This section is from the book "The Interpretation Of Dreams", by Sigmund Freud. Also available from Amazon: The Interpretation of Dreams.
† By way of supplement. Such books are poison to a young girl. She herself in youth had drawn much information from forbidden books, about his "senility" in her unconscious thoughts. The wish thought which this dream conceals may perhaps best be conjectured if I say that several days before the dream she was suddenly astounded by a command which she directed to her husband in the midst of her work: "Go hang yourself." It was found that a few hours before she had read somewhere that a vigorous erection is induced when a person is hanged. It was for the erection which freed itself from repression in this terror-inspiring veiled form. "Go hang yourself" is as much as to say: "Get up an erection, at any cost." Dr. Jenkin's arsenic pills in Nabob belong in this connection; for it was known to the patient that the strongest aphrodisiac, cantharides, is prepared by crushing bugs (so-called Spanish flies). The most important part of the dream content has a significance to this effect.
‡ A further train of thought leads to Penthesileia by the same author; cruelty towards her lover.
Opening and shutting the window is the subject of a standing quarrel with her husband. She herself likes to sleep with plenty of air, and her husband does not. Exhaustion is the chief ailment of which she complains these days.
In all three of the dreams just cited I have emphasized by italics those phrases where one of the elements of the dream recurs in the dream thoughts in order to make the manifold references of the former obvious. Since, however, the analysis of none of these dreams has been carried to completion, it will be well worth while to consider a dream with a fully detailed analysis, in order to demonstrate the manifold determination of its content. I select the dream of Irma's injection for this purpose. We shall see without effort in this example that the condensation work has used more than one means for the formation of the dream.
The chief person in the content of the dream is my patient Irma, who is seen with the features which belong to her in waking life, and who therefore in the first instance represents herself. But her attitude as I examine her at the window is taken from the recollection of another person, of the lady for whom I should like to exchange my patient, as the dream thoughts show. In as far as Irma shows a diphtheritic membrane which recalls my anxiety about my eldest daughter, she comes to represent this child of mine, behind whom is concealed the person of the patient who died from intoxication and who is brought into connection by the identity of her name. In the further course of the dream the significance of Irma's personality changes (without the alteration of her image as it is seen in the dream); she becomes one of the children whom we examine in the public dispensaries for children's diseases, where my friends show the difference of their mental capabilities. The transference was obviously brought about through the idea of my infant daughter. By means of her unwillingness to open her mouth the same Irma is changed into an allusion to another lady who was once examined by me, and besides that to my wife, in the same connection. Furthermore, in the morbid transformations which I discover in her throat I have gathered allusions to a great number of other persons.
All these people whom I encounter as I follow the associations suggested by "Irma," do not appear personally in the dream; they are concealed behind the dream person "Irma," who is thus developed into a collective image, as might be expected, with contradictory features. Irma comes to represent these other persons, who are discarded in the work of condensation, in that I cause to happen to her all the things which recall these persons detail for detail.
I may also construct a collective person for the condensation of the dream in another manner, by uniting the actual features of two or more persons in one dream image. It is in this manner that Dr. M. in my dream was constructed, he bears the name of Dr. M., and speaks and acts as Dr. M. does, but his bodily characteristics and his suffering belong to another person, my eldest brother; a single feature, paleness, is doubly determined, owing to the fact that it is common to both persons. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle is a similar composite person. But here the dream image is prepared in still another manner. I have not united features peculiar to the one with features of the other, and thereby abridged the remembered image of each by certain features, but I have adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family portraits, by which he projects both pictures upon one another, whereupon the common features stand out in stronger relief, while those which do not coincide neutralize one another and become obscure in the picture. In the dream of my uncle the blond beard stands out in relief, as an emphasized feature, from the physiognomy, which belongs to two persons, and which is therefore blurred; furthermore the beard contains an allusion to my father and to myself, which is made possible by its reference to the fact of growing grey.
The construction of collective and composite persons is one of the chief resources of the activity of dream condensation. There will soon be an occasion for treating of this in another connection.
The notion "dysentery" in the dream about the injection likewise has a manifold determination, on the one hand because of its paraphasic assonance with diphtheria, and on the other because of its reference to the patient, whom I have sent to the Orient, and whose hysteria has been wrongly recognised.
The mention of "propyls" in the dream also proves to be an interesting case of condensation. Not "propyls" but "amyls" were contained in the dream thoughts. One might think that here a simple displacement had occurred in the dream formation. And this is the case, but the displacement serves the purposes of condensation, as is shown by the following supplementary analysis. If I dwell for a moment upon the word "propyls," its assonance to the word "pro-pykeum" suggests itself to me. But the propylseum is to be found not only in Athens but also in Munich. In the latter city I visited a friend the year before who was seriously ill, and the reference to him becomes unmistakable on account of trimethylamin, which follows closely upon propyls.
 
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