Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/326

314 that we dreamed at all. The traditional idea that dreams dis- turb rest during sleep must be abandoned on the ground of these newly won results ; on the contrary, since they do not allow the unpleasant, painful or burdensome thought which would disturb sleep to become conscious with its true content, but in a changed form as the fulfillment of a wish, we are forced to recognize dreams as the preservers of sleep. -

The psychic factor which watches over rest during sleep, often with the assistance of the dream disguise already men- tioned, is the censor. This is the gate-keeper at the threshold of consciousness, which we see zealously at work during waking life also, especially in psychoneuroses, and which for our prob- lem is to be considered as either repressing all thought groupings which are distasteful in aesthetic or ethical ways, or disguising them in the form of apparently harmless symbols, symptomatic acts or symptomatic thoughts.

The function of the censorship is to secure the repose of con- sciousness and to keep at a distance all psychic creations which would cause pain or disturb rest. And like the censor of political absolutism, who sometimes works at night, the psychic censorship is kept in activity during sleep, though its red pen- ciling is not so strongly in evidence as in waking life. Prob- ably the censor is led to relax its activity by the idea that the motor reactions are paralyzed during sleep, and so thoughts cannot be expressed in deeds. So the fact may be explained that for the most part those images and situations emerge as wish fulfillments in dreams which we refuse by day to recog- nize as wishes.

We all shelter in our unconscious ego many wishes repressed since childhood, which take the opportunity of exercising their psychic intensity as soon as they perceive the letting down of the censorship at night.

It is not chance that among the wishes revealed in dreams, the strongly repressed sexual excitations, and in particular those of the most contemptible kind play the greatest r61e. It is a very great error to believe that psychoanalysis intention- ally places sexual activity in the foreground. It cannot be denied that whenever one seeks to investigate thoroughly the basal facts of mental life, he always strikes against the sexual elements. If, accordingly, we find psychoanalysis objection- able for this reason, we are really degrading the description of the unconscious facts of human mentality by our action in regarding them as obscene. The censorship of affairs of sex is, as already said, much milder in dream life than during waking hours, so that in dreams we experience and crave sexual experiences without bounds, even representing in our dreams experiences and acts reminding one of the so-called