Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/316

203 thoughts from becoming conscious; that it was in fact a result of this resistance. He speaks of the resistance that keeps certain mental processes unconscious as the " endopsychic censor." In the waking state the unconscious processes cannot come to external expression, except under certain abnormal conditions. In sleep, however, the activity of the censor, like that of all other conscious processes, is diminished, though it is never entirely abrogated. This fact permits the unconscious processes (the latent content) to reach expression in the form of a dream, but as they still have to contend with some degree of activity on the part of the censor they can only reach expression in an indirect way. The distortion in the dream-making is thus a means of evading the censor, in the same way that a veiled phraseology is a means of evading a social censor, which would not permit a disagreeable truth to be openly expressed. The dream is a compromise between the dream thoughts on the one hand and the endopsychic censor on the other, and could not arise at all were it not for the diminished activity of the latter during sleep.

Distortion of the dream thoughts by means of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement is far from being the only way in which the censor manifests itself, nor is this distortion the only way in which the censor can be evaded by the dream processes. In the first place we have already noticed above, one of its manifestations under the name of secondary elaboration. This process continues even in the waking state, so that the account of a dream as related directly after waking differs from that related some time after. The fact of this change in the subsequent memory of a dream is sometimes urged as an objection to the interpretation by psycho-analysis, but the change is just as rigorously determined and the mechanism is as precisely to be defined as those of any other process in the dream-making. For instance, if the two accounts are compared, it will be found that the altered passage concerns what might be called a weak place in the disguise of the dream thoughts; the disguise is strengthened by the subsequent elaboration by the censor, but the fact of the change points to the need for distortion at that given spot, a point of some value in the analysis. Instead of subsequently altering this weak place the censor may act by interposing doubt in the subject's mind as to the reliability of his memory about it; he may say "The person in the dream seemed to carry such and such an object, but lam not sure that I haven't imagined that in thinking over the dream." In such cases one is always safe in accepting the dubiously given point as unhesitatingly as the most vivid memory; the doubt is only one of the stages in the disguise of the underlying dream thoughts. An interesting way