Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/322

310 is much used. Although the details of the dream-books differ in essentials from each other in the different countries, they must be considered products of the common folk-spirit.

On the other hand, we find on the part of the great majority of recent psychologists an almost complete contempt for the dream as a psychic function, and as a result a denial also that the dream-content is of any significance. Many of these investigations consider the dream to be a senseless complex of hallucinations, which blaze up in a lawless way in the brain of the sleeper. According to the view of others, the dream is nothing but the psychic reaction to these outer (objective) or inner (subjective) stimuli, which the sensory end-organs of the body receive during sleep and conduct to the centres.

There were only a few who held the theory that the sleeping psyche could develop a complicated, significant activity, or that the dream could be maintained to have any sort of a symbolic meaning. But even these latter did not succeed in making the peculiarities of dreams comprehensible, without forcing their explanations into the Procrustian bed of an artificial playing with allegories.

Accordingly for centuries the army of superstitious interpreters of dreams stood over against that of the sceptics, until about ten years ago the Viennese neurologist, Professor Freud, discovered facts which make possible a unification of the two hostile conceptions, and which aided on the one hand in the discovery of the true nucleus in the age-old superstition, and on the other hand fully satisfied the scientific need of the knowledge of the connections between cause and effect.

I may say at this point, that Freud's theory of dreams and his method of interpretation only approach the popular conception in so far as to ascribe to dreams sense and meaning. But the newly discovered facts sustain in no way the belief of those who would base dreams on the interference of higher powers, and see prophecies in them. Freud's theory considers the dream as a mental product dependent upon endopsychic occurrences, and is not calculated to strengthen the belief of those who consider the dream as a device of higher powers or as the clairvoyance of the sleeper.

Psychoanalysis, a new method of investigation and treatment of psychoneuroses, made it possible for Freud to recognize the true significance of dreams. The method has its point of departure in the principle that the symptoms of these diseases are only the sensory images of particular thought-constellations, impregnated with feeling, which were distasteful to consciousness and therefore repressed, forgotten, but still live on in the unconscious; and in the fact that the surrogate-creations for the repressed material vanish as soon as the unconscious