Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/307

Rh regression Freud develops a number of important theoretic considerations regarding the structure of the mind, which, however, cannot here be gone into. He traces regression, both in dreams and in visions, to the resistance of the censor of consciousness, and to the attraction exerted for the mental processes thus represented by infantile memories, which, as is known, characteristically preserve their original visual type. In the case of dreams, though not of course in the case of waking visions, it is possible that the regression is further facilitated by the cessation during sleep of the forward movement from the sensorial to the motor side.

Under the heading of dramatisation may also be included the representation of various intellectual processes. We shall presently see that the intellectual operations (judgement, etc.) that are frequently met with in the manifest content of dreams originate not in the dream-making but in the underlying dream thoughts; no intellectual work is performed in the dream-making proper. In the dream thoughts there are of course all kinds of intellectual processes, judgements, arguments, conditions, proofs, objections and so on. None of these, however, finds any special representation in the manifest content of the dream. As a rule they are entirely omitted, only the material content of the dream thoughts being represented in the dream, and not the logical relations of these. The dream-making, however, sometimes makes use of certain special devices to indicate these logical relations indirectly; the extent to which this is done greatly varies in different dreams and in different individuals. The logical relations between the constituents ot the dream thoughts, just as between those of waking thoughts, are displayed by the use of such parts of speech as "if," "although," "either," "because," etc., which, as has just been said, find no direct expression in the manifest content. Instances of the devices in question are the following: Logical concatenation between two thoughts is indicated by the synchronous appearance of the elements representing these in the manifest content; thus, in the third dream related above, the husband's death, the second marriage and the subsequent children, three logically related thoughts, are represented by three groups of elements that synchronously appear in the manifest content. Causal connection between two dream thoughts is usually not indicated at all. When indicated it is done by making the one representing element follow on the other. The commonest way of doing this is by one clause being represented in an introductory dream (Vortraum), the other in the main dream (Haupttraum); it should however be remarked that this splitting of the manifest content does not always indicate causal connection between the corresponding dream thoughts.