Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/306

294 called "Hokerring," a neologism produced by fusing "moke" (a London slang term for donkey, used under the same circumstances as Kipper) with "smoked herring;" this process may be represented thus: (M) OKE

(SM) OKE (D)

H ERRING

(The parentheses indicate letters omitted in the neologism.) The term smoked herring reminded her of bloater, and of a rather vulgar word in her native language meaning nude, bloot (pronounced bloat). This brought up infantile memories of shyness and a sense of foolishness that were connected with nakedness.

The construction of the manifest content out of the latent content Freud terms the Dream-making {Traumarbeif) . In this two other principal mechanisms are concerned in addition to those just mentioned of condensation and displacement. The first of these may be called Dramatisation (Darstellung) . It is a familiar observation that the manifest content of most dreams depicts a situation, or rather an action, so that in this respect a dream may be said to resemble a theatrical representation. This fact exercises a selecting influence on the mental processes that have to be presented {Rucksicht auf Darstellbarkeif}, for dramatisation, like the arts of painting and sculpture, is necessarily subject to definite limitations, and therefore special expedients have to be employed to indicate mental processes that cannot be directly portrayed. Just as a painter has indirectly to convey abstract mental processes by adopting certain technical devices, so a dramatist has to select and modify his material in order to make it conform to the restrictions of his art, as for instance when an action extending over years has to be presented in a couple of hours. In a dream the mental processes are dramatised so that the past and future are unrolled before our eyes in a present action; a wish, for instance, that relates to the future is seen realised in a present situation.

It is further well known that the manifest content of most dreams is predominantly, though not exclusively, of a visual nature, and the particular process of expressing in a dream various thoughts in the form of visual pictures Freud terms Regression, wishing to indicate by this the retrograde movement of abstract mental processes towards their primary perceptions. The network of dream thoughts is in this way resolved into its raw material. This process of regression is characteristic of dreams as contrasted with other mental constructions formed by means of similar mechanisms, such as day-dreams, psycho- neurotic symptoms and so on, though it sometimes occurs in the last named in the form of hallucinatory visions. In his discussion of the nature and function of