by Ruth Snowden
Dream analysis, alongside free association, became one of the main therapeutic methods in psychoanalysis. As usual, Freud very much emphasized that he was interested in the study of dreams from the scientific viewpoint. In the preface to The Interpretation of Dreams he makes this point, saying that in his attempts to explore dream interpretation he does not feel that he has overstepped the boundary of neuropathological science. Once again he was covering his back, in anticipation of the criticism which was bound to come his way from other members of the scientific establishment.
Freud discovered that when patients were free-associating on the couch they quite often spontaneously began to tell him about their own dreams. For Freud, the unconscious contained all the repressed desires that were not accessible to the conscious waking mind – it was impossible to find out what was in the unconscious just by thinking about it. He realized that dreams were one way in which the unconscious could be accessed indirectly.
Dreams became central to psychoanalysis for several reasons:
They occur during sleep, when the conscious mind relaxes and is off guard. Freud therefore saw dreams as evidence of the unconscious mind at work and proof of its existence. He referred to dreams as being the ‘royal road’ to deeper understanding of the unconscious.
Freud had come to recognize that hypnosis and the pressure method were too authoritarian. He realized that you cannot force a person to understand what is going on in their unconscious. Only by the new methods of dream analysis and free association could one really begin to understand the symbolism involved in neurotic symptoms.
While Freud was busy working out his main theories about dreams he was also developing ideas about infantile sexuality. He was convinced that dreams are often concerned with sexual issues from very early childhood. These problems could only be resolved through dream analysis and free association.
Freud saw dreams as symbolic wish fulfilments of desires that have been repressed. By exploring the hidden desire symbolized in a dream one could, therefore, begin to unravel the problem.
Dreams as wish fulfilment
People have always tended to see some of their dreams as wish-fulfilment fantasies. We use phrases like ‘in your dreams’ or ‘not even in my wildest dreams’. Freud carried this idea further and announced that dreams were almost always driven by the need to fulfil a repressed wish. So dreams are very similar to daydreams or stories in which we end up achieving our heart’s desire.
In its simplest form, a dream directly expresses a wish. For example, Freud describes the dream of a young mother, who was cut off from society for weeks while she nursed a child through an infectious illness. In her dream she met lots of well-known authors and had fascinating conversations with them. When Freud’s little girl Anna was sick and not allowed any food, she dreamed of strawberries, omelette and pudding. This type of direct wish-fulfilment dream is common in small children: Freud said that analysis of the dreams of small children will always prove them to be fulfilments of wishes that arose the day before the dream and were not fulfilled.
Freud also recorded dreams of his own of this type, for example he noticed that if he had been eating salty food such as sardines or olives then he would dream about drinking water. Another drinking dream revealed a deeper wish fulfilment, when he dreamed that the water he was drinking was contained in an Etruscan urn that he no longer owned but regretted having parted with.
Freud saw dreaming largely as a form of regression to childhood and the instinctual forces and images that dominate this time of our lives. As we grow up we soon learn that not all our desires can be instantly fulfilled. The inhibitions that are imposed on us by parents and caretakers gradually become internalized and so the forbidden wishes become unconscious. Freud called this process ‘censorship’, and he thought that dreams were mostly disguised manifestations of infantile sexual urges that had been repressed.
Strawberries, omelette and pudding.
Because these urges were unacceptable they were suppressed and so the dream – like the neurotic symptom – is a censored way of expressing what has been buried. According to Freud, recent events and desires in a person’s life play only a minor part in dreams – they usually appear only if they somehow trigger one of the early repressed desires. It is hard to see why this should be the case and in this respect Freud’s ideas differ from modern theories about dreams, where recent and current events are very important. Freud believed that the wishes represented in dreams were almost always infantile ones, even when the infantile desire is not at first suspected. This idea harks back to, and reinforces, his original idea that hysterical symptoms had their roots in early childhood trauma.
For Freud, dreams were neurotic symptoms. The fact that everyone has dreams made it clear to him that psychoanalysis was relevant to all of us, not only those suffering from psychiatric illness.
Dreams, he said, allow the impossible to happen, and set aside the inhibitions of waking life. During sleep, forbidden wishes rise from the unconscious, where they are normally kept under control during waking hours. As they attempt to come into the conscious mind, the dream censor in the brain monitors them and decides that they have disturbing content and therefore must be suppressed for fear they disturb the sleeper. Dreams are then created in order to express the hidden wishes in a disguised form, so that the person can go on sleeping. Dreams are thus seen by Freud as guardians, allowing us to sleep peacefully. He remarked that they expose our hidden urges to the extent that anyone who behaved the same way when awake as they did in their dreams would be seen as insane. He certainly has a point there!
In cases where it seemed impossible to unravel a hidden wish fulfilment, Freud cunningly used two possible explanations:
The patient is in a state of negative transference to the analyst. He or she is deliberately producing awkward dreams in order to trip up the analyst and disprove his theories. For example, Freud cites a case where a barrister friend dreamed that he had lost all his cases. Freud and he had been rivals at school and Freud had always beaten him, so in the dream he is identifying with Freud and hoping that he will lose. This means that the dream conceals a hidden wish fulfilment.
The patient is employing mental masochism – the dream is satisfying a masochistic urge, which is in itself a form of wish fulfilment.
These two explanations could perhaps be seen as further examples of Freud’s own stubbornness when he wanted to prove a theory! It seems strange that Freud so obstinately stuck to his theory that dreams are mainly about repressed infantile wishes. This view has often been criticized as being reductionist, and in fact many of the dreams Freud discusses are clearly about adult needs and problems, for example the dream of ‘Irma’s Injection’, which was expressing anxiety about his own competence as a doctor. He did admit eventually that there are various types of dreams that do not fit in with his theory:
Some dreams need no interpretation – when we are hungry we dream of food; when we are hard-up we dream of finding piles of money.
There are traumatic dreams, in which we endlessly and directly relive things like the horror of an accident. During and after the First World War, Freud had experience with shock and trauma victims who often relived recent ghastly wartime experiences in their dreams. This led Freud to question his earlier insistence that dreams were always wish fulfilment and always harked back to childhood.
Some dreams have nightmare content, or bring up huge feelings of anxiety. It is difficult to see how these can always be masked wish fulfilments.
Dream mechanisms
It is obvious that some simple dreams can be seen as wish-fulfilment fantasies, but how can one say the same of a nightmare, or an anxiety dream? Freud explained that some nightmares or anxiety dreams appear as a result of dream censor mechanisms having failed, allowing some of the anxiety connected with forbidden impulses to emerge. The sleeper would generally wake up at this point because the censor was no longer allowing peaceful sleep to continue.
M
ANIFEST AND LATENT MEANINGS
Freud went further and explained that each dream has both a ‘manifest’ and a ‘latent’ content. The manifest content of the dream is the part that is consciously remembered; the latent part is the disguised part that is not remembered before analysis.
* * *
Insight
You may have noticed that Freud is not being very scientific here. He describes the manifest part of a dream as the part which is consciously remembered. The latent part is not consciously remembered before analysis. So surely there is a great risk of suggestive input from the analyst here? (See the case of the Wolf Man in Chapter 10.)
* * *
Freud explained that the technique used to uncover the latent content of the dream is exactly the same as the method used in free association. You simply set aside the apparent connections between all the elements of the dream and take each element separately. You then use the free-association technique and collect all the ideas that arise in association with each separate element of the dream. From this material you then arrive at the latent content of the dream. Analysis of the latent content will always show that the dream meaning can be traced back to childhood. The latent content of the dream is the true meaning, and just as with the dreams of small children, it will always represent fulfilment of unsatisfied wishes from the previous day. The manifest content of the dream – i.e. the part that you remember when you wake up in the morning – is merely a disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes.
So anxiety, for example, might only appear in the manifest aspect of the dream, but if the dream is properly interpreted, one will still find a hidden wish fulfilment lurking beneath the apparent meaning of the dream. The latent content of the dream is actually the cause of the dream. Freud proposed two mechanisms at work here:
the sleeping mind begins to create a dream, based on a wish fulfilment
the mind is shocked by the wish and imposes censorship on it causing distortion in the way the wish is allowed to appear in the dream.
Freud gives an example of this process. One of his patients challenged him, announcing that she had had a dream that was the exact opposite of a wish fulfilment. She dreamt that she wanted to hold a supper party, but various things kept going wrong. There was not enough food. It was Sunday, so she couldn’t order more to be delivered. The phone was out of order … and so on. How could he say that this dream expressed a wish fulfilment?
Her husband preferred plump women.
Freud was cunning. Analysis of the dream revealed a hidden jealously of the friend whom she had been going to invite to the supper party. She was afraid that her husband fancied this friend, but fortunately the friend was skinny, and as her husband preferred plump women she felt reasonably safe. However, she was damned if she wanted to fatten her up with a special supper party! So the dream was, in fact, a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.
Other mechanisms
Freud said that the latent content of the dream could only be revealed through dream analysis and free association. The latent aspect of the dream is seen as being the important part because it contains the real meaning, which has been censored. The thought processes of the unconscious brain are irrational and incomplete.
The goal is simply to evade the censor and allow the dream ideas to be expressed somehow. Freud suggested that there were various mechanisms at work that allowed the dream wish to be expressed but in a distorted form:
Displacement – potentially disturbing feelings about a situation are not expressed directly; instead they are associated in the dream with something different but somehow connected. The manifest content of the dream is very different from the latent content, but the associated feelings remain very much the same. This means that the manifest content of the dream can be about apparently trivial events, but associated with powerful feelings that don’t necessarily seem appropriate. Conversely, ghastly things can happen in the manifest dream with no accompanying flood of emotion.
* * *
Insight
Displacement is the shifting of emotions attached to one idea onto another idea. Freud was always trying to make his work appear scientific, so he may have borrowed this idea from Newtonian mechanics, where displacement is the difference between the initial position and the final position of an object.
* * *
Condensation – here, two or more ideas or images are fused together in the dream. In this way a dream image may have more than one root cause, and much deeper real meanings may lie behind the dream image. So examination of an image in the manifest dream may lead to a whole host of overlapping and related ideas in the latent dream.
* * *
Insight
Condensation is the fusion of two or more ideas – in a dream, or the telling a joke for example. Again, this idea may have been borrowed from science to suggest a scientific basis for Freud’s theories (for example, in earth science water vapour condenses onto a cold surface to form water droplets).
* * *
Symbolization – dream images or ideas are often symbolic and so secretly represent other things. According to Freud, most dream symbolism is sexual in nature.
* * *
Insight
In Freud’s thinking, symbolization is about representing an object or an idea with a different object or idea. This forms a kind of safe disguise: for example a dream cave could symbolize a womb. Jung later argued that Freud’s idea of what constituted a symbol was too simplistic and that dream symbols could often have much richer, more complex meanings.
* * *
Resistance – Freud said that we tend to forget dreams because of dream censorship, which still tries to prevent the dream ideas from entering conscious thought.
Representation – a process by which thoughts are converted into visual images.
Dramatization – Freud observed that dreams are mainly made up of a flow of vivid visual images. These often seem to lack any logical structure with mysterious and seemingly unconnected images, the connections between which can only be discovered during subsequent analysis. This dramatic visual sequence and its underlying meaning is what Freud called ‘dramatization’.
Secondary revision – here, the dreamer tries to make some sense of the dream as he or she recounts it after waking. As the dream is made into a more coherent ‘story’, the latent content is often still further disguised.
Obviously then, by the time the dreamer recalls the dream and relates it to the therapist, a whole host of potential mechanisms have churned into action to disguise the real original meaning. In fact, many of these are mechanisms cunningly put into place by Freud in order to prove his own theory that dreams are fulfilments of infantile sexual fantasies! He says that if we analyse our own dreams, we will be astonished to discover what an unexpectedly great part the experiences and impressions of our early childhood still play in our lives. In dream life, childish wishes and impulses still rule us – even those that are of no use to us whatsoever in our adult lives. This would seem to be true to some extent, and it may sometimes be helpful to unearth these primitive wishes and look at them in the light of adult logic.
There are also other aspects to Freud’s ideas about dreams that are just as relevant today. For example, it seems indisputably true that the unconscious often speaks to us in symbols, but it seems likely that this has more to do with the way the unconscious brain works than with furtively censoring hidden desires. It is also true that dreams can reveal our true selves – unmasking our hidden fears and desires – and they are invaluable resources in trying to understand ourselves better.
Methods of dream interpretation
Freud maintained that every dream has a meaning, and that the meaning of the dream is the cause of the dream. He realized that this was not a new idea – even Aristotle saw dreams as the mental activity of the sleeper rather than messages sent by the gods. The mechanistic view tended to lead people to believe that dreams were the meaningless result of physical processes in the sl
eeping body. Freud disagreed, pointing out that non-scientists had always seen dreams as being full of hidden meaning.
Freud described two methods with which dreams were usually interpreted:
The symbolic method – for example, Joseph’s dream in the bible, where seven fat cattle are followed by seven thin ones that eat them up. This was interpreted symbolically as showing the seven years of famine that would follow seven years of plenty. This method tended to fall down where dreams were very confused and unintelligible.
The decoding method – here, one used a fixed interpretation, of the type that is often given in books about dream interpretation. Freud said that this was not scientific because the original interpretation could be wrong.
Freud discovered that while his patients were relaxing and free associating, they began to tell him about their dreams. He saw their dreams as further symptoms, and the method he used to unravel them was really the same free-association method as he used for other problems. During the process of free association and dream analysis the patient had to be relaxed and feel safe. This meant that two things could happen: