standing of night dreams in which the nucleus of the dream formation is produced by just such complicated, disfigured day fancies which are misunderstood by the conscious psychic judgment.[1]
These day dreams are garnished with great interest, are cautiously nurtured, and coyly guarded, as if they were numbered among the most intimate estates of personality. On the street however, the day dreamer can be readily recognized by a sudden, as if absent-minded smile, by talking to himself, or by a running-like acceleration of his gait wherein he designates the acme of the imaginary situation.
All hysterical attacks which I have been thus far able to examine proved to be such involuntary incursions of day dreams. Observation leaves no doubt that such fancies may exist as unconscious or conscious and whenever they become unconscious they may also become pathogenic, that is, they may express themselves in symptoms and attacks. Under favorable conditions it is possible for consciousness to seize such unconscious fancies. One of my patients whose attention I have called to her fancies narrated that once while in the street she suddenly found herself in tears, and rapidly reflecting over the cause of her weeping the fancy became clear to her. She fancied herself in delicate relationship with a piano virtuoso familiar in the city, but whom she did not know personally. In her fancy she bore him a child (she was childless), and he then deserted her, leaving her and her child in misery. At this passage of the romance she burst into tears.
The unconscious fancies are either from the first unconscious, having been formed in the unconscious, or what is more frequently the case they were once conscious fancies, day dreams, and were then intentiontally forgotten, merging into the unconscious by "repression." Their content then either remained the same or underwent a transformation, so that the present unconscious fancy represents a descendant of the once conscious one. The unconscious fancy stands in a very important relation to the sexual life of the person, it is really identical with that fancy which helped it towards sexual gratification during a period of masturbation. The masturbating act (in the broader sense the onanistic) then consisted of two parts, the evocation of the fancy,
- ↑ Compare Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Erill, The Macmillan Co., New York, and George Allen Co., London.
