Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/126

 118 COLLECTIVE REVIEWS

face to face with a problem lately again raised by Freud". Since the preconscious thoughts can .su])ply the dreanu^r with material which throughout is opp«jscd to a uisli-fullihucnt, such as well- founded cares, painful considerations, ciifficult decisions, it would seem not unjustifiable to ask how the dream behaves in such a case. Now this question lias Ix-cn answered by Freud himself, and that in the first edition of the "TraumdeutunK" (19(X)), where he showed how the painful and anxiety dreams were also just as much wish-fuifihnents in the sense of the theory of dreams — even if the wishes were repressed, not acceptable to the ego, or of another psychic system — as the straightforward gratification dreams, in which the unconscious wish coincides with the conscious. The mechanism of the dream-making is, of course, more obvious, if we substitute the opposition between the "ego" and the "repressed" for that between conscious and unconscious (23, S. 415). On the basis of this differentiation a .special group of "punishment dreams" can be recognised, fulfilling .simultaneously an unconscious wish and a wish for punishment of the dreamer on account of a repressed impermi.ssible impulse. We must, however, attribute the active un- conscious wish of the punishment dreams to the "ego", not to the repres.sed element. The punishment dreams thus point to the ego taking a still further share in the dream-formation. The simplest supposition as to their origin is that the thoughts of the previous day are of a satisfying kind — not as one might think painful — but give expression to unpermitted gratifications: of tiie.se thoughts then Qotliing wins its way through into the manifest dream but their direct opposite. Thus we find in Freud the somewhat more com- plete formula "Wish-fulfilment, anxiety fulfilment, |iunishment fulfil- ment" (Wunscherfilllung, An^sterfuUung, StraferfullungU where it must be remembered that anxiety is the direct in the unconscious, coincident — antithesis of the wish, while the punishment also <2presents a wish-fulfilment — that of the other censoring personality (21, S. 246)..

Finally, still another group of dreams present difficult problems or dream interpretation, namely, the dreams of tftf beloved dead. n these dreams there commonly appears a siiifting from death to "e and back again which according to Freud (23, S. 291 A) re-

' See his address at the Hafi|ue Contfress (Sept. 1920) of which a short ^bstract is given in this Journal, Vol. I, p. 364, also his treatise: jenseits des ^"stprinzips (1920)..