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

ELEVENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM
The Dream-Work
IF you have mastered dream censorship and symbolic representation, you are,
to be sure, not yet adept in dream distortion, but you are nevertheless in a
position to understand most dreams. For this you employ two mutually
supplementary methods, call up the associations of the dreamer until you have
penetrated from the substitute to the actual, and from your own knowledge
supply the meaning for the symbol. Later we shall discuss certain uncertainties
which show themselves in this process.
We are now in a position to resume work which we attempted, with very
insufficient means at an earlier stage, when we studied the relation between
the manifest dream elements and their latent actualities, and in so doing
established four such main relationships: that of a part of the whole, that of
approach or allusion, the symbolic relationship and plastic word
representation. We shall now attempt the same on a larger scale, by
comparing the manifest dream content as a whole, with the latent dream
which we found by interpretation.
I hope you will never again confuse these two. If you have achieved this, you
have probably accomplished more in the understanding of the dream than the
majority of the readers of my Interpretation of Dreams. Let me remind you
once more that this process, which changes the latent into the manifest
dream, is called dream-work. Work which proceeds in the opposite direction,
from the manifest dream to the latent, is our work of interpretation. The work
of interpretation attempts to undo the dream-work. Infantile dreams that are
recognized as evident wish fulfillments nevertheless have undergone some
dream-work, namely, the transformation of the wish into reality, and
generally, too, of thoughts into visual pictures. Here we need no
interpretation, but only a retracing of these transformations. Whatever dream-
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