“The interpretation of dreams” was published in 1899. Aged 43, Freud dynamited the established understanding of the human mind. This keystone book would also serve as a key turning point in founding psychoanalysis as a discipline.
In it he proposes nothing less than a model to understand (analytically and “scientifically”) our total inner life, way beyond just our rational and conscious thoughts, into the “real” psychic life, the only place from which therapeutic benefit can come.
Unconscious, foreconscious thoughts, dream wishes, transference, trauma, Freud wants us to understand that we are only conscious of a minority of our thoughts. And that unconscious trauma or paradoxical thoughts pitting a secret wish with a real life taboo for example, were source to much of our psychic suffering.
Freud wants us to explore, and realise what meaning we have attached to what thoughts and words we use. How to become aware of our repressed emotions and traumatic experiences, thereby neutralising them to a large extent and bring therapeutic gain.
“The interpretation of dreams” was a watershed moment in his career as well as that of humanity. He often referred to it himself as his magnum opus, the one book he always went back to and felt most confident about. The book would have a profound influence in the 20th century and its convulsions, all the way to the present day culture.
Dreams, according to Freud, give us a unique window into the real inner workings of our soul. It is not the only device Freud saw as potentially bearer of clarity, he also worked with freudian slips and free associations to name but a couple. But in dreams he saw by far, the largest untapped source of real meaning, stripped of norms and conscious “censorship”, a huge source of material in real psychological terms.
The main thrust of the book:
In the first chapters, Freud conducts a literature review on what philosophers, poets, physicians and other clinicians have researched and written about dreams. This open approach is a modern concept and that bit is coherent with scientific investigation. He attempts to define dreams, what they are, how they differ from conscious, unconscious or preconscious thought.
How they are occasionally influenced by an external stimulus. How much of their dream material (the images of the dream as opposed to their underlying psychic source) is drawn typically from the previous day. How much of the underlying psychic wishes and drives come from long forgotten events and trauma.
As he defines and posits, his argument proceeds further, addressing many different types of dreams (anxiety dreams, childhood traumas, “conscious” dreams, etc.) He also painstakingly attacks and refutes many criticisms levelled at his work at the time already. The “Interpretation of Dreams” sometimes read a bit like a defense prepared in advance by a man sure to be criticised in the public realm.
By the end of 500 pages he offers a whole system, a clear process whereby external stimuli come to us, first without analysis (consciousness) then with a series of at least two transformations (from conscious to foreconscious, and from foreconscious to unconscious) and how our mind “stores” memories, knowledge, meaning.
Conversely his system goes the other way too, from unconscious, poorly qualified memories, to foreconscious, to consciousness and conscious actions. He shows with many examples taken from his practice with “hysterical” patients how mis-categorising of events, the different strength of repressions we may apply consciously or not, tend to end up explaining the apparent lack of logical behaviour in hysterics.
A few “classic” conceptions of Freudian thought run through the book. Namely Freud in dreams and memories too, applies the principle of “pain and pleasure” (or Eros and Thanatos in a different context).
Without speaking of them specifically he does harp on his traditional view of the human mind (id, ego, superego). He also finds that every dream is at heart a wish-fulfilment whether this is obvious or not, whether this is expressed directly or indirectly. He also shows time and again, the principle that “realising” consciously the nature of our repressed thoughts, can lead to immediate recovery.
What to make of it?
Much has been written about Freud’s inaccuracies, wild claims, plagiarism and artificial “finessing” of unwieldy facts so they would fit his broad doctrine. And the interpretation of dreams, being maybe his most creative work is no exception to these criticisms.
Saying that Freud was “wrong” because his method was not scientific enough or because he got some things wrong, feels like saying that Newton was wrong because his colossal Principia did not include quantum physics or relativity. It is true in isolation, Freud did clearly get a few things wrong and was highly unaware of his own biases.
He also lifted many tools and concepts from his ex bosses/sources of admiration (Von Brücke, Charcot, and especially the brilliant Josef Breuer). But he put it all together as a self standing model of potentially huge depth, and vulgarised it to the masses. Replaced in a historical context, his work remains colossal leap forward for humanity, one that remains very much alive and kicking in the modern age.
Focusing on his mistakes would be missing out the central points in favour of the peripheral: That research is evolutive, and that Freud hugely advanced human understanding of our own psyche by simple virtue of proposing a self-contained system (psychoanalysis). That Freud widely enlightened humanity in a very promethean fashion, showing us where to look, showing us that our obvious, rational thoughts are a mere fraction of our total psychic activity.
And that emotions, hurts, trauma, and all manners of mental unhealth are typically hidden from our conscious view. Breaking that cypher is the key. These notions are now mainstream in modern culture, also bringing psychology to the masses, vulgarised in a useful and understandable format.
The Interpretation of Dreams – Limitations to claims of scientific approach:
Freud tried to be as scientific as he could be, but regularly could not.
He also uses in his demonstrations terms one might find more appropriate for a new-age devine than a strict science (“psychic energy”; etc.) His attempts at passing his model as a foolproof scientific model frankly make for tiresome readings at times. In fairness, he regularly shares doubt about some aspects, invites the reader to research further other still unexplored points. But the overall impression is that of a man sure of his model, even though the reader often finds themselves scratching their head at some of the interpretative nature of his model.
Reading “The interpretation of Dreams” can feel a bit dizzying as Freud goes through meticulous principles and sub-principles, illustrating with real-life examples. He also regularly informs the reader of what he or she should understand of this and that symbol, which is jarring as the reader often find themselves unable to agree, or see the logic.
At every turn, he says “this symbolizes that”… and oftentimes the reader is left in honest doubt. But there again, it can be hard to read Freud also because for concision he does not always mention what he rests his opinion on. Maybe he spares us the 1437 cases he had actually seen in his practice that support that indeed “the tie symbolises the phallus”.
Freud had thought up of a whole method, to also test one’s interpretation of the dream. He also made plain comment in his book that anything can be associated with anything, as trains of thought go. The important thing was to find meaning, repeatability, cross-reference through different dreams, as well as drawing out as many possible interpretations as possible, granted they followed these basic rules. To record all, and
A highly subjective researcher
Freud also had a bit of god-like belief in his own science, making him forget about his biases, and unquestioned cultural/sociological aspects of his worldview. He was regularly dismissed as a fraud and/or a plagiarist, though here again it can be hard to tell jealousy from facts. The Interpretation of Dreams is one of Freud’s most personal works, where he borrows the least from contemporaries.
Freud was also simply a person with his own blind spots and specific taboos/mores. Freud was originally a physician (and often refers to psychology from an objective point, pointing at this system or that “zone”) He was also white, male, Jewish, heavily involved in the scientific debates and jealousies of the time.
He was famously the favourite child of his family, and no expenses were spared in his education. He aced most of his schoolwork. He learned European languages, ancient history, biology and mythology, largely thanks to his family’s. It becomes pressing to answer the question: “Is that your interpretation of dreams, or anyone’s interpretation of dreams?” Because Freud had, by all measure, a specific and unique life (bourgeois, Jewish, male, white, etc.) which sometimes seems to bleed right over his interpretations.
His parents moved to Austria when he was four and were hoping to develop their son into a doctor from the off, and in some way as a sort of token of good will towards their host country. He had a charged family history and would die in exile in the UK in 1939. He famously took cocaine, at a time when little was known of it, and soon to regret it.
He wrote it in bruising agony having lost his father, and basing most of his anecdotes on his own dreams that he remembered and on the work he did on “hysterics”. He was a human being with his own lenses, unconscious biases and blindspots. The Interpretation of Dreams, brilliant as it was when published, can only ever be a guide, never a bible.
Lacking methodology and debatable sample data
It can be pointed out that he based most of his observation on his work with “hysterics” a term now widely disused. Hysteria was a very “fashionable” label during his time, a sort of epidemic perceived to sweep across middle-class europe. “Hysteria” has now been replaced by many more helpful conditions and disorders (epilepsy, histrionics personality disorder, conversion disorders, dissociation)
There are no control groups in his observations, casting a profound doubt on the certainty of his findings. He trots out this anecdote or that, as seemingly guided by the needs of his argument, but no one can know what he knew, what he left out, or really how close to an objective truth his accounts are.
In summary
The Interpretation of Dreams is also, frankly, a bore to read, full of double and triple negatives, 6-line sentences and a laborious style. Clearly concerned about his standing in the local scientific community, Freud writes cautiously, like a lawyer at times. Other times he gets into pretty far out excesses of rigour in some of his demonstrations. But all in all, it is not really the complexity of his content that makes the book hard to read it is rather the pompous, labored style and the regular claims of (pseudo in parts) science.
There is no doubt that Freud’s work proved a watershed moment for humanity, good or bad.
If Freud freely lifted from the works of his early bosses Brücke, Charcot and Breuer anything from free-association to the term psychodynamic, in “The Interpretation of dreams” he deals with maybe his most personal contribution. In one fell book he upended or revisited most of the tenets of psychology and neurology at the time. For all his scientific inaccuracies, plagiarism and dubious claims, Freud provided a self-standing method for the exploration of the entire human mind, to therapeutic benefit, a leap forward never observed before or since.
“The interpretation of dreams” despite being published early in his career, was indisputably his magnum opus, his masterpiece, his “chef d’oeuvre”. It is the book he himself rated above all others he had written, and the one he often referred back to for he felt it was the most unassailable work. Reading it, one can tell that he has not entirely formed his psychoanalysis framework yet, he for example speaks little of the id, ego or superego in it yet.
A challenging read, a profoundly thought-provoking book written by a flawed researcher who still had the genius to put it all together, from intuition, from other researchers, from his personal fascination with dreams. A Rubicon in the history of the human mind that keeps some currency and contributed enormously to psychology but one that can also be read as cliff notes and with a certain healthy skepticism, in parts at least.
