South Bend news-times. (South Bend, Ind.) 1913-1938, 1913-08-19

old who had been sent su3perless 10 Ued
because he had been naughty. Next morn
ing the boy related his dream. in which
he had seen a dish on which was a large
piece of roast meat. Without being cut
into pieces the roast was suddenly eaten
in its entirety. The boy did not see who
ate it. There is no doubt that il was he
who partook of the feast. but the dream
censor disfigures the dream by hiding from
him the identity of the diner. since he had
been forbidden to eat that evening.
The dream censor was also at work in
the case of a woman patient who had
been very fond of a small son of her sis
ter's. The boy died and the aunt was
later terrified by a very vivid dream in
which she seemed to be attending the
funeral of her surviving nephew, the
brother of the dead boy. She had not
cared so much for the living boy as for
the one that died, and she was Mortified
by the thought that her dream might
mean that she wished this remaining
nephew might die. When she told her
dream she admitted, on being questioned,
that her sister, with whom she had lived,
had interfered in a love affair which she
had had with a university professor,
whom it had been tacitly understood that
she would marry.
Can be wicked enough to wish that
my sister should be left childless?" the
dreamer asked the pSychiatriSt.
a.
face value this Of course would have been
its Interpretation. but DR.. Freud believed
the Interpretation to be entirely different
He found out that the last occasion on
viii y, the young woman had seen the
professor, with whom she was still deeply
in love, was the funeral Of her nephew.
In her dream she had reproduced pre-
cisely the conditions which prevailed at
this funeral, except that the second
nephew was substituted for the first.
Unwilling to acknowledge even TO her
self her deep longing TO see the professor,
her unfulfilled wish expressed itself in
dreaming out an occasion on which she
would be sure to see him again, since,
as he was an old friend of the family,
| it would be necessary for him to appear
at the funeral of the second nephew, as
he had at the first. To disguise her
wish, even to her subconscious self, she
had placed its realization in a situation
in which persons are supposed TO be so
filled with sorrow that love is not thought
of. The fact that she dreamed Of being
Z
feeling any grief was no proof of her
Indifference to the nephew. 1t simply
meant that this feature of the dream
was of no Importance in itself. 1t merely
furnished the machinery for the fulfil
ment of her wish
A very strange instance of dream trans
formation so that the dream fabric would
accord in some degree with the conscious
code of the dreamer was that OF a woman
who dreamed that she was present at
funeral procession in which the dead per-
son was a man who very much resembled
her husband, an acquaintance in whom
she had no particular interest except that
she had noted this resemblance. The
hearse was preceded by groups of little
children scattering flowers and followed
by the dreamer in the company of an &C
quaintance Of her girlhood
The scientific Interpretation of this
dream was that the woman, unwilling
to admit to herself her real wish, the
underlying motive for the dream, had per-
verted it so that even to herself the truth
was not recognizable. Her subconscious
wish, which she had never acknowledged
even in her most secret thought, was
that she might have children OF her own.
She believed also, without conscious ad-
mission, that she would have the hap
piness Of bearing children were she to be
married 70 some one else, and her mag
ination subconsciously selected for the
husband who should have been hers a
boy whom she had cared for when she
was a very young girl. She would have
been both astonished and terrified If she
had realized that it was her unfulfilled
desire 70 be married 10 this person, and
that through the death of her husband
she saw a possible realization OF this
wish. Shrinking from the INSTALLATION
OF her husband as dead even in her dreams
she substituted for him a man who re-
sembled him and in the same way she
substituted for her childhood's lover, her
interest in whom she was afraid and
ashamed to admit TO herself, the figure
Of a young man who meant nothing 10
her but who had been the associate OF
the lover. The children going on before
the procession were the dream children
Of her Imagination, connected both with
the death of her present husband and the
presence at her side Of her old lover.