The Interpretation of Dreams

Some dreams, such as nightmares, seem on their surface not to be wish fulfillments. However, “our doctrine is not based upon the estimates of the obvious dream-content, but relates to the thought-content” (97, emphasis added) of the dream—thus, even a nightmare can contain a hidden wish. Freud refers to these two different streams of content as the “manifest” (obvious) and “latent” (hidden thought) content (98). Dreams disguise their latent content through manifest content, and it is in the latent content that the wish is held. Freud calls this process of disguise “distortion” (98).

To relate the purpose of distortion in dreams, Freud relates another of his own dreams: a dream of his friend’s and uncle’s faces merged with altered features, in context of the real-life situation of his own anxiety over a professorial position in contest with this friend. Freud then interprets the dream through associations with his uncle as a criminal and simpleton to indicate that the dream argues his friend is not worthy of the position, while he is. He does not believe this in real life, and as such the dream is a wish fulfillment. The distortions exist “as a means of disguise” (102) to allow the latent content of the dream—negative opinions of his friends—into waking consciousness without the rejection of these thoughts were they to arise undisguised.

In short, “wherever a wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable and disguised there must be present a tendency to defend oneself against this wish, and in consequence of this defence the wish is unable to express itself save in a distorted form” (102). Freud likens this to the expression of a coded message in political settings to avoid censorship. Freud then gives examples of several dreams of neurotic, hysteric, and anxious patients that, despite having clearly negative manifest content, can also be shown to contain latent wishes. Freud demonstrates how the factor of distortion in dreams can obscure dream content, causing horrific or fearful dreams that in reality contain wishes.

In this chapter, Freud introduces several more concepts important to both this text and his body of work as a whole. Foremost among them is distortion, as well as the concepts of latent and manifest content. Importantly, the concept of latent content offers a more codified expression of Freud’s earlier statement that dream images do not have static symbolic value, as the symbolic theory proposes. Instead, dream images conceal a personal meaning that can only be unveiled through exploration of the individual psyche, such as through free association and interpretation. Freud also focuses on the dreams of hysteric, neurotic, and anxious patients as exemplifications of how even nightmares can express latent wish content.

Although Freud’s concept of the definition of anxiety is roughly analogous to our modern understanding of the term, his use of neurotic and hysteric are not. Freud uses "neurotic" to indicate an individual suffering from any one of varied psychic afflictions resulting from excessive conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind over repressed emotions. Today, no such meaning exists, and “neurotic” simply indicates a personality trait of tendency toward negative emotion, which exists on a spectrum in all individuals. In the 19th century, "hysteria" referred to ungovernable emotional excess and was an affliction believed to be particular to women (hysteria comes from the Greek for uterus). This is not an accepted diagnosis today.

Freud’s concept of conscious censorship of dream content leading to distortion predicts later work in social psychology, namely the "cognitive dissonance" theory. This theory suggests that individuals are in psychological tension when they exhibit a behavior or desire inconsistent with their thoughts or beliefs, particularly their beliefs about themselves or their self-image. The individual will therefore invest in an attitudinal change or false narrative of reality to justify their actions. In such cases, the mind is split in two: one part accepting reality, the other averse to it and therefore inventive of a new reality. This is exactly what Freud proposes: “We should then assume that in every human being there exist, as the primary cause of dream-formation, two psychic forces (tendencies or systems), one of which forms the wish expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship over this dream-wish, thereby enforcing on it a distortion” (103). This is just one example of the many prescient claims Freud makes about human psychology in this text.