by Ruth Snowden
The patient and analyst could both pay closer attention to what was going on in the patient’s thought processes.
They were able to remove the critical censor that normally sifts thought processes as they arise.
In effect, Freud’s new method was reversing the critical, repressive attitudes that prevailed in Vienna at the time. He was encouraging people to look at themselves in an uncritical way. Freud helped people to analyse each part of a dream separately; often a painstaking process. In The Interpretation of Dreams he analyses many of his own dreams, because he felt that his clients, being ‘neuropaths’, might have dreams that did not represent the ‘norm’. Also, to analyse clients’ dreams would often mean exposing a good deal of confidential case history.
Freud gave advice about dream interpretation that is still very helpful today:
To interpret a dream is hard work and one has to persevere at the task.
After working on a dream it should then be left alone – fresh insights may come later.
Dreams often occur in groups with a common underlying theme. An insight into one dream may unravel a whole series of dreams.
Something that seems trivial or superficial in a dream may actually be masking a deep insight.
Similarly, it is important for the analyst to pay attention to all the client’s remarks, however trivial they may seem on the surface.
However, Freud also warns that dream interpretation is not always easy. The elements of a dream can be interpreted in various ways and it is often doubtful which method to use in deciphering a given element:
Some elements can be taken in a positive or a negative sense – by this Freud seems to mean that a dream image may actually indicate its own opposite, for example hot/cold, fire/water and so on.
An element may be interpreted historically – it is a recollection of something that has actually happened to the dreamer.
The interpretation is sometimes to do with the wording – in other words, the element may contain a pun or other wordplay; for example, you might dream of a rather undesirable acquaintance who is wearing a pair of sunglasses that bear the trade name ‘Wide Boy’.
Some elements can be interpreted symbolically.
Freudian symbols
Freud believed that much of a dream’s content was disguised by means of symbols. Freudian symbols within dreams have become one of the most well-known aspects of psychoanalytic thinking. Freud believed that symbols had fixed meanings common to all humans, and therefore under certain circumstances it was possible to interpret a dream without actually questioning the dreamer, provided one knew a little about his personality, the circumstances of his life and the impressions that preceded the occurrence of the dream. However, symbols often have more than one meaning, so correct interpretation can only be arrived at by analysing the dream. To understand symbols in a dream Freud used a combination of two methods:
exploration of the dreamer’s own associations
using the analyst’s knowledge of common dream symbols to fill in the gaps.
Freud’s own ideas about what dream symbols mean are notoriously sexual. So, for example:
Sticks, knives, umbrellas, trees and other pointy or penetrating objects represent the penis. So do objects from which water flows, such as taps, watering cans and fountains. For the male genitalia as a whole, the number 3 is of symbolic significance, whereas erections are symbolized by anything that rises into the air such as hot-air balloons and airships. It gets even odder – not only snakes, but also certain reptiles and fishes apparently represent penises, as do hats, overcoats and cloaks. Even Freud admits that the last three examples are hard to understand, but he declares that the symbolic connection is unquestionable.
Boxes, chests and other containers represent the female genitalia. So do doors, gates and ships apparently, whereas cupboards, stoves and more especially rooms have more connection with the uterus. You can’t escape from it – materials like wood and paper are symbols for women, as are tables, books … no wonder Freud thought all dreams were sexual! Snails and mussels, however, do make a bit more sense as symbolizing the female genitalia.
Sexual intercourse is symbolized by rhythmic activities such as dancing and riding, as well as things like climbing a ladder, or even going upstairs or running inside a house.
Playing with a little child represents masturbation. So do all kinds of playing in a dream, as well as sliding, slipping or pulling branches off a tree.
In this way, the dreaming mind uses symbols to conceal sexual thoughts and get past the censor. Freud certainly viewed symbols as being mainly used for purposes of concealment; however, he did warn that it was not always easy or straightforward to find an interpretation of a dream symbol. Not all of Freud’s dream symbols are sexual. Falling into water or being raised out of it symbolizes birth; queens and kings represent parents; and so on. Freud said that we can learn the meanings of common symbols from various sources, such as myths and fairy tales, jokes, folklore, customs, sayings and songs. But he stuck firmly to his sexual theory and maintained that although symbolism in these and other fields, such as art and religion, was not always sexual, symbols in dreams were used almost exclusively for the expression of sexual objects and relations.
Origins of dreams
Freud noticed that a good deal of dream content came from recent events or emotional reactions. He explained that often these were actually distortions, masking deeper emotional issues that were connected to the recent events by long trains of association. In the same way, he maintained that childhood memories were also linked to recent events by associations. Thus, the latent content of the dream is often not really about current affairs at all. However, some part of the dream is always linked to a recent event – usually within 24 hours before the dream occurs. Sometimes these links are only revealed by a long process of free association.
Dreams frequently appear to be about trivial things: a recent event in the dreamer’s life is directly represented in the dream. This kind of dream is often a wish-fulfilment dream, like the one Freud’s own small daughter had about strawberries. Dreams of this sort are obviously straightforward and need little analysis, but Freud maintained that all dreams are significant because of their latent content. So, although the significance of some dreams is immediately obvious in this way, others need to be unravelled further by analysis before their real importance can be appreciated.
Sometimes, several recent events are blended together in the dream, in what Freud called condensation. This kind of dream often reveals deeper underlying issues when it is analysed. When displacement occurs, one or more recent events are represented in the dream but this time under the disguise of a more neutral recent event. This type of dream needs more thorough analysis to uncover the latent meaning. Sometimes an even more elaborate displacement occurs, where a deeply buried issue is disguised in the dream by an image of a more neutral recent event.
Modern psychologists have had a tendency, until recently, to see dreams merely as a kind of information processing – perhaps assimilating ideas about what has happened in waking life and then incorporating this information into memory banks. But dreams can certainly help us to solve ongoing problems, so there was a lot of truth in Freud’s ideas. Recent research has suggested that the areas of the brain which control emotion and motivation are frequently aroused during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – the phase of sleep when most dreaming occurs – so maybe Freud was not far off the mark. Dreams, as many writers will agree, also unleash creative processes – so the unconscious is not all about repressed and negative impulses as Freud tended to insist. However, the important thing is to recognize that it was Freud who played the biggest part in starting the process that led to the evolution of modern theories about the dreaming mind. For him the dream is all-important, ‘one of the really deep and formative experiences of our soul’, and so it forms one of the cornerstones of the psychoanalytic process.
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THINGS TO REME
MBER
Dreams are of central importance in psychoanalysis.
Freud saw dreams as wish fulfilments.
He said that each dream has both a manifest and a latent content.
He identified special mechanisms that prevented the latent content from becoming conscious.
Freud believed that much of a dream’s content was disguised by means of symbols.
Freud interpreted dreams mainly in two ways – the symbolic method, which explores symbolic meaning and the decoding method, which uses traditional interpretations.
He maintained that most dreams harked back to childhood experiences, particularly sexual ones.
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5
Exploring the unconscious
In this chapter you will learn:
Freud’s theories about the structure and functioning of the mind
about ‘parapraxis’ – the famous Freudian slip
Freud’s ideas about jokes and the unconscious.
The divisions of the mind
Freud gradually became interested in extending his psychoanalytic exploration to try and discover how the ‘normal’ human mind operated. This step was important because it meant that psychoanalysis was no longer limited to psychology of the ‘abnormal’. Freud’s belief that the unconscious plays a huge part in determining the behaviour of ‘normal’ people means that his ideas have become important to ordinary people as well as psychiatrists and analysts, and that Freud himself has become more widely known as a result.
Psychoanalysis is all about bringing repressed ideas into consciousness, and Freud suggested that attacks against his ideas reflected this process in a collective sense, because people were trying to repress ideas that threatened current thinking. He said that the human race had had three huge blows to its self-esteem: the first was the realization that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around; the second was Darwin’s theory of evolution; and the third was the discovery that it is the unconscious, and not the conscious mind, which rules our emotional life and hence, ultimately, our relationship to everything. Obviously he was secure in his belief that his own ideas were of paramount importance to the human race – he was in fact acting out the hero’s life that he had dreamed of as a boy and which his mother had foretold for him from the moment of his birth.
In accordance with his insistence upon scientific thinking, Freud grappled with trying to formulate a theory about the structure of the mind. This was obviously difficult to achieve – one cannot trap the mind under a microscope or measure it in the laboratory – and he revised his ideas at various points throughout his life. One of the main difficulties was that, although he believed that the brain was the organ that controlled human consciousness, he realized that the divisions of the mind which he described could not be actual physical divisions of this organ. They really just gave a descriptive model to try and help us towards a better understanding of what was going on in the psyche.
To begin with, Freud decided that there were two states of consciousness:
The conscious mind is the part of the mind that is aware of its thoughts and actions. This is where all conscious thought processes occur – it is the source of conscious thinking, ideas and understanding. It is concerned with logical thinking, reality and civilized behaviour.
The unconscious is seen as the part of the mind that is repressed, the place where we put all the stuff that our conditioning does not allow us to look at. Information in the unconscious cannot easily be dug out. A lot of our past history lies here too, some of which can only be recalled under hypnosis.
After a while, Freud decided that this simple division was not quite right. He then proposed the existence of a third level:
The preconscious is the region of the mind between the conscious and the unconscious, where information is stored that is not conscious at the moment, but can easily be recalled when needed.
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Insight
The conscious mind is the part of the mind that is aware of its thoughts and actions. The unconscious is the part that is repressed. (The word subconscious is sometimes used instead of ‘unconscious’, but this tends to imply something ‘below’ the conscious mind, and therefore, perhaps, inferior.) The preconscious is where information is stored and can easily be recalled when needed. None of these are physical parts of the brain – they are simply useful ways of expressing ideas about how the mind works.
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If one imagines the psyche as a house, then the conscious mind could be the living quarters, and the preconscious a filing cabinet where information is stored ready for reference. The unconscious could be the cellar, or perhaps a loft, where stuff is stowed away and you need to use a ladder or dimly lit stairs to gain access.
Later on, Freud thought up a more complex model of the mind, based on these early ideas, where he suggests that the mind is composed of three parts – the id, the ego and the super-ego. This model will be discussed later in the book.
The theory of the unconscious
Freud saw the unconscious as being the part of the mind that lies outside the boundaries of consciousness. It was constructed by repression of ideas that were too painful or dangerous to be allowed to remain in the conscious mind, and also by sublimation – the re-channelling of instinctive drives for which an acceptable outlet cannot be found. These two processes were governed by laws of transformation. Freud saw the primary content of the unconscious as being sexual in nature, formed from sexual desires and urges that have been repressed.
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Insight
Sublimation is an unconscious process, which Freud maintained largely concerned the libido (sexual drive), which was transferred to a non-sexual, socially acceptable or safe activity. It is another concept borrowed from science, where sublimation of an element or compound means a transition from solid to gas, with no intermediate liquid stage. Nowadays it is often used in psychology in a broader sense, referring to the transformation of emotions in general.
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Primitive instinctive urges had to be repressed and pushed down into the unconscious in order for human society to function properly, otherwise everyone would just act on impulse all the time and there could be no rules or structure. Each child had to go through a series of developmental stages where this repression of instincts was gradually accomplished – for example they had to be potty trained, learn not to hit other children and so on. Freud believed that the sex drive in particular was so strong that it constantly threatened to force its way up to the surface and take over, but he did not think it was the only drive that governs human behaviour. In his later writing he suggested that there were a huge number of instincts, or drives, in the psyche, which can all be grouped into two main categories: Eros (the life instinct) and Thanatos (the death instinct). Urges linked to Thanatos were destructive and therefore worked against the sex drive, which is obviously basically creative in its nature.
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Insight
Thanatos: Freud actually used the word ‘Todestrieb’, meaning death drive. He describes it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as ‘an urge inherent in all organic life to restore an earlier state of things’. Eros on the other hand, is the life instinct, which is concerned with self-preservation and enjoyment and so encourages love and creativity.
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Freud’s fascination with ancient history emerged again in his ideas about the unconscious when he suggested that the developmental process in the individual child also reflected the entire history of the human race. So, each individual has their own private life history, which emerges during dream work and analysis, but there is also a bigger picture, common to all of us, which manifests as built-in symbolic connections that the individual has not acquired by learning. It was this idea that later inspired the psychologist C. G. Jung, and led him to develop his theory of the Collective Unconscious.
In 1915, Freud wrote a paper called ‘The Unconscious’, which explains why he thi
nks his theory of the unconscious is the best way of understanding what really governs our behaviour. The existence of the unconscious sheds light upon puzzling aspects of our mental world, such as ideas that ‘spring from nowhere’, strange inexplicable urges, and dreams.
Unconscious mental states are similar to conscious ones – people can have unconscious beliefs, emotions, desires, thoughts and so on. Freud soon realized that not everything in the unconscious is repressed material: some of it is just stuff that happens not to be conscious at the moment. This is why he initially decided that there had to be a third area – the preconscious – containing information that we are not thinking about at a given moment, but which is easily accessible when we need it. An example of this could be a foreign language that we were taught at school but have not really used since.
On the other hand, suppressed material in the unconscious is blocked and therefore cannot be accessed directly. It can, however, be accessed through studying dreams and parapraxes (slips of the tongue). Freud discusses these ideas in his book Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Another way of accessing the unconscious is through jokes, which Freud believes are always an expression of repressed wishes. He discusses this idea in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.