The interpretation of dreams

Woof, this book was a slog. Freud’s writing is tough, and apparently he kept updating the book with new details on dreams of patients, insights, and so on. A lot of what’s written here has since become popular knowledge, and I didn’t find it groundbreaking (from the perspective of 2024-25), but I did find Freud’s method illuminating, and it’s good to know where my own ideas come from. More important than dream interpretation itself is Freud’s idea of the Unconscious.

The argument here is two-fold: (1) all dreams are ultimately a form of wish-fulfillment, and (2) dreams are the “royal road” to the Unconscious.

Freud sees the mind as divided into three components: the Conscious, where our current and active thought process resides; the Unconscious, the deepest, unknowable part of one’s mind, where repressed desires live; and the Preconscious, where thought is “just under the surface”—it isn’t in a state of active recall, but it could be.

The Preconscious is really important here, as it takes repressed desires, which may be harmful to the individual, and replaces them with symbols, signs, and references that can be interpreted. But, this does not mean that these signs are, by any means, rational. Where the Conscious mind functions in a way that allows us to exist in “polite society,” the Unconscious is abstract, irrational, and simply does not care about truth, justice, or morality. It wants what it wants.

The Preconscious is active in the dreaming process, and there’s a number of paths that Freud thinks we can take to access the unconscious. First of all, any sort of absurdity in the dream is a sure sign that something is being masked. There are various other cues, like condensation, compression, and so on. These are interesting, but much less important than Freud’s big idea, which is that each dream has a “naval.” If tugged at and interpreted, the Unconscious can be accessed.

The challenge for everyday life, of course is that, if we take Freud seriously, most of our behavior is NOT the doing of the Conscious mind, but the Unconscious. We rationalize, of course, but do we know why we act in X or Y way? Under these conditions, there isn’t really a way of being self-aware.

We take for granted now that the Unconscious exists, and it’s often considered Freud’s greatest contribution to the literature. It’s hard to imagine psychology without it—Freud created a “before” and “after”—and it’s worth reading for that reason alone. Still, it’s a long, challenging book, which isn’t helped by Freud’s style.

While in its nature The Interpretation of Dreams is an academic piece of work, complete with a literature review and constant references to other works, it is at no point dry or dull. One should study Freud, first, for his ideas, and then, for his immaculate and engaging style of writing. This book is not all correct, naturally, but it was revolutionary when it came out. Freud's magnum opus, they say, and indeed, he agreed, and so do I.

It was bold of Freud to assert that dreams hold meaning and could be interpreted,at a time in which science had seldom concerned itself with the dream world and even when it did, the dreams were concluded to be no more than mere nonsense. With that one assertion, Freud basically allied himself with primitive peoples, occultists, and charlatans. Indeed, not a group of people you would want to be associated with if you want to be taken seriously as a scientist. And yet, Freud persevered, and he went on to construct a comprehensive model and a flexible technique for interpreting dreams!

This is how I would summarize The Interpretation of Dreams:

All dreams are wish-fulfillments.
The structure of a dream is sometimes rational and sometimes odd, but the sources which it draws upon are always the same.
These sources are recent or significant experiences and memories, occasionally trivial experiences, notable childhood events, and physical phenomena experienced during sleep.
Since censorship as a force exists to separate the conscious and the unconscious mind, it also has to distort our dreams to make them more soothing to our ego, therefore, arises a distinction between the latent and the manifest content.
Manifest content is everything we remember upon waking up, such as images and thoughts.
Latent content is the hidden meaning of the dream which, if deciphered through the analysis, allows us to take a peek into our unconscious thoughts, drives, and desires.
This is, needless to say, not an easy task, for censorship employs all sorts of dream distorting techniques. I will give examples of these techniques:
- Condensation occurs when several associations and ideas take shape of one dream object, which usually results in a dream being brief.
- Displacement occurs when the emotional importance of a dream object is separated from its actuality and misplaced into an entirely different object in hopes of avoiding the censor's suspicions.
- Visualization occurs when an abstract thought is converted into a visual image.
- Symbolism occurs when a symbol replaces an action, person, or idea.

Now we shift our focus away from the dream to the dreamer. The all-encompassing template which would allow us to understand every dream without understanding the dreamer does not exist. The same dream could mean different things depending on the individual's attitudes, experiences, and childhood. This is why Freud emphasized working with the dreamer not solely interpreting a dream. There is no possible way one can divorce a dreamer from the dream, for all dreams are innately egotistical!
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There, I have summarized it, but I have said nothing of what I think of it. That, I will do now!
While Freud is without a question an incredibly persuasive writer and a master rhetorician, and these would be admirable qualities in anyone, I fear that when it comes to his personal accounts of dream interpretations, I am never sure whether I was convinced by the soundness of his logic or my own bias towards the aesthetic beauty of his explanations. Furthermore, Freud's brilliance is at times overshadowed by his need to overgeneralize. Such is the example with his claim that all dreams are wish-fulfillments. While one could easily make them seem that way, and have endless ammunition to argue for it, the truth is, we do not know. Wish-fulfillment framework is a great tool which I will continue to use, but it is surely not applicable in all cases. Most prominently, in the case of the trauma dream, approaching it as a wish-fulfillment can cause more suffering than it can alleviate, both short-term and long-term. Yet, even with all mistakes Freud has made, he remains one of my favorite authors to read. I cannot fault a man that got so much of it right at the time in which there was barely anything to go off of. Read Freud, for one cannot regret taking in such a beautiful mind!