Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/119

 DREAM INTERPRETATION 111

speaking a fragmentary regression to the earliest relationships of the dreamer, a revival of his childhood, of the impulses then dominant, and of the means of expression then available. Behind the childhood of the individual there is vouchsafed to us a glimpse into the phylogenetic childliood, into the development of the human species, of which that of the individual is an abbreviated repetition influenced by the chance circumstances of this life. We realise the force of Friedrich Nietzsche's remark that in the dream is operative a very ancient fragment of human life to which there is no longer a direct approach', and we are prepared to expect to arrive by dream analysis at the knowledge of the archaic inheritance of the race, and to recognise the soul which is innate in it. It would seem that dream and neurosis has preserved for us more of the actual detail of early life than we could have supposed possible, and thus psycho-analysis may claim a high place among the sciences that concern themselves with reconstructing the most primitive and most obscure phases of human origins."

The question that thereupon presses for attention, viz.: "whether it will be eventually possible to distinguish which part of the latent psychic processes arises out of the early history of the individual and which out of that of the race" (21, S. 222) is one that Freud does not care to answer finally in the negative. Moreover he con- siders that the formation of symbols outside the experience of the individual justifies the conclusion that these symbols are to be regarded as a race inheritance.

This brings us to that part of dream interpretation most engaging our attention at the present time, viz. symbolism, the significance of which goes far beyond the scope of dream inter- pretation, and with which are closely connected numerous still un- solved problems. Those not infrequent cases where the common element in the symbol and the thing symbolised is not obviously recognisable go to prove that the symbolic relation is of a genetic nature. "What is to-day symbolically connected was probably in primaeval times united in conceptional and linguistic identity" (23, S. 240). It is noticeable that where the same language is in use the same symbols occur. Severals examples of dream symbols verified by further analytic n work are adduced by Freud (23, S. 241-5) with additional matter on S. 249-50, 253-60) not without a caution against indiscriminate confounding of sym- bolic representation with the other kinds of indirect representation,