Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/369

Rh of its cogency and is inapplicable to the actual circumstances. But since there are plenty of dreams in which judgments are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognised, in which astonishment at some single element of the dream appears, and arguments and explanations are attempted, I must meet the objections which may be inferred from these occurrences by the citation of selected examples.

My answer is as follows: Everything in the dream which occurs as an apparent exercise of the critical faculty is to be regarded, not as an intellectual accomplishment of the dream activity, but as belonging to the material of the dream thoughts, and it has found its way from them as a finished structure to the manifest dream content. I may go even further than this. Even the judgments which are passed upon the dream as it is remembered after awakening and the feelings which are aroused by the reproduction of the dream, belong in good part to the latent dream content, and must be fitted into their place in the interpretation of the dream.

I. A striking example of this I have already given. A female patient does not wish to relate her dream because it is too vague. She has seen a person in the dream, and does not know whether it is her husband or her father. Then follows a second dream fragment in which there occurs a "manure-can," which gives rise to the following reminiscence. As a young housewife, she once jokingly declared in the presence of a young relative who frequented the house that her next care would be to procure a new manure-can. The next morning one was sent to her, but it was filled with lilies of the valley. This part of the dream served to represent the saying, "Not grown on your own manure." When we complete the analysis we find that in the dream thoughts it is a matter of the after-effects of a story heard in youth, to the effect that a girl had given birth to a child concerning whom it was not clear who was the real father. The dream representation here goes over into the waking thought, and allows one element of the dream thoughts to be represented by a judgment expressed in the waking state upon the whole dream.