Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/333

Rh the act of satisfying his bodily needs. (This is a frequently repeated case; parents for the most part put no restraint on themselves before three and four-year old children, whose understanding and faculty of observation they materially underestimate.) The third constituent of the composite picture, the physician, awakened in me the suspicion, which proved to be well grounded, that the patient had unconsciously transferred her sexual curiosity from her father to the physician who was treating her.

Many times the constituent parts of a composite person have an unequal share in its creation; perhaps only a characteristic movement of one person is grafted on to the second person. I saw myself once in a dream rub my forehead with my hand just as my honored master, Professor Freud, does, when he is meditating over a hard question. It does not require much art of interpretation to guess that this mixing of teacher and pupil, especially in meditation, can only be blamed to envy and ambition, when at night the intellectual censorship was relaxed. In my waking life I have to laugh at the boldness of this identification, which strongly reminds one of the sentence, "How he clears his throat and how he spits, that have you bravely learned from him." As an example of a composite word, I may say that in a dream a German speaking patient thought of a certain Metzler or Wetzler. Persons with such names are, however, unknown to the patient. He was, however, very much occupied on the day before with the approaching marriage of a friend, by the name of Messer, who liked to joke (hetzen)–South-German for necken–with the patient. The associations from Messer showed that he as a small child had been greatly in fear of his grandfather, who, while whetting (wetzen) his pocket-knife (Taschenmesser) had jokingly threatened him with castration, a threat which was not without influence on the development of his sexuality. The name "Metzler-Wetzler" are accordingly nothing but condensations of the words messer, hetzen and wetzen.

Dream condensation stands in close relation with the work of displacement and transvaluation (Verschiebungsarbeit) of the dream. This consists essentially in the fact that the psychic intensity of the dream thoughts is shunted over from the essentials to the accessories, so that the thought-complex which is at the focus of interest is represented in the conscious dream content either not at all or by a weak allusion, while the maximum of interest in the dream is turned to the more insignificant constituents of the dream thoughts. The work of condensation and displacement go hand in hand. The dream makes harmless an important thought, which would disturb the rest of the sleeper, or be censured on ethical grounds. It as it were