ABSTRACT
Freud begins this study (1910) with a quotation from The Interpretation of Dreams in which he says:
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.
I did not succeed in understanding the dream-work’s singular ten- dency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of represen- tation for expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by the philologist Karl Abel . . . We obtain from [the crucial pas- sages] 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.
(Freud, 1910b, pp. 155–156)