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This brief communication will start with several seemingly unrelated matters: Freud's description of the creation of “collective figures” in dream condensation, Jung's view of the “subjective level” of dream interpretation, Fairbairn's scheme of splitting and fusion of internalized objects. I will then relate these topics to one another and formulate some integrative conclusions.
Freud (1900) described condensation in dreams as a universal characteristic of the dream work, which makes it possible to compress rich and complex dream thoughts into a brief dream, and also supplies the dream with “the intensities required for forcing a way through into the perceptual systems” (p. 596). He pays particular attention to the condensation of human figures in dreams. Thus, while discussing the Irma dream and describing the various individuals who came up in his associations to Irma, he states:
None of these figures whom I lighted upon by following up “Irma” appeared in the dream in bodily shape. They were concealed behind the dream figure of “Irma,”which was thus turned into a collective image … the representative of all these other figures which had been sacrificed to the work of condensation (p. 293).
Freud also suggests another way of producing a “collective figure,” “namely by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image,” A third variation follows: the dreamer may “adopt the procedure by which Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which