A.

CONDENSATION

 The first of the dream-work processes that Freud takes up is "condensation"—the

method by which dreams "condense" their thoughts and meanings.

 As Freud notes, dreams are "brief, meager, and laconic in comparison with the range
and wealth of the dream-thoughts" (6.2.1). While a dream might fill "half a page" once
it is written out, the dream analysis might "occupy six, eight, or a dozen times as
much space" (6.2.1).
 Freud notes that "[w]e very often have an impression that we have dreamt a great
deal all through the night and have since forgotten what we dreamt" (6.2.2). He says
that he intends to explain this feeling—but not yet.

 Freud also anticipates a question that some of his readers may be asking by this
point: "whether, as a matter of principle, we are justified in regarding as part of the
dream-thoughts all the associations that occur to us during the subsequent analysis"
(6.2.3).

 Freud assures his readers that this assumption is justified. In his view, the
associations that occur to us when we are conscious are products  of the dream-
thoughts, which have already prepared a way for them.

 Having established these points, Freud returns to the question of "dream-

condensation," and asks: "How is that condensation brought about?" (6.2.5).

 Freud's answer is that it is brought about through omission. As he says, "the dream is

not a faithful translation or a point-by-point projection of the dream-thoughts, but a
highly incomplete and fragmentary version of them" (6.2.6).

 In order to develop this point in more detail, Freud returns to his Dream of the
Botanical Monograph.

 Freud begins by reminding readers that the botanical monograph in the dream led
him to think of his work on cocaine, of his colleague Dr. Königstein ("the eye surgeon,
who had had a share in the introduction of cocaine"), and of a recent conversation
that he had had with Dr. Königstein in which Freud had spoken of some criticisms
that he had recently received (6.2.9).

 Freud also notes that the elements "botanical" and "monograph" had each led him to
a number of other associations, such as his recent conversation with his colleague
Professor Gärtner ("Gardener"), a patient of his named "Flora," the anecdote about
the wife who missed her birthday flowers, memories of his years as a student at
secondary school, and an early childhood memory of tearing a book apart piece by
piece, like an artichoke.
 With all of this in mind, Freud argues that the elements "botanical" and "monograph"
came into the dream "because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of
the dream-thoughts"—that is, because "they constituted 'nodal points' upon which a
great number of the dream thoughts converged, and because they had several
meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream" (6.2.11).

 Freud suggests that this important insight could be phrased another way: "each of the
elements of the dream's content turns out to have been 'overdetermined'—to have
been represented in the dream-thoughts many times over" (6.2.11).

 With this in mind, Freud concludes that "[n]ot only are the elements of a dream
determined by the dream-thoughts many times over, but the individual dream-
thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements" (6.2.13).

 In Freud's view, "[a]ssociative paths lead from one element of the dream to several
dream-thoughts, and from one dream-thought to several elements of the dream"
(6.2.13).

 Freud goes on to argue that the "manifest" content of our dreams doesn't function like
government representatives. As he says, it isn't the case that each individual piece of
"manifest" content has been chosen to represent a very specific group of dream-
thoughts.
 Instead, the dream-thoughts are represented by several surface-level elements of the
dream, and those "manifest" elements find their way into the dream precisely
because they are "overdetermined"—that is, because they relate to multiple aspects
of the dream.

 Here, Freud presents another specimen dream to illustrate his point. This one comes
from one of his male patients—a man who dreamed that he was "driving with a large
party to X street, in which there was an unpretentious inn. […] There was a play
being acted inside it. At one moment he was audience, at another actor. When it was
over, they had to change their clothes so as to get back to town. Some of the
company were shown into rooms on the ground floor and others into rooms on the
first floor" (6.2.15).

 As the dream goes on, tensions emerge over the placement of people upstairs and
downstairs. Eventually, the man found himself "walking by himself up the rise made
by X street in the direction of town. He walked with such difficulty and so laboriously
that he seemed glued to the spot. An elderly gentleman came up to him and began
abusing the King of Italy. At the top of the rise he was able to walk much more easily"
(6.2.15).

 Freud's interpretation of this dream (which he carries out in collaboration with his
patient) teases out a number of related elements: the patient's bodily memory of
tuberculosis, his recent love-affair with a stage actress, a play that he had seen
 recently, lines from a poem that suddenly sprung to his mind, and early childhood
memories of being nursed, among others (6.2.18-24).

 As Freud argues, all of these elements are interconnected through various

combinations of dream-content and dream-thoughts. In other words, the "manifest"
content of the dream has "condensed" a whole host of separate dream-thoughts.
 Freud offers another example from his records—a dream from an elderly woman
patient. In it, the patient "called to mind that she had two may-beetles in a box and
that she must set them free or they would suffocate. She opened the box and the
may-beetles were in an exhausted state. One of them flew out of the open window;
but the other was crushed by the casement while she was shutting it at someone's
request. (Signs of disgust.)" (6.2.26).

 Freud recounts some of the associations that his patient made during their analysis of
the dream, including a number of memories related to "cruelty to animals" (6.2.27).
Those memories led the patient to reflect on scenes from George Eliot's novel Adam
Bede, on early memories from her marriage, and on memories of being courted
before she was married. She also reflects on a number of scenes and passages in
other novels and theatrical performances—all related to themes of love, pleasure,
and sexuality (6.2.27-34).

 As Freud notes, their collaborative analysis of the dream made it perfectly clear that a
whole slew of memories, thoughts, and feelings related to the patient's experiences of
love, sex, and marriage had been condensed into a very simple dream that seemed,
at first glance, to have nothing at all to do with sexuality.

 At this point, Freud turns again to his Dream of Irma's Injection. This time around, he
refocuses his initial interpretation to demonstrate how dream-condensation shaped
the dream.

 Freud notes that his analyses so far have been focused on how dream-
condensation works, and that he has not yet addressed the purpose of condensation.
He promises to return to this topic in Chapter 7.

 Freud goes on to argue that "[t]he work of condensation in dreams is seen at its
clearest when it handles words and names" (6.2.47). He offers a number of examples
in which dreams give rise to fascinating neologisms (invented words) and other bits of
wordplay (6.2.48-62).
 One of these examples is Freud's Autodidasker Dream—a dream that combines the
words "Autor" (author), "Autodidakt" (self-taught), and "Lasker" (6.2.54).

 Freud's analysis of this dream uncovers many interconnected dream-thoughts, many

of which concern his hopes and ambitions for his children, his fears that one of his
sons might "come to grief over a woman" (6.2.54), and his own anxieties about his
ability to treat his patients well.
The Work of Displacement

 The second of the dream-work processes that Freud takes up is "displacement"—the

method by which dreams disguise their "latent" content by foregrounding apparently
unrelated "manifest" content instead.

 Given his earlier demonstrations that dreams contain multiple dream-thoughts, Freud
now clarifies that "[t]he ideas which are most important among the dream-thoughts
will almost certainly be those which occur most often in them, since the different
dream-thoughts will, as it were, radiate out from them" (6.3.1).

 Freud also notes that dreams will sometimes omit elements that are "highly stressed"
(that have a substantial amount of value attached to them), while instead
emphasizing other elements that are "reinforced from many directions" (6.3.1).

 Freud adds another crucial point to his argument here, as he notes that dream-
analyses often reveal dream-contents that seem far removed from the "kernel" (the
core meaning) of the dream.

 Freud argues that these elements are usually the ones that
create connections between the various other elements of the dream, and "if these
elements were weeded out of the analysis the result would often be that the
component parts of the dream-content would be left not only without
overdetermination but without any satisfactory determination at all" (6.3.2).

 With this in mind, Freud concludes that "in the dream-work a psychical force is
operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical
value of their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination,
creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their
way into the dream-content" (6.3.3).

 Freud describes this process as "a transference and displacement of psychical

intensities," and says that it is "the essential portion of the dream-work" (6.3.3).

 On top of that, Freud says that the powerful "psychic force" that puts dream-
condensation and dream-displacement in motion is the same psychical "censor" that
we met earlier.

 Freud closes this section by noting that in order for dream-thoughts to make it into our
dreams at all, "they must escape the censorship imposed by resistance" (6.3.5)