Dreams and myths Author:Karl Abraham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VII Displacement And Secondary Elaboration In Dreams And Myths Condensation explains, in the myth as in the dream, a great number of differences between... more » the latent and manifest content. A second method, through which the unconscious leads to dream distortion, is called by Freud " displacement." This element of the dream work also finds its analogy in myths. From grounds, which will soon be evident, I will consider with displacement a third element of the dream work, " secondary elaboration." When we began our consideration of the analogies of dreams and myths it was incumbent upon us to first show the authority for such a procedure. We could easily dispose of two objections while a third we left preliminarily unsettled. To it we must now turn back. The myth, one may object, according to the results of recent investigations, has gone through significant changes, before it took the form, in which it has come to us, while the dream appears to be a very fugitive structure born only for the moment. That is only apparently so. The dream content is, as a matter of fact, likewise a long time in preparation. If we compare the life period of man with that of the race we find that dreams and myths have their roots in the prehistoric time. We saw that the elements of the dream were already formed in the waking state. Now let us add: The development of the dream is not closed with the awaking of the dreamer. The concurrence of the ideas and wishes of the dream with the censor continues. If we seek to call a dream back to memory, especially when we are telling it to another person, the censor undertakes additional changes, in order to make the dream distortion more complete.This is what Freud calls "secondary elaboration."80 It is only a continuation of the work of displacement of t...« less