Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/301

Rh significant of the underlying dream thoughts; conversely an apparently unessential and transitory feature in the dream may represent the very core of the dream thoughts. Further, the most prominent affect in the dream, hate, anxiety and so on, as the case may be, often accompanies elements that represent the least important part of the dream thoughts, whereas the dream thoughts that are powerfully invested with this affect may be represented in the manifest content of the dream by elements of feeble affective tone. This disturbing displacement Freud describes, using Nietzsche's phrase, as a "transvaluation of all values. ' ' It is a phenomenon peculiarly frequent in the psycho-neuroses, in which a lively interest or an intense affect may be found associated with an unimportant idea. In both cases a transposition of affect has taken place whereby a highly significant idea is replaced by a previously indifferent and unimportant one. Often the association between the primary and secondary ideas is a very superficial one, and especially common forms of this are witty plays on the speech expression for the two ideas, and other kinds of clang association. As is well known, Jung has demonstrated that this superficial association is usually the cover for a deeper hidden bond of high affective value. This mechanism of displacement is the cause of the puzzling fact that most dreams contain so many indifferent and hardly noticed impressions of the previous day; these, having on account of their unimportance formed but few associations with previous mental processes, are made use of in the dream-making to represent more significant ideas, the affect of which is transferred to them. Displacement also explains much of the bizarreness of dreams, notably the remarkable incongruity between the intensity of the affect and the intellectual content; a person may in a dream be terrified at an apparently indifferent object and quite at ease in the presence of what should be alarming danger.

Condensation and Displacement are the two main mechanisms by means of which is produced the distortion during the passage from the latent to the manifest content. The extent to which a given dream appears confused, bizarre and meaningless varies exactly with the extent to which these two mechanisms have been operative in its formation. The following fragmentary extracts from some dream analyses will illustrate the processes in question.

(1) I recently dreamt that I was travelling in Italy on my way to the next Freudian Congress (which is to be held in March). On looking at my railway ticket I found it was for Lugaro. In reality I know of no place of that name, but I