The Interpretation of Dreams: Sigmund Freud

 Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (O.U.P. 1999)

Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was his way of working through his personal crisis.  Ritchie Robertson, in the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of the book, refers to Freud's "creative illness." (p. x) Immediately before and during his writing of this book (which was first published in 1900), he was under much personal pressure.  His father had died in 1896 and Freud was overcome with grief which lasted some years.  Also, he was working extremely hard to provide for his family and the consequent worry brought on what we today call a breakdown, which he was to see as a breakthrough. Speaking of breaking through, I recall the concluding sentences of his paper on Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914) which runs: “This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless, it is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion.” (see here)  Fourteen years before this paper was written, Freud had worked through his illness by methodically probing his past.  The Interpretation, in short, was Freud's self-therapeutic activity by which he dealt with this existential distress.  As Robertson points out this book is "among other things, a disguised autobiography, drawing on the dreams that provided Freud with the material for self-analysis." (p. xi)

While Freud's opus is superficially about dreams, it is also an autobiography and a compendium of the fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis up until around 1900, the date of its publication.  It discusses among other things the Oedipus Complex, Repression, the struggle between Desire and Defence and a veritable wealth of case histories.  It also gives us insights into contemporary Viennese society, professional medical rivalries and, indeed anti-Semitism.

Freud's writings are easy to read as he was a consummate stylist who reworked the drafts of his writings. Peter Gay in his magisterial biography Freud: A Life For Our Time alludes to Freud's agonising over his stylistic faults and the possible lack of clarity in his new book.  (p. 104). Freud chose a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid for the front of his book.  This motto reads: "If heaven I cannot move then hell I will arouse."  This is an apt motto that he deliberately chose.  In other words, if his readers were not wholly or even partially accepting of his ideas, well, then, he must create a hellish commotion to shake them out of their reverie.  He knew he was writing insights that would provoke much reaction and not a little opposition.  Here is Gay’s commentary on this chosen line from Virgil:

Reading proofs in September 1899, he predicted to Fliess that there would be an outraged outcry, a veritable "thunderstorm" over the nonsense, the foolishness, he had produced: "Then I'll really hear from them!"  His dream book was going to leave the higher powers of Vienna unmoved; the unimaginative professors who had called his ideas a fairy tale, the bigoted bureaucrats who would not give him his professorship, were not likely to be converted to his views.  No matter: he would raise the powers of hell against them. (p. 105)

In the title The Interpretation of Dreams, it is particularly important to note the emphasis on the definite article, namely that his approach is the approach, the one and only way, the ultimate scientific approach to dreams. Note this confidence in the very opening sentence of The Interpretation:

 

My copy of this book

In the following pages, I shall provide proof that there is a psychological technique that allows us to interpret dreams, and that when this procedure is applied every dream turns out to be a meaningful psychical formation which can be given an identifiable place in what goes on within us in our waking life.  I shall further try to explain the processes that make the dream so strange and incomprehensible and infer from them the nature of the psychical forces in their combinations and conflicts, out of which the dream emerges.  (p. 6)

The Interpretation of Dreams opens with an amazingly comprehensive review of the then current literature on the subject.  One could have expected no less from the brilliant erudite Freud.  His original bibliography runs to some seventy-eight books on the subject of dreams from various philosophers, professors, psychologists and doctors - Aristotle, Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher to name but a few of the scholars on the philosophical front to the early great psychologist Wilhelm Wundt.  He also referred to sources in world literature in German, French, English and Italian. 

Beginning the book with a fairly long review of current literature was a brilliant ploy.  It showed that its author was no idle or lazy speculator, but rather a serious scholar who had read all the available material on dreams.  He realised, as he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, that this introductory chapter stood as a "shield in front of the rest" and the leisurely "walk through the dark forest of authors in this chapter served to exhibit the essential poverty of existing theories on dreams." (Gay, Peter, Freud: A Life For Our Time, London, 2006, 106) While many of these authors, he argued had caught a glimpse of the truth behind dreams, they were largely unconvincing in their arguments and conclusions.  He argued that it was necessary to begin again with him - with his own magisterial understanding of the truth behind dreams, that its structure is not that of a huge building but rather that of a "guided tour" in which Freud is our very own guide.  It is rather akin, then, to a Victorian guided tour of the modern psyche.   (Gay, p. 106.) Freud, in other words, was asserting not just that dreams have meanings open to interpretation, but that they can be interpreted only if one follows his procedure.  He was never in his life to loosen his arrogant grip on his position of authority in matters of the psyche.

The chapter headings of The Interpretation of Dreams are worth outlining here as follows as they give the reader a key not alone to the contents but also to the methodology followed:

Chapter 1 - The Scientific Literature on the Problems of Dreams.

Chapter 2 - The Method of Interpreting Dreams

Chapter 3 - The Dream Is a Wish-Fulfilment

Chapter 4 - Dream Distortion

Chapter 5 - The Material and Sources of Dreams

Chapter 6 - The Dream Work

Chapter 7 - The Psychology of The Dream Processes.

We note immediately the very assurance and self-confidence of Freud in his own scientific research in his use of the "definite article" as opposed to the less self-assured and tentative use of the "indefinite article" in all of the above chapter titles. One notes also, when consulting the text that his sixth chapter on the work done by dreams was expanded to such an extent in later editions as to become almost as long as the first five chapters taken together.

I will bring this review to a conclusion by giving a somewhat long summary of his methodology.

Freud’s Methodology

The Method of Interpreting Dreams

Here, Freud launches out into the deep on a description of his method of interpreting dreams.  He now offers a complete analysis of a model dream - that is, the dream of Irma's injection.  He begins by alluding to the widespread belief that dreams are interpretable.  Freud then contends that current "scientific theories of the dream have no room for the problem of dream-interpretation, for to them the dream is not a psychical act at all but a somatic process which makes its occurrence known by indications in the psychical apparatus."  (p. 78) However, he then unusually sides with popular or even folkloric opinion that while dreams may be on the one hand somewhat incomprehensible and absurd, on the other they can and do admit of some significance.  In his own words, we read:

A dim presentiment seems to lead it [popular opinion] to assume that the dream does possess a meaning, though a hidden one, that it stands as a substitute for another mode of thinking, and that it is only a matter of finding the right way to reveal this substitute for the hidden significance of the dream to be disclosed.  (p. 78)

He dismisses both the symbolic and decoding methods of interpreting dreams as being limited in application (the symbolic method) and that the "key" to the dream book may be very unreliable indeed (decoding method). (p. 80) He goes on to advance his own theory on a more scientific basis:

But I have come to learn better.  I have had to realise that here is another of those not-infrequent cases where an ancient, stubbornly held popular belief seems to have come closer to the truth of things than the judgement of contemporary science.  I have to maintain that dreams really do possess a meaning and that a scientific method of dream-interpretation is possible.  I came to my knowledge of this method in the following way.  (p. 80)

 

It is here, that Freud becomes remarkably interesting indeed, and it is easy to see the pattern of his developing thought on dreams.   From one of his mentors, Professor Breuer he had learned all about the cathartic method for dealing with patients suffering from hysteria. Gradually, working together virtually as collaborators, doctor and patient (Breuer and Pappenheim) devised a cathartic method that removed her symptoms. In this treatment, Breuer hypnotized Pappenheim and then asked her to try to recall the first time she had experienced a physical sensation like one of her symptoms. Upon remembering such an incident, she would give vent to its previously suppressed emotion.  Following this emotional "catharsis" the symptoms would disappear.  Here is Freud himself describing how his science of dreams is based on his experience of clinical practice:

For many years I have been occupied with unravelling certain psychopathological structures, hysterical phobias, obsessional ideas, and the like, for therapeutic purposes - in fact ever since I learned from an important contribution by Josef Breuer that for these formations, experienced as symptoms of illness, the unravelling and the cure, solution, and resolution, amount to the same thing...In the course of these psychoanalytical studies, I came up with the interpretation of dreams.  Patients who had undertaken to inform me of all of the thoughts and ideas that beset them on a certain subject told me their dreams, and in this way taught me that a dream can be interpolated into the psychical chain which, starting from a pathological idea, can be traced backwards in the memory.  This suggested that the dream itself might be treated as a symptom and that the method of interpretation developed from symptoms might be applied to dreams.  (p. 80-81)

Once the dream is regarded as a symptom, bearing in mind Breuer's cathartic method, the dreamer or analysand, working with the analyst will take each element of the dream separately, and using each element as a starting point for free association, they will together unravel the meaning of the dream. Sigmund Freud claimed to have interpreted more than a thousand dreams of his own and of his patients using his new technique.  Free association, I will remind the reader is the practice in Freudian therapy of allowing the patient to freely discuss their thoughts, feelings, memories, or words, regardless of coherence.  Concerning dreams the therapist will encourage the analysand or patient to apply free association to each of the images thrown up by the dream.  The patient is encouraged to talk without pause in a stream of words. Freud believed that this non-linear way of thinking would lead to the revelation of the unconscious mind for the analysand.  Later, he was to remark that "dreams are the Royal Road to the Unconscious."

I will leave it to readers to discover both the overt content and the covert significance of Irma’s dream in this challenging but interesting book. Altogether a ground-breaking work, and for anyone interested in psychoanalysis I would recommend it highly to begin with.  The reader will also delight in the craft of a great writer as well as get to know the main taproot of modern psychotherapy.