Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/309

Rh among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head into the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a revery in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him to a nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her household.

The second half of the dream therefore represented thoughts, concerning the elopement, that belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth phantasy. Besides this inversion in order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the first half the child entered the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dream thoughts first the quickening occurred, and then the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream thoughts she left her husband.

Last among the dream-making mechanisms is that termed Secondary Elaboration (secundäre Bearbeitung). It fundamentally differs from the other three in that it arises from the activity, not of the underlying dream thoughts, but of the more conscious mental processes. This remark will be more comprehensible when we presently consider the forces that go to make a dream. When the dream is apprehended in consciousness it is treated in the same way as any other perceptive content, and is therefore not accepted in its unaltered state but is assimilated to pre-existing conceptions. It is thus to a certain extent remodelled so as to bring it, so far as is possible, into harmony with other conscious mental processes. In other words an attempt, however unsuccessful, is made to modify it so as to render it comprehensible (Rücksicht auf Verständlichkeit). This secondary elaboration is closely allied to the process I have described as rationalisation. As is well known, there is a pronounced tendency on the part of the mind to distort foreign experiences in such a way as to assimilate them to what is already intelligible; in hearing or seeing a sentence in a strange tongue the subject imagines analogies to familiar words in his own, a falsifying process that frequently is carried to excess, leading to curious misunderstandings. To this secondary elaboration is due whatever degree of ordering, sequence and consistency there may be found in a dream.

Reviewing now as a whole the process of dream-making we have above all to lay stress on the fact that in the formation of