Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud’s assessment of dreams was a revolution in understanding the psyche of the human mind. He made the “unconscious” the foundation of his psychoanalytic theories, and sexuality was a huge component in his analysis of the unconscious. He was born in 1856 and had a career in the treatment of nervous disorders. He also studied hypnosis. He is well known for his idea that sexual frustration is at the root of all nervous disorders. He alienated himself from his contemporaries in many instances because he took the idea to such an extreme level. His opponents called him intolerant, for he did not deviate from his ideas about psychotherapy, and his followers called him passionate for the truth.
Freud was met with much criticism. His relationship with Carl Jung and several other contemporaries dissolved over differences in ideas about psychotherapy. He was quite unbending in his convictions. However, if you ask anyone on the street who discovered the unconscious, dreams or using dreams to understand oneself, almost everyone would reply that Freud was the father of these concepts. Of course this is not historically accurate, for the word unconscious appeared in the English language as early as 1751 and many other writers had speculated on such things as dreams long before Freud was alive. Freud was a bit arrogant and helped create this image for himself by not acknowledging previous work by others who came before him or the work of his colleagues. He claimed to be the first to truly examine dreams, discounting previous efforts by others, and this has echoed throughout time until the present day, even though it is not true.
Freud believed dreams were of the utmost importance in understanding the nature of a patient’s mental illness. He was a supporter of Plato’s idea in 400 B.C. that our beast nature appeared in dreams, uncontrolled and easily expressed in dreams. His first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1899, although the date was depicted as 1900 by the publisher so his views did not appear to be emerging from an antiquated time period, but instead depicting the new ideas of the 1900s.
Freud divided dreams into two levels. The first level was the manifest content, or that which one could consciously recall. Freud thought this material was not important and had no meaning or significance. The second level was the latent content, or that which remains unconscious, like the true reasons for the dream that are not known to the conscious mind. These were the unconscious wishes and fantasies which have not been lived out in the physical life. Freud believed that the manifest content was a cleaned up version of the latent content, which was raw and crude.
Freud introduced the idea of the censor, a sentinel in oneself that prevents primal and crude material from getting into the conscious mind, and also puts unacceptable conscious material into the unconscious. This is called repression. During sleep, the censor is not quite as alert as usual, so through dreams it is possible for the language of the latent content of the unconscious to be translated into cleaned up language of manifest content in the conscious. This transformation is called dream work. Freud also concluded that latent content is always more extensive than the manifest content, therefore a process called condensation takes place. When something in the dream that is unimportant is exaggerated, this is called displacement. Secondary revision is the term Freud gives to the process of the mind organizing the dream into an intelligible story, or sequence of events. This creates the dream façade. He believed that secondary revision did not always happen in every dream, and that is why some dreams ended up disjointed and unintelligible. He believed that this process of secondary revision happens before the manifest content of the dream appears.
Freud first discussed symbolism in dreams in his fourth edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. Others in the same field were far more knowledgeable than Freud on the topic of dream symbols, but he caught up to them later. He believed that a symbol in a dream was a substitute for something else which came from the unconscious.
Freud’s methods of dream interpretation consisted of two main techniques. First was the symbolic interpretation of the dream. The other was the decoding method in which dream symbols were signs that coincided with a fixed key, like a dream dictionary. He worked backwards from the manifest content to the latent content by asking the patient what the pieces of the dream meant to him or her by association, finding the symbology, and eventually finding the latent content. Freud would put before the dreamer a few different possibilities for the symbol, and the dreamer would pick one that he or she most resonated with.
Freud often had his patients report the same dream twice in order to find the differences or changes in the manifest content. In this way he could find the weak spots in the dream’s disguise and also find the strongest points that did not change in the first report. He wanted all the information on manifest content if more than one dream were reported in one night, too. He believed they were complimentary and he could find similarities between them in order to decipher what the unconscious messages were.
Freud did not believe that dreams function in a problem-solving capacity. He did believe, however, that by examining dreams, repressed emotional problems could be addressed. He believed that dreams were also like safety valves to release pent up psychological tensions, and thus wish fulfillment dreams were the result.
Freud believed that there were four possible origins for wish fulfillment dreams: 1) consciously remembered wishes that were aroused during the day but left unfulfilled, 2) wishes that arose during the day but, because of their unacceptability, were repressed into the unconscious, 3) wishes arising during the night stimulated by such bodily needs as hunger or urination, and 4) wishes originating in the unconscious that are incapable of ever passing beyond the censorship into conscious awareness. These were often called infantile dreams, or they represented childlike wish fulfillment for things one cannot have. Freud also coined the phrase counter-wish fulfillment dreams. These are the dreams where frustration is experienced because the wish is not realized. He believed these dreams revealed a masochistic nature in the patient. He later believed that these actually were truly wish fulfillment dreams, but the inner censor had failed to do the translation correctly.
Freud was perplexed by telepathic dreams and other sorts of very clear dreams where mental faculties were present. He felt that these dreams were not true dreams and that they were dream fantasies, which are not necessarily disguising latent unconscious wishes. These dreams were afterthoughts of the conscious mind and weren’t really dreams at all. Any dream that was reasonable was not useful for analysis in Freud’s view. He believed that true dreams were devoid of reasoning or mental reflecting.
Freud never personally had a telepathic dream, but he regularly encountered people who did. He thought perhaps telepathic dreams were an exception to the way dreams were normally constructed and translated. He believed that sleep provides favorable conditions for telepathy, and that is what it truly is, not dreams. He believed these were separate functions. He believed that the occult was a viable field of study, but refrained from engaging in psychic study because he did not want to discredit the field of psychoanalysis. The occult always fascinated him, however, and he wished he could conduct experiments in the field. He was fascinated by the psychic abilities displayed in some subjects, and thought that it was an entirely different field of study. He made a comment in a letter to a colleague that if he did not have such an extensive career in a scientific field, he would have gladly pursued the field of psychic research. It would be interesting to see what Freud would have done in that field.
Freud is viewed with mixed feelings in the field of psychoanalysis. It is not really known whether he was truly a genius or a self-aggrandizing user of other people’s ideas. He did have a talent for convincing people that he was the first to uncover the secrets of dreams and how they work. Perhaps he is somewhere in between these two extremes. What he did do for the study of dreams was bring professionalism and scientific focus to the field. He significantly advanced the study of dreams, even though some would say that he created unfavorable connections between dreams, neurosis, and sexuality. He often insisted that even an innocent dream disguised the Oedipus complex in the dreamer. (Oedipus was the character in mythology who slept with his own mother.) Freud assumed that all dreams were disguising sexual content unless it could be proved otherwise, so in a way, he gave dreams a bad rap. Only until late in his work did he seem to open up to other possibilities for the motivations in dreams, but by then, most of his published work attributed dreams to sexual wish fulfillment.
Sigmund Freud is most famous for his work in psychoanalysis and his study in dream interpretation. He is well-known for Freudian psychology and the Freudian theory regarding dream symbol, repression and the inner workings of the psyche. For more information on Freud’s study of dream symbolism and the unconscious, refer to his work The Interpretation of Dreams.