Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/340

328 epilepsy, paralysis, sub-normals, etc. Many pathognostic peculiarities of dreams in these diseased conditions are already recognizable to-day.

All these more practical and special questions were raised to importance by the unexpected theoretical consequences of this investigation of dreams. Freud has succeeded in surprising a process on the boundary line between the physiological and pathological departments of mental life, in taking it in the midst of its work, inflagranti, as it were. In this way he has brought us nearer to an understanding of the mechanism of the manifestations of neuroses and insanity in waking life. And though it was the study of psychoneuroses which led Freud to his investigation of dreams, the dream theory pays back with interest all that it owes to pathology.

The case could indeed not be other than it is. Waking, dreams, neuroses and psychoses are only variations of the same psychic material with different modes of functioning, and progressive insight into one of these processes must necessarily deepen and widen our knowledge of the others.

Those who expect from the new dream theory any sort of prophetic insight into the future will turn back disillusioned. But those who value highly the solution of psychological problems held until now as insoluble, the widening of the psychological point of view apart from any immediate practical consequences, and who are not held back from advance by hide-bound prejudices, such will perhaps supplement the communication given here by a thorough and earnest study of Freud's "Traumdeutung."