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An essential aspect of the workings of the unconscious and especially of dream-work, as described by psychoanalysis.
A single idea or image in a dream may represent the nnodal point at which a number of chains of associations or ideas intersect, and can thus be a condensation of both their multiple unconscious meaning and their quota of affect or emotional charge.
The mechanism of condensation explains why the manifest content of a dream is often so laconic or fragmentary: it is an abridged translation of the latent content.
The second basis mechanism of the dream-work is displacement.
Both mechanisms can be observed in other unconscious formations, and notably in symptoms of hysteria and neurosis; they are also important featurres of jokes.
Following jakobson, Lacan likes condensation and displacement to the linguistic mechanisms of [[metaphor]] and [[metonymy]].
Condensation is one of the methods by which the repressed returns in hidden ways. For example, in dreams multiple dream-thoughts are often combined and amalgamated into a single element of the manifest dream (e.g. symbols). According to Freud, every situation in a dream seems to be put together out of two or more impressions or experiences. One need only think about how people and places tend to meld into composite figures in our dreams. The same sort of condensation can occur in symptom-formation. The other method whereby the repressed hides itself is displacement.
Condensation, along with displacement, is an essential process in dream work and more generally in primary-process thinking. We tend to view it as a way of attributing, to a person or representative object, characteristics and properties that, from the point of view of latent thoughts, belong to other persons or objects. In reality, if we go by Freud's text in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), condensation, like displacement, does not proceed directly by modifying the content of a representation. All dreams are made up of latent dream thoughts, each of which corresponds to one or several chains of associations, with each link being initially charged with a psychic intensity. Dream work consists in changing the location of these fragmentary intensities without either increasing or reducing their global value.
Although Freud studied condensation particularly in relation to dreams, especially in The Interpretation of Dreams, he also describes the effect of this process in other manifestations of primary-process thinking, such as jokes, forgetting names, slips of the tongue, and symptoms. In these latter domains, however, it is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish between condensation and overdetermination. In both cases, as the result of a transformation, a representation substitutes for more elaborate thought content. Both processes seem to proceed by increasing intensity, that is, by economic modification, and this results in the reorganization of the thought content. But whereas condensation can be viewed as a sum of intensities relative to forces acting in the same direction, overdetermination appears more as an appropriation of content by heterogeneous if not antagonistic forces. In fact, the content of an overdetermined representation acts as a fulcrum for opposing logics and conflicting systems (such as the preconscious and the unconscious). A thought content (or representation) resulting from the interaction of forces pushing for the fulfillment of an unconscious wish and forces opposing it (the censor) is a good example of overdetermination but not of condensation, since the censor is not part of the latent dream thoughts. However, as soon as the signifying element begins to represent conflict (as in the case of a symptom), the difference between condensation and overdetermination is more difficult to establish.
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[[Category:Sigmund Freud]]
