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THE ANTITHETICAL MEANING OF PRIMAL WORDS

In my Interpretation of Dreams I made a statement about one of the findings of my analytic work which I did not then understand. I will repeat it here by way of preface to this review:

‘The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. "No" seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.’¹

The dream-interpreters of antiquity seem to have made the most extensive use of the notion that a thing in a dream can mean its opposite. This possibility has also occasionally been recognized by modern students of dreams, in so far as they concede at all that dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted.² Nor do I think that I shall be contradicted if I assume that all who have followed me in interpreting dreams on scientific lines have found confirmation of the statement quoted above.

I did not succeed in understanding the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by the philologist Karl Abel, which was published in 1884 as a separate pamphlet and included in the following year in the author’s Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen [Philological Essays]. The subject is of sufficient interest to justify my quoting here the full text of the crucial passages in Abel’s paper (omitting, however, most of the examples). We obtain from them the astonishing information that the behaviour of the dream-work which I have just described is identical with a peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us.

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p.787

² Cf. G. H. von Schubert (1814, Chapter II).