Freudian/Filmic condensation and displacement, and the cinematic essence of Washington Square

The process of film adaptation is not a matter of simple translation but of dealing with the obstacle of time constraint and with the fact that film and literature rely on differing narrative strategies in an effort to capture the essence of the literary work. I propose that a stable analogy exists between the film adaptation process and Freud's model of the dream process and that this analogy can be used as a means of determining the extent to which a particular film achieves success with respect to its capturing this "essence." I will analyze Henry James' Washington Square and its screen version, The Heiress, as as if they were the respective "latent" and "manifest" contents of a dream, in order to show how "condensation" and "displacement," the modes of signification involved in the dream process, are similar in principle to those involved in the film adaptation process. I will contend ultimately that, just as they oblige the latent content of a dream to change shape as it becomes manifest, these "modes" oblige a literary source to change shape as it goes from the page to the screen.