The Interpretation of Dreams

soul. The distrust of the psychiatrist has placed the psyche under
tutelage, so to speak; it requires that none of the impulses of the
psyche shall reveal an autonomous power. Yet this attitude merely
betrays a lack of confidence in the stability of the causal
concatenation between the physical and the psychic. Even where on
investigation the psychic may be recognized as the primary cause of
a phenomenon, a more profound comprehension of the subject will one
day succeed in following up the path that leads to the organic basis
of the psychic. But where the psychic must, in the present state of
our knowledge, be accepted as the terminus, it need not on that
account be disavowed.

{I|D
D. Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking
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That a dream fades away in the morning is proverbial. It is, indeed,
possible to recall it. For we know the dream, of course, only by
recalling it after waking; but we very often believe that we
remember it incompletely, that during the night there was more of it
than we remember. We may observe how the memory of a dream which in
the morning was still vivid fades in the course of the day, leaving
only a few trifling remnants. We are often aware that we have been
dreaming, but we do not know of what we have dreamed; and we are so
well used to this fact- that the dream is liable to be forgotten- that
we do not reject as absurd the possibility that we may have been
dreaming even when, in the morning, we know nothing either of the
content of the dream or of the fact that we have dreamed. On the other
hand, it often happens that dreams manifest an extraordinary power
of maintaining themselves in the memory. I have had occasion to
analyse, with my patients, dreams which occurred to them twenty-five
years or more previously, and I can remember a dream of my own which
is divided from the present day by at least thirty-seven years, and
yet has lost nothing of its freshness in my memory. All this is very
remarkable, and for the present incomprehensible.
The forgetting of dreams is treated in the most detailed manner by
Strumpell. This forgetting is evidently a complex phenomenon; for
Strumpell attributes it not to a single cause, but to quite a number
of causes.
In the first place, all those factors which induce forgetfulness
in the waking state determine also the forgetting of dreams. In the
waking state we commonly very soon forget a great many sensations
and perceptions because they are too slight to remember, and because
they are charged with only a slight amount of emotional feeling.
This is true also of many dream-images; they are forgotten because
they are too weak, while the stronger images in their neighbourhood
are remembered. However, the factor of intensity is in itself not
the only determinant of the preservation of dream-images; Strumpell,
as well as other