50 Psychology Classics (24 page)

It is surprising how much had been written about dreams before Freud. He began his book with a lengthy survey of the literature, going as far back as Aristotle and
giving due credit to more contemporary figures such as Louis Alfred Maury, Karl Friedrich Burdach, Yves Delage, and Ludwig Strumpell. Summing up his reading, he noted, “In spite of being concerned with the subject over many thousands of years, scientific understanding of the dream has not got very far.”

From a conception of dreams as “an inspiration from the divine,” humans had arrived at a scientific view that they were simply the result of “sensory excitation.” While sleeping, for instance, we hear a noise outside, and that noise becomes woven into the dream in order to make sense of it. According to this explanation, common dreams such as finding ourselves naked are the result of our bedclothes falling off, flying dreams are caused by the rising and falling of the lungs, and so on.

But Freud felt that sensory stimuli did not explain all dreams. Physical stimuli while we were asleep could certainly shape what we dreamed about, but they could equally be ignored and not incorporated into our dreams. There was also the ethical or moral dimension to many dreams that did not suggest merely physical causes.

Freud's interest in dreams originally came via his work with people with psychoses. He realized that the content of patients' dreams were a good indicator of their state of mental health, and that dreams were like other symptoms in being capable of interpretation. By the time he came to write
The Interpretation of Dreams
, Freud had clinically interpreted over 1,000 dreams.

Among his conclusions were:

Dreams have a preference for using impressions from days just past, yet they also have access to early childhood memories.

The method of memory selection in dreams is different to that of the waking mind—the unconscious mind generally does not focus on major events, but remembers the trivial or unnoticed.

Despite their reputation as being random or absurd, in fact dreams have a unifying motive that easily pulls disparate people, events, and sensations into one “story.”

Dreams are always about the self.

Dreams can have multiple layers of meaning, and a number of ideas can be condensed into a single image. Equally, ideas can be displaced (a familiar person can become someone else, a house takes on a different purpose, and so on).

Nearly all dreams are “wish fulfillments,” that is, they reveal a deep motivation or desire that wants to be fulfilled, often a wish going back to earliest childhood.

While some writers believed that the memory of daily events was the prime cause of dreams, Freud came to the view that both physical sensations while asleep and memories of what happened during the day were “like a cheap material always available and put to use whenever needed.” They were, in
short, not the
cause
of dreams but simply elements used by the psyche in its creation of meaning.

Having concluded that dreams were the arena in which the unconscious mind could express itself, and that they were primarily concocted to represent the fulfillment of a wish, Freud wondered why the wish was so poorly articulated, so wrapped up in strange symbols and images. Why the need to avoid the obvious?

The answer could be found in the fact that many of our wishes are repressed, and may only have a chance of reaching our consciousness if they are somewhat disguised. A dream can seem like the opposite of what we wish for, because we may be defensive about or want to cover up many of our wishes, so the only way a dream can make an issue known is by raising it in its opposite sense. Freud explained this phenomenon of “dream distortion” by analogy: A political writer may criticize a ruler, but in doing so may endanger himself. The writer therefore has to fear the ruler's censorship, and so “moderates and distorts the expression of his opinion.” With dreams, if our psyche wants to give us a message, it may only be able to get it across by censoring it to make it more palatable, or by dressing it up as something else. The reason we so easily forget dreams, he believed, is that the conscious self wants to reduce the impact of the unconscious on its domain, the waking life.

One of Freud's key points was that dreams are always self-centered. When other people appear in a dream, often they are merely symbols of ourselves or symbolize what another person means to
us
. Freud believed that whenever a strange figure entered his dreamscape, the person undoubtedly represented some aspect of himself that could not be expressed in waking consciousness. He wondered about all the stories in history of someone being told to do something in a dream, perhaps given a wise urging that proved to be correct. Dreams can forcefully express an empowering message that someone is wont to suppress during waking consciousness—and that message is always about
them,
not family or society or any other social influence.

Freud's psychoanalysis of patients led him to the belief that neuroses evolved from repressed sexual desires, and that dreams were also expressions of these repressed feelings. It was in
The Interpretation of Dreams
that Freud first discussed Sophocles' play
Oedipus the King
to support his idea of a universal tendency that a child is sexually attracted to one parent and wants to vanquish the other—what was later termed the “Oedipus complex.”

Freud told of a significant event from his childhood. Before going to bed one night he broke one of his parents' cardinal rules and wet himself in their bedroom. As part of a general rebuke, his father muttered, “Nothing will
come of the boy.” This remark must have hit him hard, Freud admitted, as references to the scene had been a recurring motif in his dreams into adulthood, usually in connection with his achievements. In one of these dreams, for instance, it was now Freud's father who urinated in front of him. It was as if, Freud said, he wanted to tell his father, “You see, something did become of me.” This competitor for his mother's affections had now been put in his place, complete with the shameful image of illicit urination.

In Freud's cosmology, civilization barely kept a lid on our instincts, and sex was the most powerful of these. Dreams were therefore much more than idle nighttime entertainments—in revealing our unconscious motivations they were a key to understanding human nature.

Freud famously wrote that there were three great humiliations in human history: Galileo discovering that the Earth was not the center of the universe; Darwin discovering that humans were not the center of creation; and Freud's own discovery that we were not as in charge of our own minds as we believed.

This attack on the idea of human free will inevitably brought damnation, particularly in America, and as a result the whole of psychoanalysis was painted as unscientific. Though Freud was an atheist, it was pointed out that psychoanalysis had taken on the aura of a religion, creating a whole “culture of the couch” that Woody Allen satirized so well. Not only did Freudian therapy have too great a dependence on the psychoanalyst, there was a lack of standard procedures and verifiable outcomes, and little evidence of effectiveness in healing people. Neurology even discounted the idea that dreams could be linked to desire or motivation. In this climate, Freud was quietly bypassed on the reading lists of university psychology classes, and the number of professional psychoanalysts dwindled. By the early 1990s,
Time
magazine felt it appropriate to ask on its cover: “Is Freud dead?”

Today, if you visit a psychologist or psychiatrist, you may not be asked about your dreams or your past at all; these are deemed irrelevant next to cognitive psychology's more precise methods of changing your mental state. Yet today's practitioners too easily forget their debt to Freud's original “talking cure” of listening to and analyzing the content of a patient's mind, and his insight that a person can simply be sabotaged by the irrational within. In addition, recent research at the Royal London School of Medicine has lent cautious support to Freud's ideas on dreams. Brain scan imaging shows that they are not simply the by-product of random neuron firings; in fact, the limbic and paralimbic areas of the brain, which control the emotions, desires, and motivations, are very active during deep sleep. Dreams are therefore a higher mental function related to motivation, although the jury is out on whether this proves Freud's theory that they exist for wish fulfillment.