Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/317

Rh in which the censor may act is by the subject receiving the assurance during the dream that "it is only a dream." The explanation of this is that the action of the censor has set in too late, after the dream has already been formed; the mental processes which have, as it were unwittingly, reached consciousness are partly divested of their significance by the subject treating them lightly as being "only a dream." Freud wittily describes this after-thought on the part of the censor as an esprit d'escalier. The last manifestation of the censor is more important, namely the tendency to forget dreams or part of them; it is an extension of the doubting process mentioned above. Freud traces this tendency to forget, as also that shown in many forgetting acts of waking life, to the repressing action of the censor. This explanation can readily be experimentally confirmed. When a patient informs the physician that he had a dream the night before, but that he cannot recall anything of it, it frequently happens that the overcoming of a given resistance during the psycho-analytic treatment removes the barrier to the recollection of the dream, provided of course, that the resistance concerns the same topic in the two cases; the patient then says "Ah, now I can recall the dream I had." Similarly he may suddenly during the analysis of the dream, or at any time subsequent to the relation of the dream, supply a previously forgotten fragment (Nachtrag); this later fragment invariably corresponds with those dream thoughts that have undergone the most intense repression, and therefore those of greatest significance. This occurrence is extremely frequent, and may be illustrated by the following examples.

(8) A patient, a man aged 26, dreamt that ''he saw a man standing in front of a hoarding, with a gate entrance on his left. He approached the man, who received him cordially and '"entered into conversation" with him''. During the analysis he suddenly recalled that the hoarding seemed to be the wall of an "exhibition," into which the man was entering to join a number of others. The significance of this added fragment will be evident when I mention that the patient was a pronounced voyeur, and had frequently indulged in pædicatio.

(9) A patient, a woman aged 36, dreamt that ''she was standing in a crowd of school girls. One of them said " Why do you wear such untidy skirts?" and turned up the patient* s skirt to show how worn the underskirt was''. During the analysis, three days after relating the dream, the patient for the first time recalled that the underskirt in the dream seemed to be a nightdress, and analysis of this led to the evocation of several painful memories in which lifting a nightdress played an