DISCOVERY 



11 



And the study of the dream has akeady carried its 

 investigators some distance towards the understanding 

 of those thunderstorms of the mind which men call 

 insanity. 



To say that the study of the dream lies to the credit 

 of twentieth-century psychology is to make a state- 

 ment almost startUngly precise ; for the foundation- 

 stone of this new structure of knowledge bears the 

 year 1900, the date of the publication, in Vienna, of 

 Sigmund Freud's Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of 

 Dreams). To indicate in a few pages the significance 

 for psychology of this pioneer work is difficult ; to 

 represent fairly Freud's theory in ten times this space 

 is impossible. The reader therefore will understand 

 that the few glimpses which this article may afford 

 him must inevitably suffer from incompleteness and 

 not a little angular distortion. 



Freud's way of viewing, not the dream alone, but 

 the whole world of mental events, is characterized by 

 two important beliefs, both of which must be grasped 

 if his standpoint is to be appreciated. The first is that 

 all mental happenings are explicable in mental terms ; 

 that an account of them in terms of material processes 

 occurring in brain or body may supplement, but can 

 never replace, the other direct explanation. A dream, 

 then, can be analysed into factors which are just the 

 experience of the individual ; the stuff, so to speak, 

 with which the explanation deals is mental. 



The second belief is that in the mind, as in the body, 

 there is no room for the action of chance ; all mental 

 events are regarded as the results of preceding mental 

 events, and as strictly determined by them. For 

 Freud nothing accidental can ever happen in the mind. 

 Every mental occurrence, however trivial, nonsensical 

 or mad it may seem to others, or even to the experi- 

 encer himself, is the effect of preceding mental causes. 

 We may now attempt to explain the way in which 

 a dream can be analysed by Freud's method. If the 

 reader, when he reaches the latter part of this article, 

 will bear in mind a distinction which will now be made, 

 he will be in a position immeasurably superior to that 

 of many of Freud's critics. This distinction is between 

 the manifest content and the latent content of the dream. 

 According to Freud, that which people commonly term 

 " the dream," that conglomeration of experiences 

 which they relate, not seldom with additions and 

 suppressions, to a more or less appreciative breakfast- 

 table audience, is merely the aspect of the dream 

 which is " manifest " to them. It has been formed 

 from material which at the time of dreaming was 

 latent, hidden from consciousness, just as a Member 

 of Parliament is the manifest representative of some 

 of the opinions of numerous latent people called his 

 constituents. 



The way in which Freud formed this theory of the 



dual nature of the dream should not be difficult to 

 understand by anyone who has ever detected in his 

 own dreams the composite nature of some of the 

 apparently new images which they contain. We may 

 take one of the simplest examples from the writer's 

 own collection. The dreamer noticed that the right- 

 hand side-line of a Badminton Court was curved like 

 a snake, and thought that, while this addition might 

 make play more " sporting," it tended to spoil the 

 game. On awakening he saw at once that this picture 

 split up into two components : an actual Badminton 

 Court to which, on the night of the dream, he had 

 introduced a keen golfer, and a serpentine bunker 

 which his enthusiastic guest had described to him. 



Now Freud goes so far as to say that all dream- 

 pictures, whether recognized as composite or not, 

 are in reality made up of memories, and that not only 

 is their combination effected according to definite 

 principles, but that the combination itself performs a 

 definite function. 



To understand how it is possible to arrive at such 

 a belief we must grasp the broad difference between 

 two ways in which the mind can remember — by directed 

 or by free association. If a man, looking at his 

 blotting-pad, notices that it is thick, pink, oblong, 

 new, and absorbent, this expression of the workings of 

 his mind may not seem unusual, either to himself or 

 to another. But if on glancing at it he should remark, 

 " pink, sweet-pea, flower show, Wales, Criccieth, Prime 

 Minister, politics, housing problem, huts, Pacific 

 Islands," a spectator's comment might be that the 

 hst sounded Uke the ravings of a madman. It is 

 improbable that he would realize how near to an 

 accurate statement of fact he had been, and that the 

 difference between a sane man's directed association 

 and the maniac's apparently free association is merely 

 one of degree. For the first list above was compiled 

 by allowing the blotting-pad to dominate the thinker's 

 mind ; the second by employing the blotting-pad 

 simply as a launching-place for the memories which 

 were then allowed to run freely. 



But were these memories " free " ? To the ordinary 

 EngUsh reader of this article the connexions between 

 the last six of them should be obvious enough — to the 

 thinker himself the other connexions are traceable to 

 personal memories. All that is meant here by " free " 

 is that the tendencies directing the path of association 

 of the ideas in the mind at the time, are less easily dis- 

 covered. Instead of one main idea (that of the 

 blotting-pad) dominating the flow of thought, the 

 direction was taken over in turn by several subjects — 

 by hoUdays in Wales, poUtics, and the solution of the 

 housing problems in this country and elsewhere. 



This " free " association occurs whenever there is 

 removed from our minds the dominating influence of 



