Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/383

Rh we have awakened. "If I am afraid of robbers in the dream, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real," and the same is true if I am glad in the dream. According to the testimony of our feelings, the emotion experienced in the dream is in no way less valid than one of like intensity experienced in waking life, and the dream makes its claim to be taken up as a part of our real mental experiences, more energetically on account of its emotional content than on account of its ideal content. We do not succeed in accomplishing this separation in waking life, because we do not know how to estimate an emotion psychically except in connection with a presentation content. If in kind or in intensity an affect and an idea are incongruous, our waking judgment becomes confused.

The fact that in dreams the presentation content does not entail the affective influence which we should expect as necessary in waking thought has always caused astonishment. Strümpell was of the opinion that ideas in the dream are stripped of their psychic values. But neither does the dream lack opposite instances, where the expression of intense affect appears in a content, which seems to offer no occasion for its development. I am in a horrible, dangerous, or disgusting situation in the dream, but I feel nothing of fear or aversion; on the other hand, I am sometimes terrified at harmless things and glad at childish ones.

This enigma of the dream disappears more suddenly and more completely than perhaps any other of the dream problems, if we pass from the manifest to the latent content. We shall then no longer be concerned to explain it, for it will no longer exist. Analysis teaches us that presentation contents have undergone displacements and substitutions, while affects have remained unchanged. No wonder, then, that the presentation content which has been altered by dream disfigurement no longer fits the affect that has remained intact; but there is no cause for wonder either after analysis has put the correct content in its former place.

In a psychic complex which has been subjected to the influence of the resisting censor the affects are the unyielding constituent, which alone is capable of guiding us to a correct supplementation. This state of affairs is revealed in psychoneuroses even more distinctly than in the dream. Here the