Dream Psychology | Page 3

is now
open to all explorers. They shall not find lions, they shall find man himself, and the
record of all his life and of his struggle with reality.
And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him
to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: "We are what we
are because we have been what we have been."
Not a few serious-minded students, however, have been discouraged from attempting a
study of Freud's dream psychology.
The book in which he originally offered to the world his interpretation of dreams was as
circumstantial as a legal record to be pondered over by scientists at their leisure, not to be
assimilated in a few hours by the average alert reader. In those days, Freud could not
leave out any detail likely to make his extremely novel thesis evidentially acceptable to
those willing to sift data.
Freud himself, however, realized the magnitude of the task which the reading of his
magnum opus imposed upon those who have not been prepared for it by long
psychological and scientific training and he abstracted from that gigantic work the parts
which constitute the essential of his discoveries.
The publishers of the present book deserve credit for presenting to the reading public the
gist of Freud's psychology in the master's own words, and in a form which shall neither
discourage beginners, nor appear too elementary to those who are more advanced in
psychoanalytic study.

Dream psychology is the key to Freud's works and to all modern psychology. With a
simple, compact manual such as Dream Psychology there shall be no longer any excuse
for ignorance of the most revolutionary psychological system of modern times.
ANDRÉ TRIDON. 121 Madison Avenue, New York. November, 1920.

CONTENTS


CHAPTER PAGE
I DREAMS HAVE A MEANING 1
II THE DREAM MECHANISM 24
III WHY THE DREAM DISGUISES THE DESIRES 57
IV DREAM ANALYSIS 78
V SEX IN DREAMS 104
VI THE WISH IN DREAMS 135
VII THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 164
VIII THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESS--REGRESSION 186
IX THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS--REALITY 220

DREAM PSYCHOLOGY

I
DREAMS HAVE A MEANING
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