University of Virginia Library

THE SOURCES OF MEANING

Fundamentally, every dream, yours or mine, consists of certain more or less clearly remembered images or ideas; and these are secondarily derived from some mental disposition previously or coetaneously acting in the background, as it were: i. e., persisting through its residual subliminal nervous dispositions. This anterior phenomenon is properly called the primary idea or image; the other, which appears (supraliminally) in the dream is called the secondary image or idea. The dream is thus made up of collocations and combinations of secondary images, to which is usually added a filling-in of fancy which may be called tertiary ideas: required, to find the primary ideas and so, the relation of one idea to another—which is the measure of "meaning."

Each secondary or tertiary image, in the absence of any immediate stimulus to account for it, may usually be traced back into a primary train of thought left unfinished during the day. This is the conception of the perseveration of the unadjusted, stated in 1891 by Delage, in giving his theory of dreams.[17] Its history runs back to Thomas Hobbes; and it has been amplified lately by Professor Woodworth, to whom I am indebted for unusually clean-cut illustrations of the applicability of the theory to dream-life. The principle is a most important contribution to the study of meaning in dreams.

More specifically, Prince, through his text-book on "The Unconscious," is the exponent of the idea that the elements of meaning reside in the primary ideas and must be sought there by highly specific investigations in the given case: "the meaning is in the fringe of thought." The meaning of a supraliminal image must be discovered in its relation to the subliminal ideas clustering around it. This implies studying by association-tests what James called the psychic overtones, and what Prince has, in his teaching, called the unconscious settings-of-ideas, which determine meaning.[18] Care must be taken to find the real determinants, and to set aside spurious dream material—which is not always facilitated by the psycho-analytic methods.

In order to show that one should not assume meanings

by rule of thumb, without investigations of this kind, Prince has demonstrated a case in which typical phallic symbols, in a phobia of bells and towers, had acquired their emotional meanings, not through sexual analogies, as Freudians would suppose, but through actual contiguity-experience with church bells and belfry, quite apart from sexual matters.[18] Similarly, snakes, sticks, circles do not necessarily carry the sexual meanings assumed by psycho-analysts, who are over-influenced by the language-analogy.