Chapter VI: The Dream-Work, C. The Means of Representation in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey translation
The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. 'No' seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.
Chapter VI: The Dream-Work, C. The Means of Representation in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey translation The alternative 'either-or' cannot be expressed in dreams in any way whatever. Both of the alternatives are usually inserted in the text of the dream as though they were equally valid... If, however, in reproducing a dream, its narrator feels inclined to make use of an 'either-or'...the rule for interpretation is: treat the two apparent alternatives as of equal validity and link them together with an 'and.'
Chapter VI: The Dream-Work, C. The Means of Representation in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey translation ...a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these that the differences between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream-thoughts comes about. The process which we are here presuming is nothing less than the essential portion of the dream-work; and it deserves to be described as 'dream-displacement.'
Chapter VI: The Dream-Work, B. The Work of Displacement in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey translation ...each of the elements of the dream's content turns out to have been 'overdetermined' — to have been represented in the dream-thoughts many times over.
Chapter VI: The Dream-Work, A. The Work of Condensation in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey translation ...and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort and our predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation have made the mistake of treating the rebus as a pictorial composition: and as such it has seemed to them nonsensical and worthless.
Chapter VI: The Dream-Work, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey translation |
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