Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/84

66 this impression has been disturbed in its elaboration, or that being too insignificant it has no claim to such elaboration.

Robert therefore conceives the dream "as a physical process of elimination which has reached to cognition in the psychic manifestation of its reaction." Dreams are eliminations of thoughts nipped in the bud. "A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would surely in time become mentally unbalanced, because an immense number of unfinished and unsolved thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain, under the pressure of which there would be crushed all that should be incorporated as a finished whole into memory." The dream acts as a safety-valve for the overburdened brain. Dreams possess healing and unburdening properties (p. 32).

It would be a mistake to ask Robert how representation in the dream can bring about an unburdening of the mind. The author apparently concluded from those two peculiarities of the dream material that during sleep such ejection of worthless impressions is effected as a somatic process, and that dreaming is not a special psychic process but only the knowledge that we receive of such elimination. To be sure an elimination is not the only thing that takes place in the mind during sleep. Robert himself adds that the incitements of the day are also elaborated, and "what cannot be eliminated from the undigested thought material lying in the mind becomes connected by threads of thought borrowed from the phantasy into a finished whole, and thus enrolled in the memory as a harmless phantasy picture " (p. 23).

But it is in his criticism of the dream sources that Robert appears most bluntly opposed to the ruling theory. Whereas according to the existing theory there would be no dream if the outer and inner sensory stimuli did not repeatedly wake the mind, according to Robert the impulse to dream lies in the mind itself. It lies in the overcharging which demands discharge, and Robert judges with perfect consistency when he maintains that the causes determining the dream which depend on the physical state assume a subordinate rank, and could not incite dreams in a mind containing no material for dream formation taken from waking consciousness. It is admitted, however, that the phantasy pictures originating in