lly resentful at your father's
hold on your mother, whom you regarded as yours, your father being a
rival with an unfair advantage. Your sex impulse was directed towards
your mother, when you were a mere baby, but you soon came to see (how,
Freud has never clearly explained) that this was forbidden, and that
your father stood in the way. You resented this, you hated your
father, while at the same time you may have loved him, too; so this
whole complex and troublesome business was suppressed to the
Unconscious, whence it bobs up every night in disguise. You may dream
of the death of some one, and on analysis that some one is found to
represent your father, whom as a child you secretly wished out of the
way; or that some one may stand for your younger brother, against whom
you, had a standing grudge because he had usurped your place as the
pet of the family. These childish wishes are the core of the
Unconscious and help to motivate all dreams, but more recently
suppressed {507} wishes may also be gratified in dream symbolism. A
man may "covet his neighbor's wife", but this is forbidden, unworthy,
and false to the neighbor who is also his friend. The wish is
disavowed, suppressed, not allowed in the waking consciousness; but it
gratifies itself symbolically in a dream; the neighbor's wife not
appearing at all in the dream, but the neighbor's automobile instead,
which the neighbor cannot run properly, while the dreamer manages it
beautifully.

Freud has claimed the dream as his special booty, and insists that all
dreams are wish-fulfilments, even those that seem mere fantastic play
of imagination, since, as he sees it, no mental activity could occur
except to gratify some wish. Further, he holds, most if not all dreams
are fulfilments of suppressed wishes, and these are either sex or
spite wishes, the spite wishes growing out of the interference of
other people with our sex wishes.

The objection to Freud's theory of dreams is, first, that he fails to
see how easy-running the association or recall mechanism is. It isn't
necessary to look for big, mysterious driving forces, when we know
that A makes you think of B, and B of C, with the greatest ease. The
dreamer isn't laboring, he is idly playing, and his images come
largely by free association, with personal desires giving some steer.

Another objection is that Freud overdoes the Unconscious; suppressed
wishes are usually not so unconscious as he describes them; they are