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

thought, for instance) that the common elements mentioned above are
purposely manufactured where they originally do not exist. We have already
become acquainted with such condensation and compound formations; they
played an important part in the origin of certain cases of slips of the tongue.
You recall the young man who wished to inscort a woman. Furthermore, there
are jokes whose technique may be traced to such a condensation. But entirely
aside from this, one may maintain that this appearance of something quite
unknown in the dream finds its counterpart in many of the creations of our
imagination which fuse together component parts that do not belong together
in experience, as for example the centaurs, and the fabulous animals of old
mythology or of Boecklin's pictures. For creative imagination can invent
nothing new whatsoever, it can only put together certain details normally
alien to one another. The peculiar thing, however, about the procedure of the
dream-work is the following: The material at the disposal of the dream-work
consists of thoughts, thoughts which may be offensive and unacceptable, but
which are nevertheless correctly formed and expressed. These thoughts are
transformed into something else by the dream-work, and it is remarkable and
incomprehensible that this translation, this rendering, as it were, into another
script or language, employs the methods of condensation and combination.
For a translation usually strives to respect the discriminations expressed in the
text, and to differentiate similar things. The dream-work, on the contrary,
tries to fuse two different thoughts by looking, just as the joke does, for an
ambiguous word which shall act as a connecting link between the two
thoughts. One need not attempt to understand this feature of the case at
once, but it may become significant for the conception of the dream-work.
Although condensation renders the dream opaque, one does not get the
impression that it is an effect of dream censorship. One prefers to trace it
back to mechanical or economic conditions; but censorship undoubtedly has a
share in the process.
The results of condensation may be quite extraordinary. With its help, it
becomes possible at times to collect quite unrelated latent thought processes
into one manifest dream, so that one can arrive at an apparently adequate
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