with the element in the manifest content of the dream by means of exceedingly superficial associations, chiefly ridiculous plays on words of a kind I hope I should never be guilty of when awake. Any one, however, who is interested in the psychology of wit, or familiar with the unconscious phantasies of hysterics or the flight of ideas met with in mania and other psychoses, will not find it strange that the superficial associations and preposterous plays on words so characteristic of those fields of mental activity are common enough in yet another field, namely that of dream formation. The question as to whether the associations that occur during dream analysis are made only then, and take no share in the actual formation of the dream, will not here be discussed; it is one of the objections with which Freud fully deals in the Traumdeutung.
Like the other ones to be quoted, this fragment is only a small part of the full dream, and I might add that the associations here related are only intermediate connections to more remote thoughts, which as the analysis deepened soon left the subject of psychiatry for a more personal one.
(2) I was in the country in Massachusetts, and yet seemed to be in the east not of America but of England. Above a group of people was vaguely outlined the word Olve or Olde (which may be expressed as Olde). This dream affords a particularly striking illustration of displacement, for every element in it directly led in the analysis to thoughts about the Netherlands, although no indication whatever of this country appeared in the manifest content. Massachusetts brought to my mind its capital Boston, and the original Boston in Lincolnshire[1]. That reminded me of Essex,[2] these two counties being the most lowlying (Netherlandish) ones in England. In Essex lives a friend through whom I had got to know well a number of Flemish people. On the day preceding the dream I had written a letter to some one in Maiden, a town in Essex, a name the sound of which brought to my mind Moll of Flanders, The costume of the people in the dream was taken from a picture of Rembrandt's, which brought up a number of recent and old memories. Olde was a condensation of Alva, the tyrant of the Netherlands, and Van der Velde, the name of a Flemish
- ↑ That in the dream-making I was presumptuous enough to confound an American State with an English County is an illustration of the irresponsible liberties taken by the mental processes concerned in this production, and shows how completely they differ from our waking thoughts.
- ↑ I might add that the latter part of the word Massachusetts has a sound not very dissimilar to that of Essex, further that the signification of the first part of it, chu (chew, which in Boston is pronounced as if it were spelt chu) resembles that of the other word (ess is the stem of the German verb "to eat").
