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Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners by Sigmund Freud
page 54 of 176 (30%)
presence of any anxiety in the dream. These cannot be reckoned among
dreams of dread; they have, however, always been used to prove the
unimportance and the psychical futility of dreams. An analysis of such
an example will show that it belongs to our second class of dreams--a
_perfectly concealed_ realization of repressed desires. Analysis will
demonstrate at the same time how excellently adapted is the work of
displacement to the concealment of desires.

A girl dreamt that she saw lying dead before her the only surviving
child of her sister amid the same surroundings as a few years before she
saw the first child lying dead. She was not sensible of any pain, but
naturally combatted the view that the scene represented a desire of
hers. Nor was that view necessary. Years ago it was at the funeral of
the child that she had last seen and spoken to the man she loved. Were
the second child to die, she would be sure to meet this man again in her
sister's house. She is longing to meet him, but struggles against this
feeling. The day of the dream she had taken a ticket for a lecture,
which announced the presence of the man she always loved. The dream is
simply a dream of impatience common to those which happen before a
journey, theater, or simply anticipated pleasures. The longing is
concealed by the shifting of the scene to the occasion when any joyous
feeling were out of place, and yet where it did once exist. Note,
further, that the emotional behavior in the dream is adapted, not to the
displaced, but to the real but suppressed dream ideas. The scene
anticipates the long-hoped-for meeting; there is here no call for
painful emotions.

There has hitherto been no occasion for philosophers to bestir
themselves with a psychology of repression. We must be allowed to
construct some clear conception as to the origin of dreams as the first
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