You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this paper the author follows up the line of thought with regard to the Censorship that he has already taken up in an article on 'Freud's Concept of the Censorship' in the Psychoanalytic Review (republished in Instinct and the Unconscious). In the latter article he had argued that
'the fantastic character of the dream is not due to any process of distortion designed to elude the vigilance of some anthropomorphic agency watching at the threshold of consciousness, but is the natural result of the infantile character of the dream'—a character which he regards as 'the direct consequence of the coming into activity of modes of behaviour which in the waking state are held in check by levels of mental activity embodying the experience of later life'.
In the present paper he endeavours to show that the nature of the affects experienced in the dream also follows naturally from the fact that the dream constitutes a regression to an infantile level of mentality.
A dream, says Dr. Rivers, is an attempt to solve in sleep the conflicts of waking life.
If the guise in which a conflict finds expression in a dream is one which would be terrifying to a child, the dream will be accompanied by affect in the form of terror. If, on the other hand, the imagery and symbolism in which a conflict is finding expression are of a kind so natural to the child that they would not be accompanied by affect, there will be no affect in the dream. The situation as portrayed in the dream may be one of adult life, but the dream-reaction is that of the child so far as the affect is concerned.
While this seems to be the main thesis of the paper, the author also holds that the degree of affect corresponds to the extent to which a repressed tendency is transformed or disguised—the greater the disguise, the less the affect. War dreams and frankly sexual dreams have strong affect—unpleasant and pleasant respectively—because a repressed tendency is openly expressed in them.
As a third proposition it is mai