inferiority and compensation," nor Kempf 's "dynamic mechanism" might have been formulated.Freud is the father of modern abnormal psychology and he established the psychoanalytical point of view. No one who is not well
grounded in Freudian lore can hope to achieve any work of value in the field of psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, let no one repeat the absurd assertion that Freudism is a sort of religion bounded with dogmas and requiring an act of faith. Freudism as such was merely a stage in the development of psychoanalysis, a stage out of which all but a few bigoted camp followers, totally lacking in originality, have evolved. Thousands of stones have been added to the structure erected by the Viennese physician and many more will be added in the course of time.
But the new additions to that structure would collapse like a house of cards but for the original foundations which are as indestruct-
ible as Harvey's statement as to the circulation of the blood.
Regardless of whatever additions or changes have been made to the original structure, the analytic point of view remains unchanged. That point of view is not only revolutionising all the methods of diagnosis and treatment of mental derangements, but compelling
the intelligent, up-to-date physician to revise entirely his attitude to almost every kind of disease.
The insane are no longer absurd and pitiable people, to be herded in asylums till nature either cures them or relieves them, through death, of their misery. The insane who have not been made so by actual injury to their brain or nervous system, are the victims of unconscious forces which cause them to do abnormally things which they might be helped to do normally.
Insight into one's psychology is replacing victoriously sedatives and rest cures.
Physicians dealing with "purely" physical cases have begun to take into serious consideration the "mental" factors which have predisposed a patient to certain ailments.
Freud's views have also made a revision of all ethical and social values unavoidable and have thrown an unexpected flood of light
upon literary and artistic accomplishment.
But the Freudian point of view, or more broadly speaking, the psychoanalytic point of view, shall ever remain a puzzle to those who,
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from laziness or indifference, refuse to survey with the great Viennese the field over which he carefully groped his way. We shall
never be convinced until we repeat under his guidance all his laboratory experiments.
We must follow him through the thickets of the unconscious, through the land which had never been charted because academic philosophers, following the line of least effort, had decided a priori that it could not be charted.
Ancient geographers, when exhausting their store of information about distant lands, yielded to an unscientific craving for romance and, without any evidence to support their day dreams, filled the blank spaces left on their maps by unexplored tracts with amusing inserts such as "Here there are lions."
Thanks to Freud's interpretation of dreams the "royal road" into the unconscious 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.
ANDRE 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
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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?
