Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/319

Rh the age of four, no distortion takes place, so that the manifest content is identical with the latent content. In correspondence with this fact we find that child dreams are logical and coordinate, an observation that is hard to reconcile with the commonly received opinion that dream processes arise from a dissociated activity of the brain cells, for one can see no reason why dreams should be a meaningless conglomeration of disordered and lowered mental functioning in adults when they are obviously not so in the child. Further, with young children it is easy to recognise that the dream represents the imaginary fulfilment of an ungratified wish. Now Freud maintains that the latent content of every dream represents nothing else than the imaginary fulfilment of an ungratified wish. In the child the wish is an ungratified one, but it has not undergone repression, that is to say it is not of such a nature as to be inacceptable in consciousness; in the adult the wish is not merely one that could not be gratified, but is of such a nature as to be inassimilable in consciousness, and so has become repressed. It frequently happens that even in the adult a wish- fulfilment appears in the manifest content, and still more frequently that a wish-fulfilment not present in the manifest content, but revealed by psycho-analysis, concerns a wish of which the subject is quite conscious; in both these cases, however, full analysis always discloses that these wishes are merely reinforcements of deeper, unconscious ones of an associated nature. No wish, therefore, is able to produce a dream unless it is either unconscious (bewusstseinsunfahig) or else associated with an allied unconscious one.

It has sometimes been alleged by Freud's opponents that his generalisation of all dreams representing a wish- fulfilment is the outcome of observing a few child dreams, and that his analyses merely consist in arbitrarily twisting the dream, to serve some private ends, until a wish can be read into it. We have seen that this absurd suggestion is historically untrue, for Freud came to the analysis of adult dreams from the analysis, not of child dreams, but of adult psycho-neuroses. He found that his patients' symptoms arose as a compromise between two opposing wishes, one of which was conscious, the other unconscious, and that they allegorically represented the imaginary fulfilment of these two wishes. He further found that an essential factor in their production was a conflict between the two wish-systems, of such a kind that the unconscious one was forcibly prevented from becoming conscious; it was unconscious because it was repressed. It frequently happened that the psycho-analysis of the patients' symptoms directly led to their dreams, and on submitting these to the analysis in exactly the same way as any other mental material he discovered that the