Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/127

 DREAM INTERPRETATION 119

presents the ambivalence of feeling on the part of the dreamer, and should go some way towards showing that such ambivalence is not mere indifference. Otlier dreams in which it is only remem- bered that the dream figure is already long ago dead, have to do with thoughts of one's own death and the dismissal of such thoughts from tlie mind; but the meaning of these dreams has not been fully worked out yet in analysis. An attempt has recently been made by Galant (25), to explain this homogeneous group of dreams, in opposition to these views, as sexual wish-fuliilments of algolagnic perversion.

Potzl's article (61) is an important contribution, substituting as is does a highly subtilized experimental method for the rough tech- nique of introducing disturbing stimuli into the dream-state. Potzl got a number of subjects to draw what they had consciously grasped of a picture exposed by a flashlight. He then got them to make drawings in the same waj' of suitable portions of their dreams of the following night. It was thus proved unmistakably that the details of the picture not grasped by the subjects had been elaborated in the well-known autocratic way in the service of the dream-building tendency, while the consciously observed parts reproduced in the first drawing did not re-appear in the manifest dream-content. This may be looked on as a valuable experimental proof of the role of recent impressions in dream-formation.

Rudolf Weber (Geneva) has thrown out the question "Why do we think in words in waking life, but in dream in images?" Koehler (47) attempts on the basis of the Freudian theory to answer "that our psychic life receives the greater number of pleasing im- pressions through the eye".

Out of the remaining literature of dreams, remarkable rather for its quantity than its quality, we will single out three characteristic types: first the a priori opponents who still refuse to declare them- selves, next those who feel they can no longer ignore the Freudian theory, and tack it on to their own previous views on the dream (19, 81, etc.) and finally, those who accept it, but immediately think they must develop it further in their own way. As example of the first group of absolute opponents we may mention Henning(28), because he deserves to be rescued from oblivion as the gauge of scientific disputation. Against the wish-fulfilment theory Henning fulminates with \\iQ whole weight of the statistical statement that 75 per cent of all dreams are unpleasant. In the next place he does not approve of