Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/168

150, whose assumption we have been forced to make by the regularly recurring experiences of dream analysis. But the process seems to be that, in the course of those intermediate steps, a displacement—let us say of the psychic accent—has taken place, until ideas that are at first weakly charged with intensity, by taking over the charge from ideas which have a stronger initial intensity, reach a degree of strength, which enables them to force their way into consciousness. Such displacements do not at all surprise us when it is a question of the bestowal of affects or of the motor actions in general. The fact that the woman who has remained single transfers her affection to animals, that the bachelor becomes a passionate collector, that the soldier defends a scrap of coloured cloth, his flag, with his life-blood, that in a love affair a momentary clasping of hands brings bliss, or that in Othello a lost handkerchief causes a burst of rage—all these are examples of psychic displacement which seem unquestionable to us. But if, in the same manner and according to the same fundamental principles, a decision is made as to what is to reach our consciousness and what is to be withheld from it, that is to say, what we are to think—this produces an impression of morbidity, and we call it an error of thought if it occurs in waking life. We may here anticipate the result of a discussion which will be undertaken later—namely, to the effect that the psychic process which we have recognised as dream displacement proves to be not a process morbidly disturbed, but a process differing from the normal merely in being of a more primitive nature.

We thus find in the fact that the dream content takes up remnants of trivial experiences a manifestation of dream disfigurement (by means of displacement), and we may recall that we have recognised this dream disfigurement as the work of a censor which controls the passage between two psychic instances. We accordingly expect that dream analysis will regularly reveal to us the genuine, significant source of the dream in the life of the day, the recollection of which has transferred its accent to some indifferent recollection. This conception brings us into complete opposition to Robert's theory, which thus becomes valueless for us. The fact which Robert was trying to explain simply doesn't exist; its