
Around the psychical stuff of dream thoughts there are ever found
reminiscences of impressions, not infrequently of early childhood—scenes
which, as a rule, have been visually grasped. Whenever possible, this
portion of the dream ideas exercises a definite influence upon the modelling
of the dream content; it works like a centre of crystallisation, by attracting
and rearranging the stuff of the dream thoughts. The scene of the dream is
not infrequently nothing but a modified repetition, complicated by
interpolations of events that have left such an impression; the dream but
very seldom reproduces accurate and unmixed reproductions of real scenes.
The dream content does not, however, consist exclusively of scenes, but
it also includes scattered fragments of visual images, conversations, and

even bits of unchanged thoughts. It will be perhaps to the point if we
instance in the briefest way the means of dramatisation which are at the
disposal of the dream work for the repetition of the dream thoughts in the
peculiar language of the dream.
The dream thoughts which we learn from the analysis exhibit themselves
as a psychical complex of the most complicated superstructure. Their parts
stand in the most diverse relationship to each other; they form backgrounds
and foregrounds, stipulations, digressions, illustrations, demonstrations, and
protestations. It may be said to be almost the rule that one train of thought is
followed by its contradictory. No feature known to our reason whilst awake
is absent. If a dream is to grow out of all this, the psychical matter is
submitted to a pressure which condenses it extremely, to an inner shrinking
and displacement, creating at the same time fresh surfaces, to a selective
interweaving among the constituents best adapted for the construction of
these scenes. Having regard to the origin of this stuff, the term regression
can be fairly applied to this process. The logical chains which hitherto held
the psychical stuff together become lost in this transformation to the dream
content. The dream work takes on, as it were, only the essential content of
the dream thoughts for elaboration. It is left to analysis to restore the
connection which the dream work has destroyed.
The dream’s means of expression must therefore be regarded as meagre
in comparison with those of our imagination, though the dream does not
renounce all claims to the restitution of logical relation to the dream
thoughts. It rather succeeds with tolerable frequency in replacing these by
formal characters of its own.
By reason of the undoubted connection existing between all the parts of
dream thoughts, the dream is able to embody this matter into a single scene.
It upholds a logical connection as approximation in time and space, just as
the painter, who groups all the poets for his picture of Parnassus who,
though they have never been all together on a mountain peak, yet form
ideally a community. The dream continues this method of presentation in
individual dreams, and often when it displays two elements close together
in the dream content it warrants some special inner connection between
what they represent in the dream thoughts. It should be, moreover, observed
that all the dreams of one night prove on analysis to originate from the same
sphere of thought.

The causal connection between two ideas is either left without
presentation, or replaced by two different long portions of dreams one after
the other. This presentation is frequently a reversed one, the beginning of
the dream being the deduction, and its end the hypothesis. The direct
transformation of one thing into another in the dream seems to serve the
relationship of cause and effect.
The dream never utters the alternative “either-or,” but accepts both as
having equal rights in the same connection. When “either-or” is used in the
reproduction of dreams, it is, as I have already mentioned, to be replaced by
“and.”
Conceptions which stand in opposition to one another are preferably
expressed in dreams by the same element.[2] There seems no “not” in
dreams. Opposition between two ideas, the relation of conversion, is
represented in dreams in a very remarkable way. It is expressed by the
reversal of another part of the dream content just as if by way of appendix.
We shall later on deal with another form of expressing disagreement. The
common dream sensation of movement checked serves the purpose of
representing disagreement of impulses—a conflict of the will.
2. It is worthy of remark that eminent philologists maintain that the oldest languages used the
same word for expressing quite general antitheses. In C. Abel’s essay, “Ueber den Gegensinn der
Urworter” (1884), the following examples of such words in English are given: “gleam—gloom”; “to
lock—loch”; “down—The Downs”; “to step—to stop.” In his essay on “The Origin of Language”
(“Linguistic Essays,” p. 240), Abel says: “When the Englishman says ‘without,’ is not his judgment
based upon the comparative juxtaposition of two opposites, ‘with’ and ‘out’; ‘with’ itself originally
meant ‘without,’ as may still be seen in ‘withdraw.’ ‘Bid’ includes the opposite sense of giving and of
proffering” (Abel, “The English Verbs of Command,” “Linguistic Essays,” p. 104; see also Freud,
“Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte”: Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische
Forschungen, Band ii., part i., p. 179).—Translator.

Only one of the logical relationships—that of similarity, identity,
agreement—is found highly developed in the mechanism of dream
formation. Dream work makes use of these cases as a starting-point for
condensation, drawing together everything which shows such agreement to
a fresh unity.
These short, crude observations naturally do not suffice as an estimate of
the abundance of the dream’s formal means of presenting the logical
relationships of the dream thoughts. In this respect, individual dreams are
worked up more nicely or more carelessly, our text will have been followed
more or less closely, auxiliaries of the dream work will have been taken

more or less into consideration. In the latter case they appear obscure,
intricate, incoherent. When the dream appears openly absurd, when it
contains an obvious paradox in its content, it is so of purpose. Through its
apparent disregard of all logical claims, it expresses a part of the intellectual
content of the dream ideas. Absurdity in the dream denotes disagreement,
scorn, disdain in the dream thoughts. As this explanation is in entire
disagreement with the view that the dream owes its origin to dissociated,
uncritical cerebral activity, I will emphasise my view by an example:
“One of my acquaintances, Mr. M——, has been attacked by no less a
person than Goethe in an essay with, we all maintain, unwarrantable
violence. Mr. M—— has naturally been ruined by this attack. He complains
very bitterly of this at a dinner-party, but his respect for Goethe has not
diminished through this personal experience. I now attempt to clear up the
chronological relations which strike me as improbable. Goethe died in
1832. As his attack upon Mr. M—— must, of course, have taken place
before, Mr. M—— must have been then a very young man. It seems to me
plausible that he was eighteen. I am not certain, however, what year we are
actually in, and the whole calculation falls into obscurity. The attack was,
moreover, contained in Goethe’s well-known essay on ‘Nature.’”
The absurdity of the dream becomes the more glaring when I state that
Mr. M—— is a young business man without any poetical or literary
interests. My analysis of the dream will show what method there is in this
madness. The dream has derived its material from three sources:
1. Mr. M——, to whom I was introduced at a dinner-party, begged me
one day to examine his elder brother, who showed signs of mental trouble.
In conversation with the patient, an unpleasant episode occurred. Without
the slightest occasion he disclosed one of his brother’s youthful escapades. I
had asked the patient the year of his birth (year of death in dream), and led
him to various calculations which might show up his want of memory.
2. A medical journal which displayed my name among others on the
cover had published a ruinous review of a book by my friend F—— of
Berlin, from the pen of a very juvenile reviewer. I communicated with the
editor, who, indeed, expressed his regret, but would not promise any
redress. Thereupon I broke off my connection with the paper; in my letter of
resignation I expressed the hope that our personal relations would not suffer
from this. Here is the real source of the dream. The derogatory reception of

my friend’s work had made a deep impression upon me. In my judgment, it
contained a fundamental biological discovery which only now, several
years later, commences to find favour among the professors.
3. A little while before, a patient gave me the medical history of her
brother, who, exclaiming “Nature, Nature!” had gone out of his mind. The
doctors considered that the exclamation arose from a study of Goethe’s
beautiful essay, and indicated that the patient had been overworking. I
expressed the opinion that it seemed more plausible to me that the
exclamation “Nature!” was to be taken in that sexual meaning known also
to the less educated in our country. It seemed to me that this view had
something in it, because the unfortunate youth afterwards mutilated his
genital organs. The patient was eighteen years old when the attack occurred.
The first person in the dream thoughts behind the ego was my friend who
had been so scandalously treated. “I now attempted to clear up the
chronological relations.” My friend’s book deals with the chronological
relations of life, and, amongst other things, correlates Goethe’s duration of
life with a number of days in many ways important to biology. The ego is,
however, represented as a general paralytic (“I am not certain what year we
are actually in”). The dream exhibits my friend as behaving like a general
paralytic, and thus riots in absurdity. But the dream thoughts run ironically.
“Of course he is a madman, a fool, and you are the genius who understands
all about it. But shouldn’t it be the other way round?” This inversion
obviously took place in the dream when Goethe attacked the young man,
which is absurd, whilst anyone, however young, can to-day easily attack the
great Goethe.
I am prepared to maintain that no dream is inspired by other than egoistic
emotions. The ego in the dream does not, indeed, represent only my friend,
but stands for myself also. I identify myself with him because the fate of his
discovery appears to me typical of the acceptance of my own. If I were to
publish my own theory, which gives sexuality predominance in the ætiology
of psycho-neurotic disorders (see the allusion to the eighteen-year-old
patient—“Nature, Nature!”), the same criticism would be levelled at me,
and it would even now meet with the same contempt.
When I follow out the dream thoughts closely, I ever find only scorn and
contempt as correlated with the dream’s absurdity. It is well known that the
discovery of a cracked sheep’s skull on the Lido in Venice gave Goethe the

hint for the so-called vertebral theory of the skull. My friend plumes
himself on having as a student raised a hubbub for the resignation of an
aged professor who had done good work (including some in this very
subject of comparative anatomy), but who, on account of decrepitude, had
become quite incapable of teaching. The agitation my friend inspired was so
successful because in the German Universities an age limit is not demanded
for academic work. Age is no protection against folly. In the hospital here I
had for years the honour to serve under a chief who, long fossilised, was for
decades notoriously feeble-minded, and was yet permitted to continue in his
responsible office. A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces
itself upon me here. It was to this man that some youthful colleagues in the
hospital adapted the then popular slang of that day: “No Goethe has written
that,” “No Schiller composed that,” etc.

VII.

We have not exhausted our valuation of the dream work. In addition to
condensation, displacement, and definite arrangement of the psychical
matter, we must ascribe to it yet another activity—one which is, indeed, not
shared by every dream. I shall not treat this position of the dream work
exhaustively; I will only point out that the readiest way to arrive at a
conception of it is to take for granted, probably unfairly, that it only
subsequently influences the dream content which has already been built up.
Its mode of action thus consists in so co-ordinating the parts of the dream
that these coalesce to a coherent whole, to a dream composition. The dream
gets a kind of façade which, it is true, does not conceal the whole of its
content. There is a sort of preliminary explanation to be strengthened by
interpolations and slight alterations. Such elaboration of the dream content
must not be too pronounced; the misconception of the dream thoughts to
which it gives rise is merely superficial, and our first piece of work in
analysing a dream is to get rid of these early attempts at interpretation.
The motives for this part of the dream work are easily gauged. This final
elaboration of the dream is due to a regard for intelligibility—a fact at once
betraying the origin of an action which behaves towards the actual dream
content just as our normal psychical action behaves towards some proffered
perception that is to our liking. The dream content is thus secured under the
pretence of certain expectations, is perceptually classified by the
supposition of its intelligibility, thereby risking its falsification, whilst, in
fact, the most extraordinary misconceptions arise if the dream can be
correlated with nothing familiar. Everyone is aware that we are unable to
look at any series of unfamiliar signs, or to listen to a discussion of
unknown words, without at once making perpetual changes through our
regard for intelligibility, through our falling back upon what is familiar.

We can call those dreams properly made up which are the result of an
elaboration in every way analogous to the psychical action of our waking
life. In other dreams there is no such action; not even an attempt is made to
bring about order and meaning. We regard the dream as “quite mad,”
because on awaking it is with this last-named part of the dream work, the
dream elaboration, that we identify ourselves. So far, however, as our
analysis is concerned, the dream, which resembles a medley of
disconnected fragments, is of as much value as the one with a smooth and
beautifully polished surface. In the former case we are spared, to some
extent, the trouble of breaking down the super-elaboration of the dream
content.
All the same, it would be an error to see in the dream façade nothing but
the misunderstood and somewhat arbitrary elaboration of the dream carried
out at the instance of our psychical life. Wishes and phantasies are not
infrequently employed in the erection of this façade, which were already
fashioned in the dream thoughts; they are akin to those of our waking life
—“day-dreams,” as they are very properly called. These wishes and
phantasies, which analysis discloses in our dreams at night, often present
themselves as repetitions and refashionings of the scenes of infancy. Thus
the dream façade may show us directly the true core of the dream, distorted
through admixture with other matter.
Beyond these four activities there is nothing else to be discovered in the
dream work. If we keep closely to the definition that dream work denotes
the transference of dream thoughts to dream content, we are compelled to
say that the dream work is not creative; it develops no fancies of its own, it
judges nothing, decides nothing. It does nothing but prepare the matter for
condensation and displacement, and refashions it for dramatisation, to
which must be added the inconstant last-named mechanism—that of
explanatory elaboration. It is true that a good deal is found in the dream
content which might be understood as the result of another and more
intellectual performance; but analysis shows conclusively every time that
these intellectual operations were already present in the dream thoughts,
and have only been taken over by the dream content. A syllogism in the
dream is nothing other than the repetition of a syllogism in the dream
thoughts; it seems inoffensive if it has been transferred to the dream without
alteration; it becomes absurd if in the dream work it has been transferred to
other matter. A calculation in the dream content simply means that there

was a calculation in the dream thoughts; whilst this is always correct, the
calculation in the dream can furnish the silliest results by the condensation
of its factors and the displacement of the same operations to other things.
Even speeches which are found in the dream content are not new
compositions; they prove to be pieced together out of speeches which have
been made or heard or read; the words are faithfully copied, but the
occasion of their utterance is quite overlooked, and their meaning is most
violently changed.
It is, perhaps, not superfluous to support these assertions by examples:
1. A seemingly inoffensive, well-made dream of a patient. She was going
to market with her cook, who carried the basket. The butcher said to her
when she asked him for something: “That is all gone,” and wished to give
her something else, remarking: “That’s very good.” She declines, and goes
to the greengrocer, who wants to sell her a peculiar vegetable which is
bound up in bundles and of a black colour. She says: “I don’t know that; I
won’t take it.”
The remark “That is all gone” arose from the treatment. A few days
before I said myself to the patient that the earliest reminiscences of
childhood are all gone as such, but are replaced by transferences and
dreams. Thus I am the butcher.
The second remark, “I don’t know that,” arose in a very different
connection. The day before she had herself called out in rebuke to the cook
(who, moreover, also appears in the dream): “Behave yourself properly; I
don’t know that”—that is, “I don’t know this kind of behaviour; I won’t
have it.” The more harmless portion of this speech was arrived at by a
displacement of the dream content; in the dream thoughts only the other
portion of the speech played a part, because the dream work changed an
imaginary situation into utter irrecognisability and complete inoffensiveness
(while in a certain sense I behave in an unseemly way to the lady). The
situation resulting in this phantasy is, however, nothing but a new edition of
one that actually took place.
2. A dream apparently meaningless relates to figures. “She wants to pay
something; her daughter takes three florins sixty-five kreuzers out of her
purse; but she says: ‘What are you doing? It only costs twenty-one
kreuzers.’”

The dreamer was a stranger who had placed her child at school in Vienna,
and who was able to continue under my treatment so long as her daughter
remained at Vienna. The day before the dream the directress of the school
had recommended her to keep the child another year at school. In this case
she would have been able to prolong her treatment by one year. The figures
in the dream become important if it be remembered that time is money. One
year equals 365 days, or, expressed in kreuzers, 365 kreuzers, which is three
florins sixty-five kreuzers. The twenty-one kreuzers correspond with the
three weeks which remained from the day of the dream to the end of the
school term, and thus to the end of the treatment. It was obviously financial
considerations which had moved the lady to refuse the proposal of the
directress, and which were answerable for the triviality of the amount in the
dream.
3. A lady, young, but already ten years married, heard that a friend of
hers, Miss Elise L——, of about the same age, had become engaged. This
gave rise to the following dream:
She was sitting with her husband in the theatre; the one side of the stalls
was quite empty. Her husband tells her, Elise L—— and her fiancé had
intended coming, but could only get some cheap seats, three for one florin
fifty kreuzers, and these they would not take. In her opinion, that would not
have mattered very much.
The origin of the figures from the matter of the dream thoughts and the
changes the figures underwent are of interest. Whence came the one florin
fifty kreuzers? From a trifling occurrence of the previous day. Her sister-in-
law had received 150 florins as a present from her husband, and had quickly
got rid of it by buying some ornament. Note that 150 florins is one hundred
times one florin fifty kreuzers. For the three concerned with the tickets, the
only link is that Elise L—— is exactly three months younger than the
dreamer. The scene in the dream is the repetition of a little adventure for
which she has often been teased by her husband. She was once in a great
hurry to get tickets in time for a piece, and when she came to the theatre one
side of the stalls was almost empty. It was therefore quite unnecessary for
her to have been in such a hurry. Nor must we overlook the absurdity of the
dream that two persons should take three tickets for the theatre.
Now for the dream ideas. It was stupid to have married so early; I need
not have been in so great a hurry. Elise L——’s example shows me that I

should have been able to get a husband later; indeed, one a hundred times
better if I had but waited. I could have bought three such men with the
money (dowry).

VIII.

In the foregoing exposition we have now learnt something of the dream
work; we must regard it as a quite special psychical process, which, so far
as we are aware, resembles nothing else. To the dream work has been
transferred that bewilderment which its product, the dream, has aroused in
us. In truth, the dream work is only the first recognition of a group of
psychical processes to which must be referred the origin of hysterical
symptoms, the ideas of morbid dread, obsession, and illusion.
Condensation, and especially displacement, are never-failing features in
these other processes. The regard for appearance remains, on the other
hand, peculiar to the dream work. If this explanation brings the dream into
line with the formation of psychical disease, it becomes the more important
to fathom the essential conditions of processes like dream building. It will
be probably a surprise to hear that neither the state of sleep nor illness is
among the indispensable conditions. A whole number of phenomena of the
everyday life of healthy persons, forgetfulness, slips in speaking and in
holding things, together with a certain class of mistakes, are due to a
psychical mechanism analogous to that of the dream and the other members
of this group.
Displacement is the core of the problem, and the most striking of all the
dream performances. A thorough investigation of the subject shows that the
essential condition of displacement is purely psychological; it is in the
nature of a motive. We get on the track by thrashing out experiences which
one cannot avoid in the analysis of dreams. I had to break off the relations
of my dream thoughts in the analysis of my dream on p. 11 because I found
some experiences which I do not wish strangers to know, and which I could
not relate without serious damage to important considerations. I added, it
would be no use were I to select another instead of that particular dream; in

every dream where the content is obscure or intricate, I should hit upon
dream thoughts which call for secrecy. If, however, I continue the analysis
for myself, without regard to those others, for whom, indeed, so personal an
event as my dream cannot matter, I arrive finally at ideas which surprise
me, which I have not known to be mine, which not only appear foreign to
me, but which are unpleasant, and which I would like to oppose
vehemently, whilst the chain of ideas running through the analysis intrudes
upon me inexorably. I can only take these circumstances into account by
admitting that these thoughts are actually part of my psychical life,
possessing a certain psychical intensity or energy. However, by virtue of a
particular psychological condition, the thoughts could not become
conscious to me. I call this particular condition “Repression.” It is therefore
impossible for me not to recognise some causal relationship between the
obscurity of the dream content and this state of repression—this incapacity
of consciousness. Whence I conclude that the cause of the obscurity is the
desire to conceal these thoughts. Thus I arrive at the conception of the
dream distortion as the deed of the dream work, and of displacement
serving to disguise this object.
I will test this in my own dream, and ask myself, What is the thought
which, quite innocuous in its distorted form, provokes my liveliest
opposition in its real form? I remember that the free drive reminded me of
the last expensive drive with a member of my family, the interpretation of
the dream being: I should for once like to experience affection for which I
should not have to pay, and that shortly before the dream I had to make a
heavy disbursement for this very person. In this connection, I cannot get
away from the thought that I regret this disbursement. It is only when I
acknowledge this feeling that there is any sense in my wishing in the dream
for an affection that should entail no outlay. And yet I can state on my
honour that I did not hesitate for a moment when it became necessary to
expend that sum. The regret, the counter-current, was unconscious to me.
Why it was unconscious is quite another question which would lead us far
away from the answer which, though within my knowledge, belongs
elsewhere.
If I subject the dream of another person instead of one of my own to
analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is,
however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me to
enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the dream

thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we are dealing
with a person suffering from any neurosis—say from hysteria—the
recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason of their
connection with the symptoms of his illness and of the improvement
resulting from exchanging the symptoms for the repressed ideas. Take the
patient from whom I got the last dream about the three tickets for one florin
fifty kreuzers. Analysis shows that she does not think highly of her
husband, that she regrets having married him, that she would be glad to
change him for someone else. It is true that she maintains that she loves her
husband, that her emotional life knows nothing about this depreciation (a
hundred times better!), but all her symptoms lead to the same conclusion as
this dream. When her repressed memories had rewakened a certain period
when she was conscious that she did not love her husband, her symptoms
disappeared, and therewith disappeared her resistance to the interpretation
of the dream.

IX.

This conception of repression once fixed, together with the distortion of
the dream in relation to repressed psychical matter, we are in a position to
give a general exposition of the principal results which the analysis of
dreams supplies. We learnt that the most intelligible and meaningful dreams
are unrealised desires; the desires they pictured as realised are known to
consciousness, have been held over from the daytime, and are of absorbing
interest. The analysis of obscure and intricate dreams discloses something
very similar; the dream scene again pictures as realised some desire which
regularly proceeds from the dream ideas, but the picture is unrecognisable,
and is only cleared up in the analysis. The desire itself is either one
repressed, foreign to consciousness, or it is closely bound up with repressed
ideas. The formula for these dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed
realisations of repressed desires. It is interesting to note that they are right
who regard the dream as foretelling the future. Although the future which
the dream shows us is not that which will occur, but that which we would
like to occur. Folk psychology proceeds here according to its wont; it
believes what it wishes to believe.
Dreams can be divided into three classes according to their relation
towards the realisation of desire. Firstly come those which exhibit a non-
repressed, non-concealed desire; these are dreams of the infantile type,
becoming ever rarer among adults. Secondly, dreams which express in
veiled form some repressed desire; these constitute by far the larger number
of our dreams, and they require analysis for their understanding. Thirdly,
these dreams where repression exists, but without or with but slight
concealment. These dreams are invariably accompanied by a feeling of
dread which brings the dream to an end. This feeling of dread here replaces
dream displacement; I regarded the dream work as having prevented this in

the dream of the second class. It is not very difficult to prove that what is
now present as intense dread in the dream was once desire, and is now
secondary to the repression.
There are also definite dreams with a painful content, without the
presence of any anxiety in the dream. These cannot be reckoned among
dreams of dread; they have, however, always been used to prove the
unimportance and the psychical futility of dreams. An analysis of such an
example will show that it belongs to our second class of dreams—a
perfectly concealed realisation of repressed desires. Analysis will
demonstrate at the same time how excellently adapted is the work of
displacement to the concealment of desires.
A girl dreamt that she saw lying dead before her the only surviving child
of her sister amid the same surroundings as a few years before she saw the
first child lying dead. She was not sensible of any pain, but naturally
combated the view that the scene represented a desire of hers. Nor was that
view necessary. Years ago it was at the funeral of the child that she had last
seen and spoken to the man she loved. Were the second child to die, she
would be sure to meet this man again in her sister’s house. She is longing to
meet him, but struggles against this feeling. The day of the dream she had
taken a ticket for a lecture, which announced the presence of the man she
always loved. The dream is simply a dream of impatience common to those
which happen before a journey, theatre, or simply anticipated pleasures. The
longing is concealed by the shifting of the scene to the occasion when any
joyous feeling were out of place, and yet where it did once exist. Note,
further, that the emotional behaviour in the dream is adapted, not to the
displaced, but to the real but suppressed dream ideas. The scene anticipates
the long-hoped-for meeting; there is here no call for painful emotions.

X.

There has hitherto been no occasion for philosophers to bestir themselves
with a psychology of repression. We must be allowed to construct some
clear conception as to the origin of dreams as the first steps in this unknown
territory. The scheme which we have formulated not only from a study of
dreams is, it is true, already somewhat complicated, but we cannot find any
simpler one that will suffice. We hold that our psychical apparatus contains
two procedures for the construction of thoughts. The second one has the
advantage that its products find an open path to consciousness, whilst the
activity of the first procedure is unknown to itself, and can only arrive at
consciousness through the second one. At the borderland of these two
procedures, where the first passes over into the second, a censorship is
established which only passes what pleases it, keeping back everything else.
That which is rejected by the censorship is, according to our definition, in a
state of repression. Under certain conditions, one of which is the sleeping
state, the balance of power between the two procedures is so changed that
what is repressed can no longer be kept back. In the sleeping state this may
possibly occur through the negligence of the censor; what has been hitherto
repressed will now succeed in finding its way to consciousness. But as the
censorship is never absent, but merely off guard, certain alterations must be
conceded so as to placate it. It is a compromise which becomes conscious in
this case—a compromise between what one procedure has in view and the
demands of the other. Repression, laxity of the censor, compromise—this is
the foundation for the origin of many another psychological process, just as
it is for the dream. In such compromises we can observe the processes of
condensation, of displacement, the acceptance of superficial associations,
which we have found in the dream work.

It is not for us to deny the demonic element which has played a part in
constructing our explanation of dream work. The impression left is that the
formation of obscure dreams proceeds as if a person had something to say
which must be disagreeable for another person upon whom he is dependent
to hear. It is by the use of this image that we figure to ourselves the
conception of the dream distortion and of the censorship, and ventured to
crystallise our impression in a rather crude, but at least definite,
psychological theory. Whatever explanation the future may offer of these
first and second procedures, we shall expect a confirmation of our correlate
that the second procedure commands the entrance to consciousness, and can
exclude the first from consciousness.
Once the sleeping state overcome, the censorship resumes complete
sway, and is now able to revoke that which was granted in a moment of
weakness. That the forgetting of dreams explains this in part, at least, we
are convinced by our experience, confirmed again and again. During the
relation of a dream, or during analysis of one, it not infrequently happens
that some fragment of the dream is suddenly forgotten. This fragment so
forgotten invariably contains the best and readiest approach to an
understanding of the dream. Probably that is why it sinks into oblivion—
i.e., into a renewed suppression.

XI.

Viewing the dream content as the representation of a realised desire, and
referring its vagueness to the changes made by the censor in the repressed
matter, it is no longer difficult to grasp the function of dreams. In
fundamental contrast with those saws which assume that sleep is disturbed
by dreams, we hold the dream as the guardian of sleep. So far as children’s
dreams are concerned, our view should find ready acceptance.
The sleeping state or the psychical change to sleep, whatsoever it be, is
brought about by the child being sent to sleep or compelled thereto by
fatigue, only assisted by the removal of all stimuli which might open other
objects to the psychical apparatus. The means which serve to keep external
stimuli distant are known; but what are the means we can employ to depress
the internal psychical stimuli which frustrate sleep? Look at a mother
getting her child to sleep. The child is full of beseeching; he wants another
kiss; he wants to play yet awhile. His requirements are in part met, in part
drastically put off till the following day. Clearly these desires and needs,
which agitate him, are hindrances to sleep. Everyone knows the charming
story of the bad boy (Baldwin Groller’s) who awoke at night bellowing out,
“I want the rhinoceros.” A really good boy, instead of bellowing, would
have dreamt that he was playing with the rhinoceros. Because the dream
which realises his desire is believed during sleep, it removes the desire and
makes sleep possible. It cannot be denied that this belief accords with the
dream image, because it is arrayed in the psychical appearance of
probability; the child is without the capacity which it will acquire later to
distinguish hallucinations or phantasies from reality.
The adult has learnt this differentiation; he has also learnt the futility of
desire, and by continuous practice manages to postpone his aspirations,
until they can be granted in some roundabout method by a change in the

external world. For this reason it is rare for him to have his wishes realised
during sleep in the short psychical way. It is even possible that this never
happens, and that everything which appears to us like a child’s dream
demands a much more elaborate explanation. Thus it is that for adults—for
every sane person without exception—a differentiation of the psychical
matter has been fashioned which the child knew not. A psychical procedure
has been reached which, informed by the experience of life, exercises with
jealous power a dominating and restraining influence upon psychical
emotions; by its relation to consciousness, and by its spontaneous mobility,
it is endowed with the greatest means of psychical power. A portion of the
infantile emotions has been withheld from this procedure as useless to life,
and all the thoughts which flow from these are found in the state of
repression.
Whilst the procedure in which we recognise our normal ego reposes upon
the desire for sleep, it appears compelled by the psycho-physiological
conditions of sleep to abandon some of the energy with which it was wont
during the day to keep down what was repressed. This neglect is really
harmless; however much the emotions of the child’s spirit may be stirred,
they find the approach to consciousness rendered difficult, and that to
movement blocked in consequence of the state of sleep. The danger of their
disturbing sleep must, however, be avoided. Moreover, we must admit that
even in deep sleep some amount of free attention is exerted as a protection
against sense-stimuli which might, perchance, make an awakening seem
wiser than the continuance of sleep. Otherwise we could not explain the fact
of our being always awakened by stimuli of certain quality. As the old
physiologist Burdach pointed out, the mother is awakened by the
whimpering of her child, the miller by the cessation of his mill, most people
by gently calling out their names. This attention, thus on the alert, makes
use of the internal stimuli arising from repressed desires, and fuses them
into the dream, which as a compromise satisfies both procedures at the
same time. The dream creates a form of psychical release for the wish
which is either suppressed or formed by the aid of repression, inasmuch as
it presents it as realised. The other procedure is also satisfied, since the
continuance of the sleep is assured. Our ego here gladly behaves like a
child; it makes the dream pictures believable, saying, as it were, “Quite
right, but let me sleep.” The contempt which, once awakened, we bear the
dream, and which rests upon the absurdity and apparent illogicality of the

dream, is probably nothing but the reasoning of our sleeping ego on the
feelings about what was repressed; with greater right it should rest upon the
incompetency of this disturber of our sleep. In sleep we are now and then
aware of this contempt; the dream content transcends the censorship rather
too much, we think, “It’s only a dream,” and sleep on.
It is no objection to this view if there are border-lines for the dream
where its function, to preserve sleep from interruption, can no longer be
maintained—as in the dreams of impending dread. It is here changed for
another function—to suspend the sleep at the proper time. It acts like a
conscientious night-watchman, who first does his duty by quelling
disturbances so as not to waken the citizen, but equally does his duty quite
properly when he awakens the street should the causes of the trouble seem
to him serious and himself unable to cope with them alone.
This function of dreams becomes especially well marked when there
arises some incentive for the sense perception. That the senses aroused
during sleep influence the dream is well known, and can be experimentally
verified; it is one of the certain but much overestimated results of the
medical investigation of dreams. Hitherto there has been an insoluble riddle
connected with this discovery. The stimulus to the sense by which the
investigator affects the sleeper is not properly recognised in the dream, but
is intermingled with a number of indefinite interpretations, whose
determination appears left to psychical free-will. There is, of course, no
such psychical free-will. To an external sense-stimulus the sleeper can react
in many ways. Either he awakens or he succeeds in sleeping on. In the latter
case he can make use of the dream to dismiss the external stimulus, and
this, again, in more ways than one. For instance, he can stay the stimulus by
dreaming of a scene which is absolutely intolerable to him. This was the
means used by one who was troubled by a painful perineal abscess. He
dreamt that he was on horseback, and made use of the poultice, which was
intended to alleviate his pain, as a saddle, and thus got away from the cause
of the trouble. Or, as is more frequently the case, the external stimulus
undergoes a new rendering, which leads him to connect it with a repressed
desire seeking its realisation, and robs him of its reality, and is treated as if
it were a part of the psychical matter. Thus, someone dreamt that he had
written a comedy which embodied a definite motif; it was being performed;
the first act was over amid enthusiastic applause; there was great clapping.
At this moment the dreamer must have succeeded in prolonging his sleep

despite the disturbance, for when he woke he no longer heard the noise; he
concluded rightly that someone must have been beating a carpet or bed. The
dreams which come with a loud noise just before waking have all attempted
to cover the stimulus to waking by some other explanation, and thus to
prolong the sleep for a little while.

XII.

Whosoever has firmly accepted this censorship as the chief motive for
the distortion of dreams will not be surprised to learn as the result of dream
interpretation that most of the dreams of adults are traced by analysis to
erotic desires. This assertion is not drawn from dreams obviously of a
sexual nature, which are known to all dreamers from their own experience,
and are the only ones usually described as “sexual dreams.” These dreams
are ever sufficiently mysterious by reason of the choice of persons who are
made the objects of sex, the removal of all the barriers which cry halt to the
dreamer’s sexual needs in his waking state, the many strange reminders as
to details of what are called perversions. But analysis discovers that, in
many other dreams in whose manifest content nothing erotic can be found,
the work of interpretation shows them up as, in reality, realisation of sexual
desires; whilst, on the other hand, that much of the thought-making when
awake, the thoughts saved us as surplus from the day only, reaches
presentation in dreams with the help of repressed erotic desires.
Towards the explanation of this statement, which is no theoretical
postulate, it must be remembered that no other class of instincts has
required so vast a suppression at the behest of civilisation as the sexual,
whilst their mastery by the highest psychical processes are in most persons
soonest of all relinquished. Since we have learnt to understand infantile
sexuality, often so vague in its expression, so invariably overlooked and
misunderstood, we are justified in saying that nearly every civilised person
has retained at some point or other the infantile type of sex life; thus we
understand that repressed infantile sex desires furnish the most frequent and
most powerful impulses for the formation of dreams.[3]
3. Freud, “Three Contributions to Sexual Theory,” translated by A. A. Brill (Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease Publishing Company, New York).

If the dream, which is the expression of some erotic desire, succeeds in
making its manifest content appear innocently asexual, it is only possible in
one way. The matter of these sexual presentations cannot be exhibited as
such, but must be replaced by allusions, suggestions, and similar indirect
means; differing from other cases of indirect presentation, those used in
dreams must be deprived of direct understanding. The means of
presentation which answer these requirements are commonly termed
“symbols.” A special interest has been directed towards these, since it has
been observed that the dreamers of the same language use the like symbols
—indeed, that in certain cases community of symbol is greater than
community of speech. Since the dreamers do not themselves know the
meaning of the symbols they use, it remains a puzzle whence arises their
relationship with what they replace and denote. The fact itself is undoubted,
and becomes of importance for the technique of the interpretation of
dreams, since by the aid of a knowledge of this symbolism it is possible to
understand the meaning of the elements of a dream, or parts of a dream,
occasionally even the whole dream itself, without having to question the
dreamer as to his own ideas. We thus come near to the popular idea of an
interpretation of dreams, and, on the other hand, possess again the
technique of the ancients, among whom the interpretation of dreams was
identical with their explanation through symbolism.
Though the study of dream symbolism is far removed from finality, we
now possess a series of general statements and of particular observations
which are quite certain. There are symbols which practically always have
the same meaning: Emperor and Empress (King and Queen) always mean
the parents; room, a woman,[4] and so on. The sexes are represented by a
great variety of symbols, many of which would be at first quite
incomprehensible had not the clues to the meaning been often obtained
through other channels.
4. The words from “and” to “channels” in the next sentence is a short summary of the passage in
the original. As this book will be read by other than professional people the passage has not been
translated, in deference to English opinion.—Translator.
There are symbols of universal circulation, found in all dreamers, of one
range of speech and culture; there are others of the narrowest individual
significance which an individual has built up out of his own material. In the
first class those can be differentiated whose claim can be at once recognised
by the replacement of sexual things in common speech (those, for instance,

arising from agriculture, as reproduction, seed) from others whose sexual
references appear to reach back to the earliest times and to the obscurest
depths of our image-building. The power of building symbols in both these
special forms of symbols has not died out. Recently discovered things, like
the airship, are at once brought into universal use as sex symbols.
It would be quite an error to suppose that a profounder knowledge of
dream symbolism (the “Language of Dreams”) would make us independent
of questioning the dreamer regarding his impressions about the dream, and
would give us back the whole technique of ancient dream interpreters.
Apart from individual symbols and the variations in the use of what is
general, one never knows whether an element in the dream is to be
understood symbolically or in its proper meaning; the whole content of the
dream is certainly not to be interpreted symbolically. The knowledge of
dream symbols will only help us in understanding portions of the dream
content, and does not render the use of the technical rules previously given
at all superfluous. But it must be of the greatest service in interpreting a
dream just when the impressions of the dreamer are withheld or are
insufficient.
Dream symbolism proves also indispensable for understanding the so-
called “typical” dreams and the dreams that “repeat themselves.” If the
value of the symbolism of dreams has been so incompletely set out in this
brief portrayal, this attempt will be corrected by reference to a point of view
which is of the highest import in this connection. Dream symbolism leads
us far beyond the dream; it does not belong only to dreams, but is likewise
dominant in legend, myth, and saga, in wit and in folklore. It compels us to
pursue the inner meaning of the dream in these productions. But we must
acknowledge that symbolism is not a result of the dream work, but is a
peculiarity probably of our unconscious thinking, which furnishes to the
dream work the matter for condensation, displacement, and dramatisation.

XIII.

I disclaim all pretension to have thrown light here upon all the problems
of the dream, or to have dealt convincingly with everything here touched
upon. If anyone is interested in the whole of dream literature, I refer him to
the works of Sante de Sanctis (I sogni, Turin, 1899). For a more complete
investigation of my conception of the dream, my work should be consulted:
“Die Traumdeutung,” Leipzig and Vienna, third edition, 1911.[5] I will only
point out in what direction my exposition on dream work should be
followed up.
5. Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” third edition, translated by A. A. Brill. London:
George Allen and Company, Ltd.
If I posit as the problem of dream interpretation the replacement of the
dream by its latent ideas—that is, the resolution of that which the dream
work has woven—I raise a series of new psychological problems which
refer to the mechanism of this dream work as well as to the nature and the
conditions of this so-called repression. On the other hand, I claim the
existence of dream thoughts as a very valuable foundation for psychical
construction of the highest order, provided with all the signs of normal
intellectual performance. This matter is, however, removed from
consciousness until it is rendered in the distorted form of the dream content.
I am compelled to believe that all persons have such ideas, since nearly all,
even the most normal, can have dreams. To the unconsciousness of dream
ideas, or their relationship to consciousness and to repression, are linked
questions of the greatest psychological importance. Their solution must be
postponed until the analysis of the origin of other psychopathic growths,
such as the symptoms of hysteria and of obsessions, has been made clear.

LITERATURE

For a completer study of Dream Symbolism, consult the work of
Artemidorus Daldianus: The Interpretation of Dreams. Rendered into
English by “R. W.”—i.e., Robert Wood. The fourth edition, newly written.
B. L., London, 1644. The last edition was published in 1786.
Scherner, R. A. Das Leben des Traumes. Berlin, 1861.
Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams.
For the symbolism of legend, myth, and saga compared with dreams, see
—
Abraham, Karl. Traum und Mythus.
Rank, Otto. Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden.
Riklin, F. Wunscherfüllung und Symbolik im Märchen.
These three works are published by Franz Deuticke, Vienna.
English translations are ready, or are in preparation.
Recent literature will be found in—
Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen:
Franz Deuticke.
Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse; and Imago (both
published by Hugo Heller and Co., Vienna).

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect
retained.

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