Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/323

Rh thought can be brought to light and made conscious by help of free association. In the course of this analytic work the dreams of the patients were told, and Freud made their content also an object of psychoanalytic investigation. To his surprise he found in dream analysis not only a great aid to the treatment of neuroses, but he gained at the same time as a byproduct a new explanation of the dream as a psychic function, more enlightening than any of the former explanations. In many chemical processes materials are incidentally obtained by the reduction of certain chemicals, which perhaps have been thrown away as useless for a long time, but which are shown after a time to be valuable materials, often surpassing the principal products of the manufacture in value. The case was about the same with the explanation of dreams incidentally found by Freud; it opens up such outlooks for the knowledge of both the sound and the diseased mind that in comparison its particular point of departure, the treatment of certain phenomena of nervous diseases, seems a scientific question of the second rank.

In the short time at my disposal I cannot reproduce exhaustively Freud's theory of dreams. I must rather confine myself to the more essential explanations and the most valuable facts of the new theory, and to its verification by examples. I do not imagine that this lecture will convince my hearers. According to my previous experience one can gain a conviction in affairs of psychoanalysis only for himself. So I shall not controvert here the lesser and quite superficial critics of Freud, but will rather explain in brief the most essential parts of the theory itself.

First a few words concerning method. If we desire to analyze a dream, we proceed exactly as in the psychological investigation of psychoneurotic symptoms. Behind each imperative thought, no matter how illogical it may appear, are hidden coherent but unconscious thoughts, and to make these evident is the problem of psychoanalysis. Freud has proved that the images and experiences of which the dream consists, are for the most part only disguises, symbolic allusions to suppressed trains of thought. Behind the conscious dream-content is hidden a latent dream-material, which, on its part, was aroused by coherent, logical dream-thoughts. The interpretation of the dream is nothing else than the translation of the dream from its hieroglyphic-symbolic speech into conceptual speech; the leading back of the obvious dream-content through the clues of association given by the hidden dream-material, to the logical dream-thoughts. The means by which this is done is the socalled free association. We have the dream related to us, divide the given material into several parts or sections, and