Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/292

274 and who is brought into connection by the identity of her name. In the further course of the dream the significance of Irma's personality changes (without the alteration of her image as it is seen in the dream); she becomes one of the children whom we examine in the public dispensaries for children's diseases, where my friends show the difference of their mental capabilities. The transference was obviously brought about through the idea of my infant daughter. By means of her unwillingness to open her mouth the same Irma is changed into an allusion to another lady who was once examined by me, and besides that to my wife, in the same connection. Furthermore, in the morbid transformations which I discover in her throat I have gathered allusions to a great number of other persons.

All these people whom I encounter as I follow the associations suggested by "Irma," do not appear personally in the dream; they are concealed behind the dream person "Irma," who is thus developed into a collective image, as might be expected, with contradictory features. Irma comes to represent these other persons, who are discarded in the work of condensation, in that I cause to happen to her all the things which recall these persons detail for detail.

I may also construct a collective person for the condensation of the dream in another manner, by uniting the actual features of two or more persons in one dream image. It is in this manner that Dr. M. in my dream was constructed, he bears the name of Dr. M., and speaks and acts as Dr. M. does, but his bodily characteristics and his suffering belong to another person, my eldest brother; a single feature, paleness, is doubly determined, owing to the fact that it is common to both persons. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle is a similar composite person. But here the dream image is prepared in still another manner. I have not united features peculiar to the one with features of the other, and thereby abridged the remembered image of each by certain features, but I have adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family portraits, by which he projects both pictures upon one another, whereupon the common features stand out in stronger relief, while those which do not coincide neutralize one another and become obscure in the picture. In the dream of my uncle the