Now the meaning of the dream is clear.  I may say to the patient:  “It is just as though you had thought at the time of the request:  ’Of course, I’ll invite you, so you can eat yourself fat at my house and become still more pleasing to my husband.  I would rather give no more suppers.’  The dream then tells you that you cannot give a supper, thereby fulfilling your wish not to contribute anything to the rounding out of your friend’s figure.  The resolution of your husband to refuse invitations to supper for the sake of getting thin teaches you that one grows fat on the things served in company.”  Now only some conversation is necessary to confirm the solution.  The smoked salmon in the dream has not yet been traced.  “How did the salmon mentioned in the dream occur to you?” “Smoked salmon is the favorite dish of this friend,” she answered.  I happen to know the lady, and may corroborate this by saying that she grudges herself the salmon just as much as my patient grudges herself the caviare.

The dream admits of still another and more exact interpretation, which is necessitated only by a subordinate circumstance.  The two interpretations do not contradict one another, but rather cover each other and furnish a neat example of the usual ambiguity of dreams as well as of all other psychopathological formations.  We have seen that at the same time that she dreams of the denial of the wish, the patient is in reality occupied in securing an unfulfilled wish (the caviare sandwiches).  Her friend, too, had expressed a wish, namely, to get fatter, and it would not surprise us if our lady had dreamt that the wish of the friend was not being fulfilled.  For it is her own wish that a wish of her friend’s—­for increase in weight—­should not be fulfilled.  Instead of this, however, she dreams that one of her own wishes is not fulfilled.  The dream becomes capable of a new interpretation, if in the dream she does not intend herself, but her friend, if she has put herself in the place of her friend, or, as we may say, has identified herself with her friend.

I think she has actually done this, and as a sign of this identification she has created an unfulfilled wish in reality.  But what is the meaning of this hysterical identification?  To clear this up a thorough exposition is necessary.  Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled in their symptoms to represent not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of a great number of other persons, and can suffer, as it were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama by means of their own personalities alone.  It will here be objected that this is well-known hysterical imitation, the ability of hysteric subjects to copy all the symptoms which impress them when they occur in others, as though their pity were stimulated to the point of reproduction.  But this only indicates the way in which the psychic