Dream Psychology | Page 6

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
favorite 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 recognize 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 analyze the
dream of some one 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