The Seba library treats Secondary Revision in 6 passages, across 2 authors (including Freud, Sigmund, Bulkeley, Kelly).
And now at last we can turn to the fourth of the factors the construction of dreams. If we pursue our investigation of dreams in the manner in which we have begun it
This passage marks Freud’s formal introduction of secondary revision as the fourth dream-work mechanism, opening the dedicated section of The Interpretation of Dreams devoted to its systematic analysis.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
whatever the original material of the dream-thoughts has been turned into by the dream-activity is then subjected to a further influence. This is what is known as ‘secondary revision’, and its purpose
In Totem and Taboo Freud condenses his account of secondary revision as a post-hoc process that reshapes the already-transformed dream material into a more intelligible facade, situating it within a broader anthropological argument about psychical coherence.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
it is our normal thinking that chical agency which approaches the content of dreams with a demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to a first interpretation and consequently produces a complete misunderstanding of it.
Freud identifies the agency of secondary revision with normal waking thought, which imposes intelligibility upon dream content and thereby systematically produces a fundamental misreading of it.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
the wish to sleep (which the conscious ego is concentrate which, together with the dream-censorship and the ‘secondary revision’ I shall mention later, constitute the conscious ego dreaming)
Freud situates secondary revision alongside the dream-censorship and the wish to sleep as one of three functions attributable to the conscious ego’s participation in dream formation.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting
there is one case in which it is to a great extent labour of, as it were, building up a façade for the dream — the case in which a formation of that kind already exists, available for use
Freud discusses the specific condition in which pre-existing daytime phantasies provide secondary revision with a ready-made narrative façade, reducing the work this mechanism must perform on the latent dream-thoughts.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting
specific dream-work mechanisms that change latent thoughts, wishes, and memories into the manifest images of the remembered dream. The first dream-work mechanism is condensation.
Bulkeley surveys the dream-work mechanisms as an ensemble, providing the interpretive frame within which secondary revision functions as one component among the four processes Freud enumerated.
, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017aside