The Interpretation of Dreams

Even dreams that are simple to interpret, such as typical dreams, are still marked by “the essential characteristics which conspicuously differentiate a dream from our waking thoughts, and this difference demands explanation” (333). Where the previous chapter has focused on the processes within the dream that give rise to its content, this chapter focuses on the deeper psychic processes that create and surround dreams themselves. Freud looks to several dynamics to investigate this.

A. The Forgetting of Dreams

Memory seems “peculiarly incapable of retaining dreams” (334). Instead, we forget dreams or only recall fragments. The narrative order of dreams is often added afterward, such that the most important components of a dream to interpretation may in fact be points added in recall. However, as Freud has noted elsewhere, even the minutiae of dreams are relevant to their interpretation: “Every analysis will afford evidence of the fact that the most insignificant features of the dream are indispensable to interpretation” (335). Furthermore, secondary elaboration is itself subject to censorship and other subconscious forces and can as such be worked into the interpretation. In fact, patient doubt of the events of dreams is generally a sign that a dream-thought is being approached, since censorship works on the dreamer’s waking mind and blocks access to the undesired wish the dream expresses.

The forgetting of dreams is just such a process of psychic censorship. In part due to this, the forgotten dream thoughts can be recovered through analysis, as analysis breaks down this resistance to subconscious thoughts. Logically, since dreams are forgotten in wakefulness due to censorship, censorship must be reduced in sleep, or else dreams would never occur: “The state of sleep makes dream-formation possible by reducing the endopsychic censorship” (344).

Here, Freud argues that the memory of one’s dreams is fickle—most dream content is lost to memory. However, even insignificant elements of dreams have access to the central dream thought due to the process of condensation and overdetermination that occurs in dreams. Also, Freud notes that if a patient is resistant to a dream interpretation or a recovered dream thought, this is a signal that the analysis is on the right track, since conscious censorship of dream thoughts would naturally block these thoughts, causing the patient’s reaction.

Freud’s focus on the mutability of memory is another example of foresight into later psychological discoveries, namely the work of Elizabeth Loftus and other scholars on the reconstructed nature of memories. In short, we do not recall events exactly as they occur but reconstruct a version of events relevant to our context each time we remember, and at this moment of reconstruction it is possible to implant falsified components of memory into the psyche, which can be recalled later.

Although Freud’s contention that memory cannot be trusted is therefore correct, his contention that patient denial of a memory signals resistance to a true event is problematic. This perspective led to the repressed memory panic of the 1980s in the United States, when Freudian psychotherapists implanted false memories of child abuse into the minds of children due to their belief in the validity of Freud’s concept of repression.

B. Regression

The dream is a wish fulfillment, with its manifest content governed by censorship of this wish, condensation of its symbolic content, and psychic structuring for intelligibility (secondary elaboration). Once these facts of the dream are uncovered, “the dream must be inserted in the context of the psychic life” (349). In what part of the psyche, in other words, do dreams occur?

Freud wishes to locate dream creation in a certain area or stage of the “psychic apparatus” (351). This apparatus, distinct from the anatomical substrate of the brain, is the complete network of psychic processes, a “compound instrument, the component parts of which we shall call [...] psi-systems” (351). Freud assumes the event of dreaming must inhabit a certain step in this apparatus’s sequence, which is most generally from sensation or stimulus (input) to action (output).

Freud’s discussion here of a psychic apparatus divorced from the brain today might seem unscientific. However, at the birth of psychology, the mind’s emergence from the brain was a wholly unknown process, such that the best process to understand the mind was to observe its activities with no reference to their anatomical grounds. Throughout its history and still today, psychology remains the study of the brain as it is manifested in thought and behavior, as opposed to neuroscience, which investigates the brain on a biological basis. Freud’s approach here of conceptualizing the mind or psyche as an apparatus is in fact a trademark of psychological modeling.

The most prominent of such examples is that of cognitive psychology, which examines the mind as a system that takes in stimulus, performs some cognitive process on this stimulus that is largely unknown, and then creates an output. Freud acknowledges exactly this: “All our psychic activities proceed from (inner or outer) stimuli and terminate in innervations” (351). The working metaphor of the brain in this discipline is as a computer, and this conceptualization has been very fruitful, birthing such fields as contemporary cognitive science and artificial intelligence models.

Freud notes that within dreams, “the criticizing instance [of the psyche: censorship and logical structuring processes] maintains closer relations with the consciousness than the instance criticized [dream-works]” (353). The criticizing instance is therefore “closer to the motor end” (351): It has to do with making choices and actions. The last system at the motor end is the preconscious, “the system behind it we call the unconscious [...] because it has no access to consciousness except through the preconscious” (353).

In describing the relationships of the conscious and unconscious through the preconscious, Freud lays out a first fledgling psychodynamic model, which he will build upon in future work. Here, dream thoughts arrive from the unconscious and are filtered through the preconscious, which censors and shapes them into dream content, some of which then makes it into conscious thought. Such a simplified, mechanical model greatly assists in understanding Freud’s general idea about dreams: They are unconscious thoughts distorted in order to enter the conscious mind.

Dream content progresses from the unconscious to consciousness, which mirrors progression from stimulus to action. Dreams also have a "regressive" character, as they do not impact motor impulses but are phenomena of perception (we see dream images, hear dream sounds, etc.), and perception is at the stimulus end of the psychic system. This is not a phenomenon of dreams alone, as memory is also such a regressive call upon perception. Later, Freud will characterize this regressive direction of the dream as a result of its failure to pass directly from the unconscious through the preconscious to the consciousness, since the preconscious shuts down during sleep, having “presumably protected itself against invasion” (375) of dreams. Through images in memory, the dream “acquires representability,” thereby “drawing attention to itself, and [...] [so] being remarked [on] by consciousness” (376).

Dreams progress from thoughts (latent content) to images (manifest content), calling on memory to do so. However, since this process is regressive, moving backward from thought as output to stimulus as input, the process of constructing a dream is not in fact the formulation of thought content but the access of raw, preconscious memory content at the level of its individual images. Such regression from thought to raw memory is what allows dreams their access to repressed memory material, such as memories of infancy: “Dreaming is on the whole an act of regression to the earliest relationships of the dreamer, a resuscitation of his childhood, of the impulses which were then dominant and the modes of expression which were then available” (359).

The simplicity of Freud’s model may cause some confusion here. Freud claims that dreams progress from one end of his model to the other, like a regular input-to-output trajectory. However, once created, dreams also move regressively toward memory, which he sees as "stored" closer to the input area of the apparatus. In reality, the relationship between sensation and action, as well as the process of memory recall, are complex and cannot be reduced to one-way linear relations of which some are "regressive." In fact, standard models of perception view the process as more of a feedback loop between sensing and processing structures.

Another confusion here may be Freud’s outlook on how memories interact with dreams. He claims that dreams call upon memory content, essentially entering the memory-storage area and manipulating individual components of memories (individual images) in order to produce a dream that jumbles this content into a new formulation. Today, scientists would reject the concept that such a process is possible in memory. Memory does not act like a filing system of individual images retrieved from the real world but is a much more enactive process.

C. The Wish-Fulfilment

In some dreams, the wish is plain, in others, it is concealed. These wishes originate in varied aspects of life: in the day preceding the dream, where they are unsatisfied or rejected, in purely unconscious wishes, or from urges arising during sleep.

In adults, the unconscious wish is by far the strongest motivator of dreams. Conscious wishes only arise in dreams when they connect to deeper unconscious drives. Furthermore, “as we learn from the psychological investigation of the neuroses [...] the wish manifested in the dream must be an infantile wish” (362, emphasis added). Many wishes in dreams are those arrived at during infancy, which are then repressed, as all unconscious material is. However, these wishes are “immortal” and “indestructible” (362), lasting forever in our psyche. These wishes are also completely active during sleep, when much of consciousness is inactive.

Throughout this book, Freud has suggested that dreams give insight into the workings of the neurotic mind, since dreams essentially enact a temporary release from sanity when our unconscious is capable of running free. Here, in discussing the actual dreams of neurotics, Freud adds that the unconscious wishes they present always relate to repressed infantile content. This is another example of Freud’s emphasis on the importance of infantile experiences throughout our psychic life.

Freud also gives a first intimation of his belief in the unconscious’s primacy over the conscious mind in psychic life, an argument he will return to in more detail later in the chapter. Freud speaks of the unconscious wishes as “ever-active and, as it were, immortal wishes” (361). Our conscious experience, on the other hand, is fleeting and mortal—in short, the unconscious serves as a sort of personal prehistory.

Dreams make use of memories of recent experience, as the unconscious wish can “exert an influence [on the conscious mind] only by establishing touch with a harmless idea already belonging to the preconscious” (368)—a sort of psychic stowaway. Freud calls this “transference” (368), as in transference of a wish from an unconscious thought to a conscious one. Wishes “prefer” (369)—another example of Freud’s attribution of independent agency onto the unconscious—to use conscious thoughts with little existing association in the psyche, making recent memories a particularly useful candidate and explaining their common presence in dreams.

Why must dreams be wish fulfillments? A wish is a drive toward “a repetition of that perception which is connected with the satisfaction of the need” (370)—for example, a repetition of the perception of satiety which satisfies the need for food, experienced as hunger. All thought emerges from these basic drives. Producing a mental image of the satisfying perception is the “shortest regressive path” (371) to wish fulfillment. This is an imaginative activity that children regularly engage in but is “abandoned as inappropriate” in adulthood (371), except in the case of hallucinatory disorders.

Freud attributes such disorders to the constant activity of this imaginative process. In the healthy mind, this mental behavior is “abandoned to nocturnal life [...] Dreaming is a fragment of the superseded psychic life of the child” (371). Preconscious blockage of these thoughts to enter waking consciousness is as such “the guardian of our psychic health” (371), and these thoughts are only allowed free rein during sleep, where motility and the risk of acting on them is nullified.

In this section Freud argues that the psyche creates hallucinatory realities to satisfy drives, and that this is the basic substrate of even complex mentation. Furthermore, this activity, which is typical of childhood imaginative play, is abandoned in adulthood and exists only in adult dreams. This perspective is a precursor to Freud’s later ideas of the different psychic dynamics governing mentation throughout our development: the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle."

In childhood, we are driven solely by our pleasures, an expression of id—what Freud terms the wholly selfish, animalistic drives of every individual. As we develop, we become aware that behaviors that completely satisfy our pleasures do not mesh with reality, leading us to develop an ego, which is the intermediary between the id and the pressures of society to conform (what Freud calls the superego). The ego is driven by the reality principle, which works to satisfy the desires of the id within the bounds of reality.

D. Waking Caused by Dreams. The Function of Dreams. The Anxiety Dream.

Dreams can alert the consciousness and thereby cause wakefulness. This arousal occurs due to the “intensity” of the dream (378), which can be a “cause of disturbance” (378) to consciousness, causing it to momentarily activate, “like driving off a fly in our sleep” (378). This reaction causes a lapse of the intensity of the wish, as the preconscious is awakened and able to suppress the subconscious, which has free rein during sleep. This suppression in turn allows conscious arousal to recede and the dreamer to fall back asleep.

Since all events in the unconscious are immortal—“The mortification suffered thirty years ago operates [...] during all these thirty years as though it were a recent experience” (378)—the very function of dreams is to serve as a release valve of unconscious content that would grow too powerful if never entertained: It “discharges the excitation of the [unconscious and] acts as a safety-valve for the latter, and at the same time, by a slight outlay of waking activity, secures the sleep of the preconscious” (379). This rest for the preconscious occurs because the usual role of the preconscious system is to suppress unconscious urges, which the dream relieves. Freud mentions he can “think of no other function for dreams” (380), refuting an interpretation by another scholar that resembles modern practice theory.

When dreams awaken the sleeper, this serves as an indication of a need for psychic or behavioral adjustment. Anxiety dreams exhibit this principle. Anxiety is an avoidant behavior that serves as “fortress” (381) against the object of one’s fears. When the preconscious is deactivated, such subconscious anxieties may reveal themselves. Freud gives several examples of such dreams, noting their consistent sexual nature, especially among children experiencing confusion around developing sexuality.

Freud provides an explanation as to why we sometimes wake from our dreams, suggesting that events of high intensity in the dream arouse the preconscious, which suppresses them and allows the dreamer to fall back asleep. Notably, these mechanisms of push and pull in arousal resemble the sympathetic and parasympathetic activities of the nervous system, a system Freud was aware of via his early training in medicine. His concept extending such processes to sleep, however, is new.

From the idea that intense unconscious events arouse the preconscious, Freud proposes that the very function of dreams is to slowly release the intense content of the unconscious, allowing the preconscious to maintain control of this powerful aspect of the psyche during wakefulness. As such, Freud ultimately argues that dreams are a healthy and necessary part of our psychic life.

E. The Primary and Secondary Processes—Repression

Freud summarizes the theoretical work so far and then focuses on explaining the interplay of normal and abnormal psychic processes in dreams. Dreams make logical associations between pieces of content, but these are not associations produced by the dream itself. They are instead associations made in conscious thought but not noticed, which Freud calls the “preconscious train” of thought (389). Such thoughts may disappear or continue preconsciously. If maintained, unconscious associations may take them over, “establish[ing] a connection between it and the unconscious wish, and transfer[ing] to it the energy inherent in the unconscious wish” (390).

Transformed by the unconscious, these thoughts can become abnormal through one of multiple possible routes. They may be attached to other relevant unconscious ideas and condensed. They may be compromised in the service of this condensation or put in adjacency with contradictory thoughts. Where some dreams maintain associations logical in waking thought, those that do not are deemed abnormal.

Such “abnormal psychic elaboration of a normal train of thought takes place only when the latter has been used for the transference of an unconscious wish [...] from the infantile life [which] is in a state of repression” (392). Freud defines repression by noting that wishes can result in two processes: the hallucination of images that satisfy the wish (the "primary process" [394]), or genuine activity in pursuit of wish fulfillment, be it psychic or physical (the “secondary process” [394]). The secondary process requires free access to all memories and, when alighting on memories that cause pain, inhibits mental access to them. This is repression.

Since infantile wishes are counter to adult desires, they are regularly repressed but remain in the unconscious mind. When these wishes build up in the subconscious, they can “break through in some form of [...] symptom-formation” (397), leading to neurosis or hysteria. Through attachment to the primary process, they create delusions. As such, abnormal thoughts are “are not really falsifications of our normal procedure, or defective thinking, but the modes of operation of the psychic apparatus when freed from inhibition” (397, emphasis added)—i.e., broken free of natural repression.

Freud “asserts with absolute certainty that it can only be sexual wish-impulses from the infantile life, which therefore supply the motive-power for all psychoneurotic symptom-formation” (397). This does not mean that those with "incorrect" sexualities become neurotic, but that those who in adult life do not accept the sexual desires they expressed in childhood—a time at which Freud argues all people are bisexual (397)—can become neurotic. This is a prime example of the criticism often aimed at Freud, that his entire theory of psychic pathology rests on sexual themes—a note that is certainly not borne out in contemporary science.

Overall, Freud labors to describe when the normal psychic processes of dreams become abnormal and signal disorder in psychic life. This requires him to first describe how the unconscious mind kidnaps preconscious content in order to subsume its "energy." Although this is a normal process, it can become abnormal when attached to repressed childhood sexual desires, such as the Oedipal complex. When this happens, the conscious mind represses content associated with these painful and undesirable memories. This repression of these infantile wishes results in neurosis. Freud gives a definition of neurosis as psychic symptoms arising from the repression of wishes associated with infantile sexuality and therefore claims that dreams that express these wishes are signals of neurosis in the patient. Importantly, none of these concepts are maintained by contemporary clinical psychology.

F. The Unconscious and Consciousness—Reality

Consciousness is not the be all and end all of thought, as “[t]he most complicated and the most accurate operations of thought [...] may take place without arousing consciousness” (401) and occur unconsciously instead. Physicians must be aware of this reality, as symptoms that manifest in the conscious mind from unconscious material are “only a remote psychic product” (401) of the complete unconscious condition. When we acknowledge the importance of the unconscious in conscious mental life, we can better understand the value of dreams as a source of inspiration and creativity: “The dream [i]s a form of expression for impulses to which a resistance was attached during the day” (403), which gathers power from unconscious associations to bring forth expanded ideas during sleep.

So if this is the unconscious, what is consciousness? “None other than that of a sense-organ for the perception of psychic qualities” (404), which lies mostly in the application of attention. When attending to thoughts themselves, the consciousness is thereby only allowed examination of thoughts the preconscious does not censor, thereby structuring the divide between conscious and unconscious realms.

Are our wishes, as we see them in dreams, what we really desire? According to Freud, not as we experience them: “Psychic reality is a special form of existence which must not be confounded with material reality” (407). What we wish for in our mind may not be what we truly wish to see become reality. We should therefore be neither ashamed nor fearful of our dreams, as neither they nor our unconscious wishes are our fault: “Actions, above all, [and not thoughts] deserve to be placed in the front rank” (408) in questions of character, Freud asserts.

Freud offers some final thoughts on the role of the unconscious, arguing it is the true basis of psychic life and should be respected as such. Scholars and physicians who do not respect the role of the unconscious are doomed to misapprehend the issues of their patients or the qualities of the mind. Many scholars of Freud’s day did not accept even the existence of the unconscious, and today we are not much further. Today, our understanding of the brain as an information-processing machine indicates that there are endless mental processes of which we are not, and in fact cannot, be aware. These, however, include largely mechanical aspects of data processing, not the emotional, mythological, and symbolic center of the psyche Freud claims.

Alongside our quest to understand if we have an unconscious (and not, simply, subconscious mental processes) is our contemporary quest for a definition of consciousness. Here Freud defines it simply: the sense organ for perceiving the unconscious. Definitions today are not so simple and vary widely, but Freud’s early focus on limiting the consciousness not to some divine aspect of humanity but as emergent from processes of the brain is truly innovative for his time.

In closing, Freud adds another layer to the value of dreams in our psychic life: They are sources of our creativity. Freud returns full circle to the claims of ancient scholars that dreams offer inspiration from the gods. Freud alters this statement: Dreams offer inspiration from our own personal deity, the unconscious. In a clinical turn, he also suggests that those individuals who are afraid of either their dreams or unconscious have no reason to be so. Dreams contain strange and startling content for all people, but this is in fact a natural process of our psychological well-being, as earlier chapters have outlined. We therefore have no need to be ashamed of our dreams, as it is our conscious choices that determine our character.