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

that the sequence of sounds of the words was transposed to denote the same
fundamental idea. The following are examples from English and German:
Topf—pot; boat—tub; hurry—Ruhe (rest, quiet).
Balken (beam)—Kloben (mallet)—club.
From the Latin and the German:
capere (to seize)—packen (to seize, to grasp).
Inversions such as occur here in the single word are effected in a very
different way by the dream-work. We already know the inversion of the
sense, substitution by the opposite. Besides there are inversions of situations,
of relations between two people, and so in dreams we are in a sort of topsyturvy
world. In a dream it is frequently the rabbit that shoots the hunter.
Further inversion occurs in the sequence of events, so that in the dream the
cause is placed after the effect. It is like a performance in a third-rate theatre,
where the hero falls before the shot which kills him is fired from the wings. Or
there are dreams in which the whole sequence of the elements is inverted, so
that in the interpretation one must take the last first, and the first last, in
order to obtain a meaning. You will recall from our study of dream symbolism
that to go or fall into the water means the same as to come out of it, namely,
to give birth to, or to be born, and that mounting stairs or a ladder means the
same as going down. The advantage that dream distortions may gain from
such freedom of representation, is unmistakable.
These features of the dream-work may be called archaic. They are connected
with ancient systems of expression, ancient languages and literatures, and
involve the same difficulties which we shall deal with later in a critical
connection.
Now for some other aspects of the matter. In the dream-work it is plainly a
question of translating the latent thoughts, expressed in words, into psychic
images, in the main, of a visual kind. Now our thoughts were developed from
such psychic images; their first material and the steps which led up to them
were psychic impressions, or to be more exact, the memory images of these
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