a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

TENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM
Symbolism in the Dream
WE have discovered that the distortion of dreams, a disturbing element in
our work of understanding them, is the result of a censorious activity which is
directed against the unacceptable of the unconscious wish-impulses. But, of
course, we have not maintained that censorship is the only factor which is to
blame for the dream distortion, and we may actually make the discovery in a
further study of the dream that other items play a part in this result. That is,
even if the dream censorship were eliminated we might not be in a position to
understand the dreams; the actual dream still might not be identical with the
latent dream thought.
This other item which makes the dream unintelligible, this new addition to
dream distortion, we discover by considering a gap in our technique. I have
already admitted that for certain elements of the dream, no associations really
occur to the person being analyzed. This does not happen so often as the
dreamers maintain; in many cases the association can be forced by
persistence. But still there are certain instances in which no association is
forthcoming, or if forced does not furnish what we expected. When this
happens in the course of a psychoanalytic treatment, then a particular
meaning may be attached thereto, with which we have nothing to do here. It
also occurs, however, in the interpretation of the dreams of a normal person
or in interpreting one's own dreams. Once a person is convinced that in these
cases no amount of forcing of associations will avail, he will finally make the
discovery that the unwished-for contingency occurs regularly in certain dream
elements, and he will begin to recognize a new order of things there, where
at first he believed he had come across a peculiar exception to our technique.
In this way we are tempted to interpret these silent dream elements
ourselves, to undertake their translation by the means at hand. The fact that
every time we trust to this substitution we obtain a satisfactory meaning is
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