by Ruth Snowden
Freud gave advice about dream interpretation that is still very helpful today:
• To interpret a dream is hard work and requires perseverance.
• After working on a dream, one should leave it 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.
• It is important for the analyst to pay attention to all the client’s remarks, however trivial they may seem on the surface.
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 best-known aspects of psychoanalytic thinking. Freud believed that symbols frequently have more than one meaning and that correct interpretation can only be arrived at by analysing the dream. To understand symbols, he used a combination of two methods:
1 an exploration of the dreamer’s own associations
2 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. For example, he suggested the following interpretations:
• Sticks, knives, umbrellas, and other pointy objects represent the penis.
• Boxes, chests, ovens, cupboards and other containers represent the uterus.
• Movement up and down ladders, stairs, seesaws, etc. represents having sex.
• Playing with a little child represents masturbation.
Freud developed a highly sexualized version of the traditional dreamer’s dictionary…
However, Freud warned that it was not always easy or straightforward to find the correct interpretation of a dream symbol.
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 association. Thus the dream is often not really about current affairs at all.
THE DIVISIONS OF THE MIND
Initially, Freud decided that there were two states of consciousness or parts of the psyche:
1 The conscious mind This is the part of the mind that is aware of its thoughts and actions. It is where all conscious thought processes occur, and is the source of ideas and understanding. It is concerned with logical thinking, reality and civilized behaviour.
2 The unconscious This is the part of the mind that is repressed, the place where we put anything that our conditioning does not allow us to look at. Information in the unconscious cannot easily be accessed. Much of our past history lies here too, some of which can be recalled only under hypnosis.
Eventually, Freud concluded that this simple division was not completely accurate. He therefore proposed the existence of a third level:
3 The preconscious This is where information is stored that is not conscious at the moment, but can easily be recalled when needed. Imagine the psyche as a house. The conscious mind is the living quarters, while the preconscious is a filing cabinet where information is stored ready for reference. The unconscious is the cellar, or perhaps a loft, for which you need a ladder to enter.
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 rechannelling 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.
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.
Freud realized that not everything in the unconscious is repressed material: some of it is just stuff that happens not 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.
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 superego. This model will be discussed later in the book.
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE
Freud suggested two opposing processes that control normal human behaviour:
1 The pleasure principle This pushes people towards immediate gratification of their wishes. It is the tendency behind all natural impulses and basic urges. It is linked to the unconscious and it is impulsive, primitive and disorganized. According to Freud, it governs us from birth and basically concerns the gratification of our sexual urges – Freud did not seem to consider other basic drives such as hunger when he was talking about this drive. The pleasure principle is always the main motive force of the unconscious.
2 The reality principle As a person matures and has to operate in a social environment, the opposing force, the reality principle, comes into play. This involves conscious, logical thinking, and it allows us to delay gratification in order to get on with everyday life.
Freud used the word ‘libido’ to describe the sexual drive, which he claimed was the driving force for most behaviour. The reality principle causes libidinal energy (i.e. sexual energy) to be redirected into safer or more socially acceptable behaviour. This unconscious redirection is called ‘sublimation’.
According to Freud, psychic conflicts arise as a result of the conflict between sexual drive (ruled by the pleasure principle) and survival (ruled by the reality principle). After a while, however, he changed his mind about the two forces being in opposition. He decided that they actually worked together because both led to a decrease in tension. This decrease in tension, he believed, was the purpose of all behaviour.
It seems typical of Freud’s pessimistic outlook on life that the ‘pleasure principle’ is actually all about avoiding tension and pain! It is not about pleasures such as love, joy, fun and friendship. Freud always tended to view any powerful emotion as negative, something that needed to be expelled in order for a person to feel comfortable. According to Freud, a person’s character is determined by the way he or she has channelled libido into more acceptable activity. If libido is blocked up without an outlet, then neuroses or other psychological problems develop. Psychoanalysis is all about finding out what urges have been blocked up, and why.
After a while, Freud discovered a problem with the idea of the pleasure principle. He found that patients who suffered from neuroses caused by trauma tended to keep on endlessly acting out the original scene in their imagination.
Small children also do this in a more concrete way, by repeatedly acting out nasty experiences. This probably gives them some sense of control over the original incident. Freud eventually began to evolve a new theory about a ‘death instinct’ as an attempt to deal with this problem.
PARAPRAXIS
‘Parapraxis’ (the plural is ‘parapraxes’) is a term often used for the now famous ‘Freudian slip’. Freud became interested in parapraxes because they occurred frequently in the lives of perfectly ‘normal’ people, and seemed to him to demonstrate that the unconscious was at work. His popular book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is all about parapraxes. The title of the book is interesting in itself because the word ‘psychopathology’ (meaning the study of abnormal mental processes) implies that Freud believed parapraxes to be symptoms of abnormality or disorder, despite their universal occurrence.
Freud identified a whole list of different forms of parapraxis, such as:
• forgetting peoples’s names
• forgetting something one intended to do
• slips of the tongue or pen
• misreading or mishearing
• losing or temporarily mislaying things
• bungled actions and accidents
• remembering things wrongly.
Freud claimed that none of these are actually innocent, accidental mistakes. They all reveal the unconscious at work on a cover-up job again, rather like the dreaming process. Thoughts that are painful or socially unacceptable are disguised by means of a Freudian slip. The slip is seen, not as a silly chance mistake, but as a subconscious mental act.
The Freudian slip… Even accidents could be interpreted as examples of parapraxis, Freud believed.
Slips of speech are often caused by the influence of something that is connected to the misspoken word by a chain of thought. Sometimes they occur when the person anticipates a taboo word coming up, or perhaps feels that the conversation is getting uncomfortably close to revealing his or her true feelings. In fact, any kind of parapraxis arises as a result of two different intentions in a person’s mind that are acting in opposition. They reveal what the person is really thinking.
According to Freud, all parapraxes occur in this way and if they are analysed this will nearly always prove to be the case. However, it is not possible actually to prove that his theory is true. Other psychologists argued that parapraxes are caused by factors such as fatigue, excitement or distraction. Freud admitted that this was true, but insisted that such an explanation missed the point – such conditions simply make it easier or more likely for slips to occur.
FORGETTING PROPER NAMES
Freud gives an example where, try as he might, he could not recall a place name. In the end he had to ask his wife and daughter for help. They were amused, saying that of course he would forget a name like that – the place was called Nervi. Freud had quite enough to do with nerves in his daily work, and so pushed the name out of his mind. Very often, a wrong proper name will intrude in place of the correct one. When this occurs, the two are usually connected by a train of associations. The subconscious wants to forget the correct name because it has painful or embarrassing associations. Or it may just be connected with a topic one has had enough of, such as work, as in the example given by Freud.
FORGETTING CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
Many childhood memories are not consciously recalled by the adult. Freud observed that children frequently remembered trivial events rather than important ones. He says that both these facts indicate a process of displacement going on – the child substitutes a trivial memory in order to conceal a painful one. Freud calls this type of memory a ‘concealing memory’, and says that they form a large part of our total memory bank. He seems to overlook the possibility that sometimes children might seem to remember trivia because for them those are actually the things that have assumed importance.
ACCIDENTS
Even accidents, such as tripping over, are parapraxes. Freud says that they show unconscious feelings being expressed in a physical way. We all know examples of people who seem to get themselves injured almost on purpose in order to be able to lap up attention. Conversely, we sometimes ‘accidentally’ hurt another person when we feel hostile towards them, or we may break an object such as a hideous vase because of a subconscious desire to get rid of it.
Freud gives various examples of ‘bungled actions’. For example, Freud forbade one of his patients to contact a girl with whom he was madly in love. All the same, the patient accidentally used her telephone number instead when he was trying to contact Freud. This shows that bungled actions, like other errors, are often used to fulfil wishes that a person is consciously trying to deny.
SLIPS OF THE TONGUE
These are very common and one can easily observe amusing ones in everyday conversation; for example: ‘He entrusted his money to a savings crank.’ This category also includes Spoonerisms, where bits of words are swapped around; for example: ‘The student had tasted the whole worm.’ The slip of the tongue can often be seen to be transparently covering up what the person would really like to have said.
FORGETTING FOREIGN WORDS
Freud said that we are less likely to forget a word completely in our native language – a slip is more likely to appear instead. He goes on at great length about an occasion when he was trying to remember the name of an artist called Signorelli. He kept getting Botticelli or Boltraffio in his mind instead. His explanation for this covers about six pages in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and involves a complicated diagram with such labels as ‘death and sexuality’ and ‘repressed thoughts’. It is all very interesting and ingenious, but somehow the process seems rather unlikely. Is the unconscious really that desperate to conceal fairly trivial thoughts? And how does it work out such a complex series of connections so quickly? The problem with this type of analysis is that it relies mainly on the free-association process. This method usually leads quite rapidly to the uncovering of supposedly ‘significant material’, even if you start with an innocent, neutral word.
SLIPS OF THE PEN
These, like slips of the tongue, are common and easily recorded. Freud tells of an incident when he came home from holiday in September, but wrote the date as ‘October 20th’. The explanation was that he was experiencing a lull in his work after the holiday period and had a client booked in to see him on the October date. So the slip was a kind of wish-fulfilment process, of wishing that the date would hurry up and arrive.
JOKES AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Freud was also interested in the way jokes demonstrate the workings of the unconscious. His book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious appeared in 1905. In it is quite a collection of jokes, mainly Jewish ones (unfortunately, many of the jokes do not translate very well). The main point he makes was that some of the mechanisms used in jokes are the same as those used in dreams. For example, one word is substituted for another, or condensation is used. He claimed once again that repression and sublimation of unconscious material is taking place.
Freud identified two categories of jokes:
1 Tendentious jokes This type is dependent on indirect expression of hostility or sexual urges. The category would include the classic mother-in-law joke and the dirty joke.
2 Innocent jokes These depend on verbal ingenuity. The category would include puns and riddles.
The first category is the one in which Freud was chiefly interested. They allow the joker to get around internal inhibition by expressing an urge indirectly. For example, schoolboy humour often involves rude jokes which are told to relieve adolescent tension. The urge being indirectly expressed may be either sexual or aggressive. Freud eventually claimed that all jokes are in fact tendentious, the innocent ones being a kind of foreplay, leading up to the tendentious ones!
All Freud’s work on dreams, the pleasure and reality principles and parapraxes is actually looking at ways in which the ego defends itself. If the ego finds an idea too painful, embarrassing or soci
ally unacceptable, the idea is repressed. The unconscious then finds endless little ways of letting the ideas leak back out.
SUMMARY
Today we have focused on Freud’s evolving ideas about the unconscious and how certain human phenomena such as dreams, slips of the tongue and even jokes can offer glimpses into its murkiest recesses and our normally hidden urges and desires. For Freud, dreams in particular were a key link between the unconscious and conscious mind – he famously called them the ‘royal road to the unconscious’.
As we have seen, Freud’s exploration of phenomena such as dreams and jokes began to take psychoanalysis away from the confines of abnormal psychology and towards an understanding of human psychology more generally. He began to develop ‘models’ of the human psyche and argued that there were psychic drives, principles and mechanisms that were common to all human beings, whatever the state of their mental wellbeing.
Freud’s understanding of the unconscious still largely shapes the way most of us think of human psychology today, even if many of his ideas have been adjusted, challenged, or even dismantled by the ‘experts’.
FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. What is the title of Freud’s 1900 ground-breaking publication about dreams?
a) The Analysis of Dreams
b) The Interpretation of Dreams
c) The Royal Road to the Unconscious
d) None of the above
2. Which of the following statements does not describe Freud’s understanding of dreams?
a) Dreams can offer insights into the unconscious
b) Dreams are all about wish fulfilment