ar we have failed to see any necessity for
this addition to the dream mixture. This necessity appears only when we
follow closely the part played by the unconscious wish, and then seek
information in the psychology of the neuroses. We thus learn that the
unconscious idea, as such, is altogether incapable of entering into the
foreconscious, and that it can exert an influence there only by uniting
with a harmless idea already belonging to the foreconscious, to which it
transfers its intensity and under which it allows itself to be
concealed. This is the fact of transference which furnishes an
explanation for so many surprising occurrences in the psychic life of
neurotics.
The idea from the foreconscious which thus obtains an unmerited
abundance of intensity may be left unchanged by the transference, or it
may have forced upon it a modification from the content of the
transferring idea. I trust the reader will pardon my fondness for
comparisons from daily life, but I feel tempted to say that the
relations existing for the repressed idea are similar to the situations
existing in Austria for the American dentist, who is forbidden to
practise unless he gets permission from a regular physician to use his
name on the public signboard and thus cover the legal requirements.
Moreover, just as it is naturally not the busiest physicians who form
such alliances with dental practitioners, so in the psychic life only
such foreconscious or conscious ideas are chosen to cover a repressed
idea as have not themselves attracted much of the attention which is
operative in the foreconscious. The unconscious entangles with its
connections preferentially either those impressions and ideas of the
foreconscious which have been left unnoticed as indifferent, or those
that have soon been deprived of this attention through rejection. It is
a familiar fact from the association studies confirmed by every
experience, that ideas which have formed intimate connections in one
direction assume an almost negative attitude to whole groups of new
connections. I once tried from this principle to develop a theory for
hysterical paralysis.
If we assume that the same need for the transference of the repressed
ideas which we have learned to know from the analysis of the neuroses
makes its influence felt in the dream as well, we can at once explain
two riddles of the dream, viz. that every dream analysis shows an
interweaving of a recent impression, and that th
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