The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams (11 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams
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than waking life, most modern dream theorists argue, they
can
offer significant insight into character and conflict that our waking thoughts might miss.
As recently as the 1800s, scientists considered dreams meaningless, and blamed them on indigestion or physical discomfort such as excessive heat or cold. It is only in this century that dreams have been the focus of in-depth scientific study, with recordable data that show not only when we dream, but how and why we dream and what we dream about. And while theories still differ, and some scientists are even returning to a physiological explanation of dreams, there is new understanding that benefits all dreamers. Here is a summary of the history of twentieth-century dream theory.
Sigmund Freud
We've all heard references to the work of Sigmund Freud (18591939), the founder of psychoanalysis (the theory and therapeutic treatment of neuroses) and the first physician to see dreams as a "window to the soul." Before Freud, there had been considerable philosophical interest in dreams, but it was he who began to turn it into a science. Freud started his medical career as a neurologist, and initially sought to discover neurological causes of dreams. Finding no evidence to support this hypothesis, he turned toward psychology, studying hypnosis, which aroused his interest in looking at mental illness from a psychological rather than a physiological point of view. In time, he created a system for the individual interpretation of dreams that would change the course of dreamwork forever. As the first contemporary theorist to reexamine dreams as a wholly psychic (mental) process, Freud was a pioneer, bringing the study of dreams into the modern scientific world.
 
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Freud not only used the study of dreams in his work with his patients, but also in conducting his own self-analysis. Examining his dreams led Freud to deduce that his dreams revealed he was actually happy about the death of his father, biographers say, which motivated him to explore dreams as expressions of emotions typically held back in waking life. Freud published the results of his work with the dreams of psychiatric patients in twenty-six different volumes, including
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), which he liked to call his "dream book." Although it initially aroused little interest, selling only 351 copies in the first six years, Freud himself considered it to be his "most significant work"; in the preface to its third edition in 1931, he called it "the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime.''
This landmark book chronicles his use of free associationsaying whatever comes to mindas a technique for understanding how the content of dreams is connected with a patient's waking life; Freud's technique of noting all of the dreamer's associations with a dream or dream symbol is still popular in dream interpretation today. Freud believed dreams came from the unconscious, that part of the brain that represses (holds back) or forgets memories, though even these supposedly lost emotions can usually be recalled. (Some people refer to it as the subconscious, though
unconscious
is the preferred term.) In trying to imagine the unconscious, it may help to think of your brain as an office building: The front room is your waking experience; the back room is your memory, easily accessible, logically filed; and the storage area beyond the back room is your unconscious, hard to get to sometimes, and elaborately cross-referenced with everything you have experienced in some surprising ways.
What is the purpose of dreams? As Freud saw it, dreams
 
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express buried sexual and aggressive impulses or wishes that are not safe or appropriate to reveal in everyday life; the unconscious takes over during sleep, he theorized, and it is from there that dreams emerge, providing a kind of mental release valve for these strong feelings.
Freud described two different levels of dream elements: the manifest dream content, the dream's basic story line as the dreamer recalls it; and the latent dream content, the unconscious wishes the dreamer has suppressed. Freud believed the latent dream content is where the true meaning lies. If you are wondering why the meaning of dreams is sometimes so hard to figure out, Freud would say it's because your conscious mind cannot deal with the latent dream content up front, so your unconscious steps in to shield or conceal the meaning from you by disguising the sexual or aggressive longings.
Freud suggested that the mind masks these often "inappropriate" desires by substituting a symbol for the unexpressed wish. In this way, the latent dream content is depicted through the symbolic manifest dream content. Freud was preoccupied with sexual content in dreams because he believed that dreaming is largely about the sexual urges repressed in early childhood; it is for this reason that any elongated object is considered a phallic or penislike symbol, and any cavity or container-type object a symbol of the vagina in Freudian interpretation. Dream activity such as flying or floating also bears some relation to a repressed sexual wish, according to Freud.
So, when people say "Oh, that's so Freudian," they are generally referring to an action or statement that appears to have an unconscious motivationusually sexual or aggressive. A Freudian interpretation of a dream, then, would be scrutinized for these impulses: If you dream you cannot move, Freudian theory would suggest, you are holding back sexual feelings; if
 
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you dream you are falling, you are contemplating giving in to a sexual urge, and so forth. Freud considered these kinds of symbols and themes to be so typical and pervasive as to be virtually universal, meaning essentially the same thing to every dreamer. He still insisted, however, that every dream has some connection to an event in the dreamer's own personal history. Freud concluded that dreams are a direct route to understanding an individual's unconscious motivations, calling dreams ''the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."
It is interesting to consider that Freud began his dream research at the end of the Victorian era, which is known for its intense sexual repression. The normal sexual and aggressive urges had to go somewhere, it seems, and the unconscious seemed to Freud to be the logical place. But these views made Freud one of the most unpopular and criticized members of the scientific community in Germany at the time. Against enormous opposition, however, Freud persisted in emphasizing the importance of sexuality in dreams and psychological development. In his preface to the second edition of
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1909), Freud expressed frustration that his fellow psychiatrists were resistant to his views: "My colleagues seem to have taken no trouble to overcome the initial bewilderment created by my new approach to dreams," he wrote. "The professional philosophers . . . have evidently failed to notice that we have something here from which a number of inferences can be drawn that are bound to transform our psychological theories."
In 1902, together with psychiatrists Alfred Adler, William Stekel, and Carl Jung, among others, Freud established the Wednesday Psychological Group, a regular gathering of professionals that in time became the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. Little more than a decade later, Stekel, Adler, and Jung ended their affiliation with Freud. These early dream theorists
 
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developed their own theories, which differed from Freud's beliefs about the individual unconscious.
Sigmund Freud
The father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in what was formerly Czechoslovakia, the first of eight children born to Jewish wool merchant Jakob Freud and his wife, the former Amalie Nathanson.
When he was six, his family moved to Vienna, Austria, where he would grow up and attend medical school, entering the University of Vienna in 1873. His interests in science led him to study histology and neurophysiology.
Freud was among the first to examine the effects of cocaine on the nervous system, finding it to be an effective anesthetic. It was study at a Paris asylum that inspired his interest in the workings of the human mind.
As a neuropathologist, he continued to explore the workings of the physical brain, trying to determine the extent to which neuroses were chemically based.
Freud created the term
psychoanalysis
to describe the revolutionary free association technique he had developed to help disturbed patients reveal and confront repressed memories of emotional trauma. His focus on repressed sexual and aggressive urges as the primary content of dreams and the cause of neuroses made him an extraordinarily controversial figure in early post-Victorian Europe.
Still, through organizations such as the Wednesday Psychological Group, the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, and others, he influenced a generation of psychiatric professionals whose work is the basis for contemporary mental health theory and practice.
 
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In addition to his landmark book
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Freud is the author of numerous works, among them
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920),
The Analysis of the Ego
(1920),
The Ego and the Id
(1923),
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
(1923), his
Autobiography
(1926), and
Civilization and Its Discontents
(1929).
Freud died of cancer in 1939.
Carl Jung
Carl Jung (18751961), one of the most renowned dream theorists of modern times, worked with Freud for several years before the two scientists had a dispute over the existence of a "disguise function" in dreams that supposedly suppresses sexual and aggressive wishes; they also disagreed on how much influence sexual conflict really has in dreams. Jung considered the "disguise" theory to be too contrived, believing ''the dream is a natural event and there is no reason under the sun why we should assume that it is a crafty device to lead us astray." In order to discover the meaning of dreams, Jung focused on what the manifest content of the dream might reveal, rather than what it seemed to
conceal
. He disagreed with Freud as to whether the meaning was
necessarily
connected to the dreamer's sexuality or wish fulfillment. Though he did not deny that sexual or aggressive wishes could surface in dreams, he did not believe that they are always present. Rather, a dream might have any number of meanings, finding references in the conscious and unconscious, personal and universal.
In this regard, Jung reached back into earlier cultural interpretation of dreams, arguing that some of a dream's content is based on experiences beyond those of the individual dreamer. He
 
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theorized that, in addition to a personal unconscious belonging to each individual dreamer, there is a collective unconscious shared by all humankind, complete with images and symbols that have had similar meaning in all cultures for centuries. In this regard, suggests author Raymond de Becker, Jung may have been influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who "placed the cause of dreams in the remote past of the human species, asserting that in our sleep we reenact the labours of early man." In metaphorical terms, let's extend our idea of the office suite with the front room (conscious mind), back room (memory), and storage area (unconscious): The collective unconscious could be seen as the building that contains all of the office suites that are the basic aspects of humanity, familiar and constant, no matter who moves in or out over generations.
Jung referred to "the contents of the collective unconscious" as archetypes. Although the term or idea of an archetype had occurred in earlier religious and mythological discussions, Jung was the first to identify the psychological archetype. Calling these universal symbols "among the inalienable assets of every psyche," Jung used archetypes to refer to the universal aspects of humankind that can have both "a positive favourable meaning or a negative evil meaning." You can think of archetypes as the essential ''programming"part of the original package that comes with your psychological computer. Archetypal symbols surface in dreams, which Jung called "the spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche . . . not falsified by any conscious purpose.'' In other words, your dreaming mind is free to make any symbolic reference, without the limitations the conscious mind might place on thought or imagination.
Generally, certain archetypes are capitalized in written form to emphasize their fundamental truth; thus, an archetypal Mother

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