Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/311

Rh incongruity is solely due to the distortion of the conceptual content, whereby a given affect becomes secondarily associated with an inappropriate idea. The third dream mentioned above well illustrates this fact; the incongruity with which Mr. X's death was joyfully celebrated by his brother explains itself as soon as one realises that the figure of Mr. X in the dream represented that of another man in the latent content. The affect investing the latent content is always more intense than that present in the manifest content, so that, although strongly affective dream thoughts may produce an indifferently toned dream, the reverse never occurs, that is to say an affective manifest content never arises from an indifferently toned latent content. Freud attributes this inhibition of the affect in dream formation partly to the cessation in sleep of the forward movement from the sensory to the motor side he regards affective processes as essentially centrifugal and partly to the suppressing effect of the censor, which will presently be further considered. Another important matter is that the nature of the affect as it appears in the manifest content is the same as that of the latent content, although, as has just been said, the intensity of it is always less there than here. The effect of the dream-making on the original affect is thus different from that on the rest of the dream thoughts, in that no distortion of it takes place. As Stekel puts it in a recent article, "Im Traume ist der Affekt das einzig Wahre" The affect appears in the same form in the latent as in the manifest content, although through the mechanisms of transference and displacement it is in the latter otherwise associated than in the former. It should however be remarked that a given affect in the manifest content may represent its exact opposite in the latent content, but on closer analysis it will be found that the two opposites were already present in the latent content, and were both of them appropriate to the context; as is so often the case in waking mental life, exactly contrasting mental processes in dream thoughts are intimately associated with each other.

Having mentioned some of the mechanisms that bring about the distortion of the latent into the manifest content we may next shortly consider the material and sources from which a dream is composed. Again we have sharply to distinguish between the sources of the manifest content and those of the underlying dream thoughts; the latter will presently be dealt with apart. Three peculiar features shown by the memory in dreams have especially struck most observers: first the preference shown for recent impressions, secondly that the experiences are