on being questioned. In the vulgar expression known to my friend it was "a whole car full of children." The wagon with the children inhibits his impetuosity. The sense of the dream is now perfectly clear. It reads as follows:
The pregnancy of the wife and the problem of too many children restrained the husband. This dream fulfills a wish as it presents the self-restraint as accomplished. At first sight the dream, just as all others, seems senseless, but when its first stratum is uncovered it already shows distinctly the aspirations and the disappointments of an upward struggling career. Inwardly, however, it hides a most personal question which must be accompanied by many painful feelings.
In the analysis and treatment of this dream, I omitted to refer to the numerous recurring analogous combinations, the similarity of pictures, and allegorical representations of phrases, etc. A careful examination of the reported observations shows that they contain the characteristic features of mythological thinking. I only wish to point out that the ambiguity of the individual pictures of the dream (Freud's overdetermination) simply shows the obscurity and haziness of thought in dreams. The pictures of the dream belong to one as well as the other complex of the waking state, although both complexes are sharply separated in the waking state. Due to a deficiency of the discriminating ability in the dream both complexes may at least symbolically flow together.
This manifestation is perhaps not clear without further explanation, but we can readily deduct it from our former premises.[1]
Our experiments in distraction confirm our supposition that in
- ↑ For the fusion of simultaneously existing complexes we may find some corroboration in the elementary fact not unknown in psychology (Féré in La pathologie des émotions, mentions it by way of intimation) that two stimuli simultaneously existing in two different sensory spheres, reinforce or respectively influence each other. From researches with which I am at present occupying myself, it seems to show that a voluntary motor activity is visibly influenced by a simultaneously existing automatic activity (breathing). From all that we know of complexes they are continued automatic incitements or activities. Just as they influence the conscious activity of thought so do also the complexes act upon one another formatively, so that every complex contains elements of the other, a thing which may psychologically be designated as fusion. Freud from a different point of view calls this Überdeterminierung (overdetermination).
