requires a greater expenditure of attention and self-suppression in the analysis; that is all; but it shows that the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention. *

* As an example of the significance of doubt and uncertainty in a dream with a simultaneous shrinking of the dream-content to a single element, see my General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis the dream of the sceptical lady patient, p. 492 below, the analysis of which was successful, despite a short postponement. -

A convincing proof of the tendencious nature of dream-forgetting- of the fact that it serves the resistance- is obtained on analysis by investigating a preliminary stage of forgetting. * It often happens that, in the midst of an interpretation, an omitted fragment of the dream suddenly emerges which is described as having been previously forgotten. This part of the dream that has been wrested from forgetfulness is always the most important part. It lies on the shortest path to the solution of the dream, and for that every reason it was most exposed to the resistance. Among the examples of dreams that I have included in the text of this treatise, it once happened that I had subsequently to interpolate a fragment of dream- content. The dream is a dream of travel, which revenges itself on two unamiable traveling companions; I have left it almost entirely uninterpreted, as part of its content is obscene. The part omitted reads: "I said, referring to a book of Schiller's: 'It is from...' but corrected myself, as I realized my mistake: 'It is by...' Whereupon the man remarked to his sister, 'Yes, he said it correctly.'" *(2)

* Concerning the intention of forgetting in general, see my The Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life.

*(2) Such corrections in the use of foreign languages are not rare in dreams, but they are usually attributed to foreigners. Maury (p. 143), while he was studying English, once dreamed that he informed someone that he had called on him the day before in the following words: "I called for you yesterday." The other answered correctly: "You mean: I called on you yesterday."

Self-correction in dreams, which to some writers seems so wonderful, does not really call for consideration. But I will draw from my own memory an instance typical of verbal errors in dreams. I was nineteen years of age when I visited England for the first time, and I spent a day on the shore of the Irish Sea. Naturally enough, I amused myself by picking up the marine animals left on the beach by the tide, and I was just examining a starfish (the dream begins with Hollthurn- Holothurian) when a pretty little girl came up to me and asked me: "Is it a starfish? Is it alive?" I replied, "Yes, he is alive," but then felt ashamed of my mistake, and repeated the sentence correctly. For the grammatical mistake which I then made, the dream substitutes another which is quite common among German people. "Das Buch ist von Schiller" is not to be translated by "the book is from," but by "the book is by." That the dream-work accomplishes this substitution, because the word from, owing to its consonance with the German adjective fromm (pious, devout) makes a remarkable condensation possible, should no longer surprise us after all that we have heard of the intentions of the dream-work and its unscrupulous selection of means. But what relation has this harmless recollection of the seashore to my dream? It explains, by means of a very innocent example, that I have used the word- the word denoting gender, or sex or the sexual (he)- in the wrong place. This is surely one of the keys to the solution of the dream. Those who have heard of the derivation of the book-title Matter and Motion (Moliere in Le Malade Imaginaire: La Matiere est-elle laudable?- A Motion of the bowels) will readily be able to supply the missing parts.

Moreover, I can prove conclusively, by a demonstratio ad oculos, that the forgetting of the dream is in a large measure the work of the resistance. A patient tells me that he has dreamed, but that the dream has vanished without leaving a trace, as if nothing had happened. We set to work, however; I come upon a resistance which I explain to the patient; encouraging and urging him, I help him to become reconciled to some disagreeable thought; and I have hardly succeeded in doing so when he exclaims: "Now I can recall what I dreamed!" The same resistance which that day disturbed him in the work of interpretation caused him also to forget the dream. By overcoming this resistance I have brought back the dream to his memory.