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.