1 Afektivitat, Suggestibilitat, Paranoia. Carl Marhold, Halle a. S., 1906. Bleuler states: "Our actions are probably influenced exclusively by the feelings of pleasure and of dysphoria; logical considerations receive their strength through the effects with which they happen to be linked." In the same way the dream is not an interplay of thoughts, but a struggle of affects.

She attacks him with a knife. She hurls ugly epithets at him.

In the dream this woman gives free rein to a tremendous feeling of hatred. When she wakes up she is happy that it was "only a dream." But the dream discloses to us the fact that she is mistrusting and that she hates her husband. More than that. She seeks some justification for her hatred. This woman once said to her husband: "If I should ever find that you are unfaithful to me I would promptly revenge myself." The dream pictures a justification for her hatred and furnishes her an excuse for following the trend of her sexual instincts.

Thus, whenever an affect breaks through in the open it always yields a deep insight into mental life.

But affects, too, are deceptive. Affects, too, may be transposed; substitution plays a great role: respect for scorn, overvaluation for depreciation, love for hate. I take this opportunity to emphasize that dreams should be plain even without the transposition. The two emotional trends coexist. The neurotic - like every human being - is moved by contraries. All symptoms, all the manifestations of human thought and feeling, are bipolar. Hate and love, respect and scorn, confidence and doubt, go hand in hand. Any affect may appear either in a positive or in negative form, - either with a plus sign or with a minus sign. Hatred is love with a minus sign. . . . We must recall here the fourth symbolic equation. The affects may replace one another.

Often the dream displays an affect which does not fit at all into the content of the dream. Freud has discussed this theme very carefully and I must refer to his Trawmdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams, authorized English translation by A. Brill). I may add only that in many cases the dream affect is extremely treacherous and exposes the psychic conflict almost in its naked terms. I am able to corroborate the rule laid down by Freud that in every strongly toned dream the affect is always justified. When interpreting a dream I always start with the affect. In this way we find out how the dream material has been masked through transposition, shifting, etc. and how the affect becomes linked to irrelevant elements in the dream. Trivial data next disclose the character of the affect. Since the disturbance of the affectivity is the deepest cause of the neurosis I put greatest weight on the analysis of the dream affects., Of course, there are also dreams apparently devoid of affects (Freud). But as is the case with compulsive acts, they are only apparently devoid of affect. Incidentally, this has led to the erroneous view, still held by many psychiatrists, that the absence of affect is characteristic of compulsions.2

The following examples will illustrate how the dream affect enables us to obtain a deeper insight into the structure of the respective neurosis.

A woman patient has a number of typical recurring dreams: every time she gets tremendously excited over something which she does not quite attain. The symbolism is obvious: diese Hetze findet besonders beim Koitus statt. Ihre Angst ist, dass der Mann zu fruh fertig wird, before she attains the libido; her perpetual wish: einmal zurecht zu kommen. This conflict expresses itself in a dream as follows: