Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams late in 1899. It has outsized importance among his writings, as arguably the founding document of psychoanalysis. In his own estimation, the book contains “the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make”.
The Pelican Freud Library and a Literary Masterwork
When I first became interested in psychoanalysis, the Pelican Freud Library was the mother lode. Launched in 1973, this first English-language paperback edition of Freud’s major writings was intended for a general readership. Its colourful covers brightened many a student’s bookshelf. Psychoanalysts and bookshelves no longer have the same cachet among students, and the general reader has other priorities. But Joyce Crick’s 1999 translation has now been published in the Oxford World Classics series, certifying the book as a literary masterwork – and it deserves that status.
Though it is a treatise on dreams, Freud’s book introduced a new way of thinking about the mind that reverberated through the 20th century. Although the impact of psychoanalysis has dwindled in the Anglosphere, its ideas continue to shape how we understand mental health, therapy and human nature itself.
Dream Theories and Psychical Strangeness
Freud opens his book with an extended review of dream theories, from the ancient Greeks to more recent psychologists and philosophers. These theories speculate on how dreams relate to the preceding day’s experiences, how they respond to the stimuli that impinge on us – from outside and within – while we sleep, and why we struggle to recall them on waking. These early dream theories offered differing views on the function of dreaming and the sleeping brain’s capacities. Some viewed dreams as works of creative imagination and prophecy, whereas others wrote them off as residues of a weakened mind.
To Freud, what is fundamental to dreams is their “psychical strangeness”. They appear to take place in a different location from waking consciousness: in a different theatre, not merely under a dimmer light. In addition to their enigmatic quality, Freud emphasises how dreams lack sense and logic. The dream is incoherent, without compunction it unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse. Despite their apparent incoherence, dreams should not be denied “the dignity of being a process of the psyche”. They are meaningful products of a sophisticated mental process, rather than the somatic froth of sleep. “The madness of the dream may not be without method,” Freud writes.
Dream Interpretation and Wish Fulfilment
If dreams are intelligently crafted, it should be possible to decode them. Contrary to a common misunderstanding and the enduring popularity of dream dictionaries, Freud argues this should be done without resorting to a collection of fixed symbols. An old song jokes that “a thing’s a phallic symbol if it’s longer than it’s wide”, but Freud maintained that dreams can only be understood by exploring the dreamer’s personal associations to their content. These associations allow it to be located in an autobiographically meaningful “psychical chain”.
Freud contended that a wish can always be found at the dream’s core or “navel”, and that the dream represents a fulfilment of that wish. In the first dream he analysed, which featured Irma, a former patient, the motivating wish was Freud’s desire to be exonerated from responsibility for her illness. Sometimes the wish being fulfilled is obvious: hungry people dream of food. At other times, the wish is disguised through a process Freud calls “dream-distortion” and likens to political censorship. The dream’s distorted “manifest content”, the elements experienced by the dreamer, must be distinguished from the “latent content”, the hidden wish fulfilment they express.
Dream Distortion and Objectionable Wishes
This formulation raises several questions. Why must certain wishes be disguised, for example? Freud’s answer was that some wishes are objectionable to the person and would wake them if expressed directly. Dreams serve as guardians of sleep by fulfilling these repressed or suppressed wishes in a camouflaged, hallucinatory form that the censor will tolerate. Who exactly is the censor trying to keep in the dark, if the same person is being guarded and doing the guarding? Here, Freud proposed that there are two distinct systems or agencies in the mind: one urging fulfilment of the wish and the other resisting it. That resistance extends to waking life. We tend to forget our dreams not because they are fragmentary or elusive, Freud argued, but because we want to bury their messages.
And how is the disguise carried out? Here, Freud referred to what he dubbed the “dream-work”. The latent content of a dream is transformed into the experienced manifest dream by condensing multiple dream elements into one, and by substituting elements, as when a latent feeling about one person is represented as directed towards someone else. Dream thoughts are also camouflaged by representing them as visual or auditory images. These transformations account for why dreams seem strange and puzzling.
Freud as Psychological Sherlock
Indeed, to Freud interpreting dreams is like solving a puzzle: he compares it to deciphering the meaning of hieroglyphics or a rebus. His book’s many examples show him to be dogged and clever in unmasking the concealed wishes. He is especially fond of tracing elaborate verbal associations and allusions. On one occasion, a woman’s name (Pélagie) is linked in an associative chain to plagiarism, to the class of plagiostomes (a class of sharks and rays), and then to fish’s bladder.
These interpretations can be read as the virtuoso insights of a psychological Sherlock Holmes. However, the sceptical reader will worry that someone of Freud’s verbal and intellectual dexterity could find meaning where none exists. Dream analysis of this kind is unconstrained by rules of evidence. It’s more like riffing on an inkblot than solving a crime. Critics of psychoanalysis have pointed to this lack of interpretive constraint and the impossibility of knowing confidently whether an interpretation is valid. Faced with the challenges of reliable interpretation, dream analysts need a degree of caution and humility that Freud lacked. But successful theories are not built on humility.
Towards the end of his book, Freud expands on what he has discovered, to make broader claims. Dreams demonstrate the existence of the unconscious as a mental system, which is “the true reality of the psyche”. For genuine insight into the mind, we must “get away from overestimating the attribute of consciousness”.
Legacy: The Unconscious to Oedipus
The Interpretation of Dreams is often considered to be Freud’s most important work. The first genuinely psychoanalytic book that he published on his own, it introduces several ideas that were to become fundamental to the movement. These include the Preconscious (mental content that can be made conscious) and Unconscious (content blocked from consciousness) as separate psychological “systems”. There’s the Oedipus complex: a supposed stage in a boy’s psychosexual development where he sees himself as a romantic rival with his father for his mother’s affections. Then, there’s the separation of manifest and latent content, and the distinction between primary and secondary process thinking (the former a mode of dream-like thought that ignores laws of logic, time and space; the latter a coherent and linear mode beloved by essay markers). They all make their first appearances here.
The idea that psychological phenomena can be interpreted as disguised wish fulfilments was also carried forward into Freud’s subsequent books on parapraxes (so-called “Freudian slips”) and jokes. However, dreams remained the “royal road” to the unconscious, whereas these phenomena were merely side streets. Combined with his earlier work on hysteria, which examined the roles of trauma and repressed memory, this series of books established the foundations of a movement that was to become immensely influential in the 20th century, both within psychology and psychiatry, and in the culture at large.
Dream Science
The book’s legacy for the study of dreams is less clear. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which he published in 1920, Freud acknowledged that some dreams were not in fact wish fulfilments. The repetitive dreams that woke World War I soldiers in a cold sweat did not express a wish and were clearly not serving as guardians of sleep. A different dynamic was at work here, Freud suggested: specifically, a compulsion to repeat. This compulsion could be manifested in many ways, but in traumatic dreams, it represented an attempt to master overwhelming experiences. Dreams that replay scenes from the battlefield reveal undigested horrors, rather than disguised wishes.
The wish fulfilment theory is no longer widely held among those who study dreaming, thanks in part to developments in neuroscience. In 1953, dreaming was found to accompany rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a newly discovered sleep phase with a distinct neurophysiology. This discovery opened Freud’s theory up to new lines of attack. In 1977, psychiatrists Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley argued that during REM sleep, the brain stem sends electrical activations upward like a firework. The forebrain then attempts to make narrative sense of these more or less random impulses. Because they are unconnected, the narrative usually lacks coherence. What neuroscientific evidence teaches us about dreams is not entirely settled, and Hobson and McCarley’s views have been challenged and updated. However, the neuroscience of sleep does not support the view that most dreams are disguised wish fulfilments. Even so, no one now argues that dreams are meaningless or that they tell us nothing about the dreamer. We have Freud to thank for persuading us that even ephemeral experiences carry significance.
