The Dimensions of Dreams: The Nature, Function, and Interpretation of Dreams / Edition 1 available in Paperback
The Dimensions of Dreams: The Nature, Function, and Interpretation of Dreams / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 1843100681
- ISBN-13:
- 9781843100683
- Pub. Date:
- 01/24/2002
- Publisher:
- Kingsley, Jessica Publishers
- ISBN-10:
- 1843100681
- ISBN-13:
- 9781843100683
- Pub. Date:
- 01/24/2002
- Publisher:
- Kingsley, Jessica Publishers
The Dimensions of Dreams: The Nature, Function, and Interpretation of Dreams / Edition 1
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Overview
Vedfelt also discusses dreamwork in gestalt therapy and psychodrama, and describes the results of modern laboratory investigations of sleep and dreaming. How dreams are affected by organic diseases and physical symptoms, the relationship between dreams and psychosis, parapsychological phenomena, esoteric dream understanding, and consciousness-expanding dreams are among other subjects covered. The Dimensions of Dreams is an excellent handbook for the professional, and compelling reading for those with a general interest.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843100683 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kingsley, Jessica Publishers |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2002 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.17(h) x 0.98(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Freud and the Neo-Freudians
Freud's unveiling of the mystery of dreams—The unconscious in Freud—The nature and function of dreams in Freud—The free-association method—Dream censorship—The dream sources—Dreamwork—The technique of dream interpretation—Dreams are regressive—Freud and the prospective in dreams—Dream affects and the contrast principle—Wish fulfillment and its absence-Symbols and wordplay in dreams—The neo-Freudians—Dreams and defense mechanisms—The dreamer's ability to integrate—Dream and transference—From latent to manifest dream—Dreams and psychosexual development—Dreams and psychosocial development—Dream and aggression-The analyst's role and countertransference—Conclusion
Freud's unveiling of the mystery of dreams
By the mid-1890s, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, had already been working for a number of years with psychic disturbances like hysteria and compulsion neuroses. Inspired by his mentor, Josef Breuer, he made the discovery that if during an analysis you could trace the neurotic symptoms back to the elements in the patient's mental processes which had caused them, then you could "unravel" the neurotic idea and thereby rid the patient of it. The analysis of a neurotic idea and its removal is one and the same thing, Freud claimed. Later, however, he had to acknowledge that interpretation in itself is not enough.
In these psychoanalytical researches Freud told hispatients to report all of the associations and thoughts that came into their heads in connection with the problem being treated. They now began relating their dreams, and Freud saw that a dream can be built into a complex of notions leading from the abnormal idea back to recollections from childhood. This led him to treat the dream itself as a symptom, and to transpose the analytical method he had used on the neurotic symptoms to dreams.
Like all psychotherapists who are any good, Freud tried out this method on himself, and on July 24, 1895, he felt that through the analysis of his own dreams he had "unveiled the mystery of dreams." Five years later there appeared his monumental work Die Traumdeutung (The interpretation of dreams), in which he presents an entirely new and complete method of dream analysis; it is also where some of his most important psychological concepts come to expression. Freud himself and those familiar with his psychology regarded the book as being his most important work. Even though Freud constantly revised his concepts, The Interpretation of Dreams is the chief contribution to his theory of dreams.
The unconscious in Freud
It is not by chance that as the epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams Freud used the following line from Virgil: "If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions." The psychic regions Freud penetrated he experienced as mainly negative. The unconscious was to him "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality," "a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations." Its content is for the most part of an infantile sexual character, and its mode of thinking resembles an insane person's hallucinations. The inner world is confused with the outer; boundaries of space and time are canceled; and mental conceptions merge so that one can symbolize another.
In opposition to this unconstructive and uncreative chaos stands the consciousness, the part of the personality we know, which thinks logically and rationally, distinguishes between inner and outer reality, and can be modified upon influence from the outer world.
Between the conscious and the unconscious there exists a psychic system that Freud calls the preconscious. The preconscious is like a screen that filters and disguises any contents from the dangerous unconscious before they are admitted to the conscious. In a psychic model Freud finalized twenty-three years after The Interpretation of Dreams, the most important psychic instances are the ego, the superego, and the id, with the id corresponding to the unconscious.
The nature and function of dreams in Freud
Like all later dream theorists of significance, Freud maintained that dreams perform a simple although important psychological function: to benefit to the dreamer. The content of a dream is in no way meaningless or happenstance. On the contrary, dreams reflect complex mental activities that observe their own laws. In Freud's view these are closely bound up with conscious thought processes.
Freud's simplest definition of dreams is that they are wish fulfillments. He describes them as substitutes for unresolved events in childhood, Predominantly repressed sexuality. He believed that dreams begin in a form that is as rational as waking thoughts, but that they are disguised because the conscious can not accept them. The original dream is called the latent dream, and the disguised dream—the one you remember when you wake up—is called the manifest dream.
Even though the energy and motivation for dreams is provided by repressed infantile sexual wishes, what was significant for Freud is that the dreams do not portray the unconscious but on the contrary are thoughts that might have been conscious had the preconscious not protected the dreamer from knowing the truth about him- or herself.
Essentially dreams are a compromise between the unconscious and the conscious. On the one hand they allow the repressed drives of the unconscious to be satisfied through fantasy; on the other hand they protect the conscious mind from thoughts so shocking that the dreamer would be awakened. The dream thus has two functions: to fulfill wishes and to preserve sleep.
The free-association method
Freud's method for getting at the meaning of a dream is to break down its separate elements, and for each element the patient is to tell what occurs to him. This requires a certain preparation. He must relax sitting or lying down; he must sharpen his attentiveness and receptiveness toward what is taking place inside him; and he must not sort out the thoughts that turn up. Especially important is to keep the critical intellect from rejecting the "freely surfacing" thoughts and thus checking the new openness for the otherwise inaccessible parts of the psyche. This is called free association.
Freud gives the following example in The Interpretation of Dreams: When he was between eleven and thirteen years old, a man had dreamed repeatedly and with severe anxiety that a man with a hatchet was pursuing him; he tried to run away but seemed to be paralyzed and could not move from the spot. First the dreamer thought of an uncle who was once attacked by a suspicious-looking individual; he may also have heard of a similar episode at the time of the dream. He further related that at about that same time he had injured himself chopping wood with a hatchet. He then thought of his brother, toward whom he could be so violent that their mother had said, "I'm afraid he'll be the death of him one day." While his associations were revolving around the violence theme, suddenly a recollection from his ninth year turned up. He had heard sounds of panting and other noises that seemed to him uncanny coming from his parents' bedroom. He had often noticed blood in his mother's bed and concluded from this that there had been violence and struggling between his parents.
The dream's separate elements had been traced back to their source, and Freud could assemble them into an interpretation. From his clients he had learned that children who witness adult sexual intercourse find it alarming and feel anxiety. This anxiety is a sexual excitation that children are unable to cope with, Freud thought, and which they reject because their parents are involved in it.
Dream censorship
The function that keeps the unconscious wishes under control in the sleeping state Freud calls dream censorship. It was not made an independent entity in his models of the psyche but was regarded as a part of the repressing forces.
To introduce the concept, Freud chose a dream of his own. My friend R. was my uncle. I had a great feeling of affection for him. From this Freud associated that he only had one uncle, namely Uncle Josef, and that his father not without reason called Uncle (Josef) a simpleton. The manifest dream is saying that Freud is very fond of R., but the underlying implication in the latent dream is that by making him his uncle he is reproving him for being a simpleton. It's like in a country, Freud says, where the people are in revolt against an unpopular official but the autocrat chooses that moment to bestow a high distinction on the official. The form of censorship in this case is the defense mechanism Freud later called a reaction formation, in which one defends oneself against negative feelings by feeling the opposite.
The dream sources
To avoid misunderstanding I should point out that by dream sources it is not meant the dream's motivational energy source, which according to Freud is unsatisfied bodily needs, but rather the source of the material, the components of the dream: the dream images, the persons, and the dramatic situations. These come from three sources: bodily (somatic) sources; the day's residues; and infantile material.
Bodily (somatic) sources: It has always been a popular assumption that the content of dreams is inspired by physical factors like the dreamer's body position, poor digestion, fever, pain, and other physical influences like noise, light, cold, and heat. Freud found that such stimuli only seldom provoke dreams without being connected with psychically significant sources (see "External stimuli and dreams," chapter 6).
The day's residues: By "the day's residues" Freud means emotion- and energy-laden thought processes from the preceding day that recur in a dream. He thought these could be found in any dream. He divided the day's residues into two groups: "indifferent" impressions that recur in the manifest dream, and "freshly experienced" significant events that precisely on account of their importance are disguised and can be retrieved only through a painstaking analysis and unmasking.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells about a woman who dreams she came too late to the market and can get nothing from the butcher. The indifferent day's residue is that the previous day the woman had actually gone to the market too late and got nothing. Freud points out that the phrase "the meat shop is open" can be used about a man who has forgotten to button his fly, and that the apparently indifferent event acquired an anything but innocent meaning in the dream. Meanwhile, to trigger the dream, impressions are needed that are not indifferent but, on the contrary, psychologically significant. In connection with the dream about the butcher shop, Freud contents himself with suggesting that the significant impression was of a sexual nature. But as it was unacceptable for the dreamer to have certain sexual feelings and thoughts, they recurred in the dream in disguised form.
Ninety years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, the import of the day's residues is still misjudged by most people who do not have special knowledge of dreams. If a person dreams that the light went out in the basement, the objection might be heard that it is merely because there was a power failure the day before. But it doesn't explain why thousands of other citizens didn't dream the same night about the light going out in the basement. All dream theorists since Freud are in agreement with him on that point: in one way or another the day's residues in our dreams are always intertwined with something psychologically significant.
The infantile as dream source: In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud gives a number of examples of long since forgotten childhood scenes that are relived in dreams and whose authenticity could subsequently be corroborated.
A man who decided to visit his native town after a twenty-year absence dreamed the night prior to departure that he found himself in a village he didn't know, and on the street there he met a gentleman unknown to him whom he spoke with. When he arrived at the native town it turned out that the village from the dream was located nearby, and that the "unknown" man was a friend of his deceased father. Another man dreamed that his former tutor was in bed with the nursemaid he had had until his eleventh year. This was corroborated by his older brother. The lovers got the brother Intoxicated on beer when they wanted to be together, but the dreamer they did not regard as a hindrance. He was only three years old at the time.
Far more often, however, Freud found that childhood experiences are disguised and can be detected only upon close analysis. It could be as in the hatchet dream, where associations led to a sexual scene with the father and mother. Or it could be as with a woman who dreamed that she fainted on the street and so recalled the epileptic seizures of a janitor's son in childhood.
Freud had at his disposal a large collection of dreams that could be traced to recall experiences from the first three years of life. Often a complicated job of unraveling preceded the materializing recollection. There is scarcely a dream investigator today who disagrees with Freud that we possess a vast file of recollections in the unconscious which reaches back to events very early in childhood. Even the childishness in us, understood as infantile impulses, supplies copious material for dreams.
Dreamwork
Freud defines dreamwork—not to be confused as the analytical work with dreams—as the psychic process that transforms the original latent dream-thoughts into the finished manifest dream. Its four operational modes are called condensation, displacement, plastic representation, and secondary revision. Condensation and displacement are the most important.
By condensation Freud means that the individual dream elements are points of intersection for many dream-thoughts simultaneously; the dream elements are "overdetermined." For example, when Freud dreamed about a botanical book in which there was a pressed specimen of a plant, he could find a wealth of connections to the incidents, thoughts, and feelings of the previous day. He had met a certain Professor Gärtner, whose wife he found "blooming." He had seen a book on the genus Cyclamen, which he thought was his wife's favorite flower, and so forth and so on. These thought connections, which he had an astonishing talent for finding and which fill several pages in The Interpretation of Dreams, were all psychologically significant and bound up with the dream's meaning.
Displacement occurs when the emotional energy of a specific dream-thought is transferred to another dream element. In the dream just mentioned in which the butcher shop was closed, the dangerous, emotionally intense sexual content was displaced to a harmless everyday scene.
The two latter and less important mechanisms aim to give the dream a dramatic intelligible form and a smooth facade.
The technique of dream interpretation
"The lay world has from the earliest times concerned itself with 'interpreting' dreams, and in its attempts to do so it has made use of two essentially different methods," Freud writes.
The first he calls the symbolic method (later in these pages symbolic will be used with a different meaning). This technique considers the dream content as a whole, and sees a parallel between the dream and an external event that will occur sometime in the future. For example, in the biblical Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream, seven fat cows followed by seven lean ones that consume the first seven is symbolic of the prediction for seven years' famine in Egypt, in which all the surplus created by seven abundant years would be consumed. Freud didn't set much store by such interpretations.
The second technique he calls the decoding method, since it treats Dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key. "Suppose, for instance, that I have dreamed of a letter and also of a funeral. If I consult a 'dream book' I find that 'letter' must be translated by 'trouble' and 'funeral' by 'betrothal.' It then remains for me to link together the key words which I have deciphered in this way and, once more, to transpose the result into the future tense."
Freud considered his own technique to be closest to the decoding method. The dream is divided into separate elements and a meaning for each one is arrived at—to be sure, without the aid of a dream book but by means of free association. He also believed that dreams have an unambiguous meaning and that this meaning can be found through interpretation.
Dreams are regressive
Freud's stroke of genius was that he put the dream's meaning in the individual, saw it as expression of internal patterns. Contrary to the traditional folk method, he did not focus his interpretation on the future but traced it back to childhood. To be sure, other and later techniques reinstate both the external and the prospective interpretation, but Freud could rightly claim to be the first to base an interpretation on the inner psychic and the regressive aspects of the dream.
This mode of interpretation is closely bound up with Freud's entire view of the psyche and the dream. In its essence the dream is a returning to earlier forms of experience, a regression.
The regression has three forms: a topographical regression, meaning That the psyche is considered to be a map with a conscious above and an unconscious below, and that thoughts pass from the conscious down into the unconscious; a temporal regression, which leads back to experiences in childhood; and a formal regression, whose effect is that the dream's idiom is more primitive than that of the waking conscious. Ultimately, all three forms of regression occur together, which is to say that the deeper you delve into the unconscious, the further back in childhood you go and the more primitive and unrealistic the language of dreams becomes.
Freud and the prospective in dreams
Freud admitted that attempts at problem solving were discernible in dreams, and he was cognizant of the idea first put forth by his colleague Alfred Adler that the dream can think prospectively. But Freud didn't regard this as having to do with any creative activity in the unconscious. He found it indisputable that even very complex and difficult intellectual performance is possible outside of the conscious, and that one can wake up with the solution to a knotty problem one could not have solved in the waking state. His explanation for these phenomena—in line with the theory—was that the preconscious solves the problem, perhaps already in the waking state, and afterward the solution is revealed in the dream. He thought though that such solutions were uncommon.
Dream affects and the contrast principle
Both Freud and other early dream investigators were surprised that "in dreams the ideational content is not accompanied by the affective consequences that we should regard as inevitable in waking thought." In one of Freud's own dreams, a man (whom Freud regards as a fill-in for himself) drops dead without Freud becoming the least horrified. On the other hand, elsewhere in the dream Freud is horrified at something that in the waking state would cause gladness. Or to paraphrase Freud: The affects in the dream can be detached from here and placed over there.
While in some instances Freud saw inhibitions or repressions of the emotions in dreams, at other times there was the question of their complete reversal. For example, this dream of Freud's:
A hill, on which there was something like an open-air closet: a very Long seat with a large hole at the end of it. Its back edge was thickly Covered with small heaps of faeces of all sizes and degrees of freshness. There were bushes behind the seat. I micturated on the seat; a long stream Of urine washed everything clean; the lumps of faeces came away easily and fell into the opening. It was as though at the end there was still some left.
Freud marveled that he had felt no disgust at this dream. But on closer analysis he found that paradoxically it covered over quite different feelings. To clear away manure made him think immediately of Hercules himself, who cleaned out the stables of the mythological king Augeas. The day before the dream, Freud had lectured on the connection between hysteria and perversions, and he had felt disgust at his own "grubbing about in human dirt." But a student had flattered him by saying that he had "cleansed the Augean stables of errors and prejudices." The dream took place where his children were staying at the time, and he had just "discovered the infantile aetiology of the neuroses and had thus saved my own children from falling ill." The bench (which in reality, however, did not have a privy hole) had been given to him by a devoted female client, which reminded him that his patients were attached to him, and so on. And so he found in back of the dream nothing but positive notions.
Dream interpretations of this sort contributed to Freud's assuming that it was at times necessary to utilize a contrast principle, which is to say that each element in the dream could represent both its opposite and itself. Another dream in which the feelings did not match the content came from an older gentleman:
I was lying in bed when a gentleman who was unknown to me entered the room. I tried to turn on the light but was unable to. Thereupon my wife got out of bed to help me, but she could not. As she felt awkward in front of the gentleman, being en négligé, she gave up and went back to bed. All of this was so funny that I couldn't help roaring with laughter.
The man was awakened from sleep by his wife because he was laughing uproariously. But in Freud's analytical regard the dream appeared less jolly. The dreamer suffered from arteriosclerosis and the day before had thought of death. The gentleman who came inside could be construed as death, "the great unknown," and it was "the light of life" the dreamer was unable to turn on. The ungovernable laughter in reality represented the place where he weeps at the thought that he must die.
Wish fulfillment and its absence
The idea that all dreams are wish fulfillments has by most later dream theorists been countered with the fact that there are plenty of dreams that are distressing and unpleasant—something one would not wish for. But Freud himself disputed a number of apparent exceptions to the theory of wish fulfillment, both in The Interpretation of Dreams and in later writings. He describes four types of dreams: counter-wish dreams, punishment dreams, anxiety dreams, and dreams in the traumatic neuroses. It was not much trouble for Freud to fit counter-wish dreams and punishment dreams into his theoretical system.
A male acquaintance, who was described by Freud as an intelligent jurist, dreamed: I came up to my house with a lady on my arm. A closed carriage was standing in front of it and a man came up to me, showed me his credentials as a police officer, and requested me to follow him. I asked him to allow me a little time to put my affairs in order. The jurist had expected the police to charge him with infanticide.
On analysis Freud worked out that his acquaintance had spent the previous night with a woman. On that occasion he had practiced coitus interruptus to avoid making her pregnant. The morning prior to the dream he had also had intercourse with the woman. A few days previously Freud and the jurist had discussed that it was still common to equate birth control with infanticide. Finally, the jurist suffered moral qualms because once he had occasioned an induced abortion.
The dream has the appearance of an aversion dream. But behind the anxiety caused by a charge of infanticide, Freud saw a deeper motive: the wish that the woman should not become pregnant. According to Freud, in this case it was a matter of finding the counter-wish dream's true wish motif. In other cases Freud saw unpleasant dreams as manifesting a masochistic tendency in the dreamer.
Punishment dreams are dreams in which the dreamer is subjected to maltreatment, either physical or emotional. An example is a poet who previously had been a tailor. He kept dreaming he was back in the tailor's workshop, where he felt chagrin at having to waste time and being scolded by the boss. Freud thought that in these instances the dreamer in reality wished to be punished for his overt or repressed desires. The masochistic wish originated not from the unconscious but from censored preconscious forces in the psyche.
Anxiety dreams, which are so charged with anxiety that they wake the sleeper, are apparently a serious contradiction of the theory that dreams preserve sleep and are wish-fulfilling. Here Freud thought that at first the censorship fails the unconscious wish but then comes through by simply breaking off the dream with an awakening.
Freud found an exception to the principle of wish fulfillment in one type of dream, namely dreams in the traumatic neuroses. Freud's attention was drawn to these particularly during the First World War, when they appeared in great numbers. The dream life of the traumatic neuroses again and again takes the sufferer back to the calamitous situation, whereupon he wakes up with renewed terror.
As Freud conceived it, man has a natural anxiety preparedness that Safeguards him from being taken unawares by terror-inducing experiences. But in situations of war and disaster the influence can be so violent that the measure's "protective shield against stimuli" is penetrated. By actualizing the calamity in the dream, the organism attempts too late and unrealistically to generate an anxiety preparedness.
This attempt at mastering aversional experiences by repeating them again and again Freud also found in children's play. It led him to the assumption that beyond the pleasure principle there exists a deeper drive, a self-destructive death principle driven by the compulsion to repeat. The supposition of this principle denotes a turning point in Freud's theory formation, and he changed his original definition "the dream is a wish fulfillment" to "the dream is an attempt at a wish fulfillment."
Symbols and wordplay in dreams
In addition to the use of free association to get from the manifest (censored) dream to the latent (uncensored) dream, Freud uses the reading of symbols.
To Freud, symbols have fixed meanings, and in the dream they are nearly exclusively sexual. Weapons, implements, and tools stand for the male genitals, while hollow objects and things that get worked up are the female genitals. Climbing up a ladder or stairs can symbolize the sexual act with its ascending scale of pleasure. Falling and flying produced sensations as in the sexual act. Violets are reminiscent of the word violate, meaning rape, and so on. As so many symbols were fixed, it was possible under certain conditions to interpret the dream without asking the dreamer himself. But this demanded "great virtuosity" and was generally not recommended.
Freud thus acknowledged the existence of universal symbols, and it is interesting that he considered the language of symbols as inherited unconscious knowledge from the individual's—and the species's—evolutionary history, "as if a parlormaid had a perfect knowledge of Sanskrit without knowing it." In the use of symbol translations, Freud approximated the old-fashioned cipher technique, but he made it clear that reading symbols took second place to free association.
An absorbing aspect of dream interpretation that Freud had a great flair for was wordplay referring to figures of speech. We have already seen how the expression "the butcher shop is open" put Freud on the track of a dream's sexual meaning. In other examples, a wretched hotel, the moisture runs down the walls and the beds are damp becomes "superfluous," and his uncle is kissing him in the automobile is equated with "autoerotism." That a dreamer pulls a woman out from someplace in back of the bed means that he prefers her (the play on hervorziehen [to draw forth] and vorziehen [prefer]). Der alte Blasel (Old Blasel, an actor) was thought to allude to a bladder ailment (Blasenleiden), and a girl in a white blouse alluded to a certain Fräulein Weiss.
The neo-Freudians
The Interpretation of Dreams remained relatively unchallenged within the Freudian tradition for close to half a century. But as the themes of Freudian analysis became defined, it was increasingly possible to arrive at the same diagnoses and solutions to problems without the aid of dreams. While dream interpretation was regarded by Freud as "the royal road to the unconscious," it appears to have had less significance to his successors, who at times regarded it nearly as a detour to the unconscious. After all, the technique of free association was laborious and could be used as a direct evasive action by patients having a knowledge of the theory. But from the forties onward, Freud's followers again began to further develop the dream theory.
While Freud's psychology was first and foremost a theory of the unconscious, the neo-Freudians became increasingly interested in the ego and its defense mechanisms. Some have compared dreams to the creative process, and whereas Freud concerned himself nearly exclusively with the latent dream, one began seeing the manifest dream (that is, the dream as it is immediately recalled) as a meaningful statement in itself.
The therapist/client relationship, with its transference and Countertransference of irrational feelings, has attracted growing interest. Meanwhile, Freud's models of the psyche have undergone changes that have been significant to the understanding of dream content.
Dreams and defense mechanisms
In Freud's psychology the ego is a frail entity that is constantly threatened by unconscious drives, a punishing superego, and dangers from without. To ward off these perils the psyche in early childhood builds up a set of various typical defense mechanisms during the different development stages. This theory was furthered by the neo-Freudians. Freud's daughter Anna Freud described nine common defense mechanisms, and later theorists have given prominence to a few more, mostly primitive mechanisms that in adults are seen especially in pathological narcissists.
Defense mechanisms can encompass all the techniques of mastering, channeling, and using forces that would otherwise lead to neuroses. But in therapy they are usually understood as blockages that narrow a person's experience potential and contact surface. Defense mechanisms are related to the ego, but in the course of development they have declined and become preconscious automatisms that can't immediately be integrated into consciousness. Therefore the younger a child is, the more directly impulses from the unconscious manifest themselves in dreams. The Freudian textbook writer Charles Brenner mentions as an example a two-year-old child who in connection with the mother's giving birth to yet another child relates the following dream: "See baby go away." The dream is understood as an undisguised wish to get rid of the new competitor for the parents' love. In an older individual the hostile feelings would presumably be represented in a more camouflaged form.
With the elaboration of the defense mechanism concept, it became obvious that the disguising of the original unconscious content in dreams does not take place according to a fixed formula but varies for each dreamer, based on the intensity of the unconscious impulses and the efficacy of the defense mechanisms. For example, Brenner imagines a woman whose latent dream content originates in a so-called oedipal desire for a sexual relationship with the father. This could be represented by a recalled image of the woman and her father that corresponds to the oedipal stage (three to five years old), in which they have a fight with an accompanying feeling of sexual arousal in the girl. In the manifest dream it becomes fighting with father but with her sexual feelings omitted. If this is too close to the original fantasy, the father can be replaced with another person, such as her own son. If this is still too close to the original image, the fight can be replaced with the dreamer dancing with her son, or, still more distant, with a strange woman dancing with her son, and so forth.
The potential for disguises is unlimited. The manifest dream result depends on a balance of strength between the unconscious content (the id contents) and the defense mechanisms—in other words, on a compromise. The defense can also be effected through content, which originally is coherent in the latent dream and appears broken up and spread out in the manifest dream. For instance, the father can be present in one part of the dream while the woman fights with a different man later. Another common compromise phenomenon is that the dream appears diffuse.
Defense mechanisms in dreams can include projection—for instance, when the woman in the above example shifts her own sexual wish onto a strange woman—displacement of emotional intensity from one content to another, isolation of feelings that can't be contained in the same object (as when the feminine figures in a man's dream are split up into harlots and madonnas), reversal or denial of feelings, etc.
As an example of reversal of feeling, psychoanalyst Bela Mittelmann mentions the following dream from a fifty-year-old housewife with phobias (exaggerated anxiety in particular situations) and strong sexual inhibitions: My husband and I are looking at a five-year-old girl who is getting married. We are laughing heartily. That the woman was five years old in the dream is due to the mother having punished her at that age for masturbating, and the laughter could be regarded as an attempt at relieving the anxiety. (Note the previous example of the man who couldn't turn on the light of life and woke up laughing.) Other reversals of feelings include anxiety that becomes aggressiveness, hatred turning to "love," etc.
As an example of denial of anxiety by means of a fantasy of "high aesthetic quality," Mittelmann mentions a dream from "an attractive and intelligent twenty-eight-year-old unmarried woman" who had broken seven engagements. One night following intercourse she has a dream. She is in the sea, rising and falling with large threatening waves. The waves finally assume the shape of a beautiful orchid and become calm. Her anxiety subsides. (Another possible interpretation of this dream is suggested in "Phenomenology compared with other methods," chapter 4.)
Resistance can also be evidenced if a dream is forgotten on awakening. This was systematically investigated by R. M. Whitman, a neo-Freudian who found that dreams having an unacceptably aggressive content especially were forgotten. Resistance is often unconscious and can occur without the dreamer himself having understood the frightening element in the dream.
Dream theorist Emil Gutheil has provided the following dream example from a male homosexual patient: I was a woman. I was kneeling alongside a bed. Another woman was lying in it. A red scar was visible on her abdomen between her vagina and her navel. I seemed to want to fondle this red scar.... I woke up thinking this was an unimportant dream; forgot all about it. Gutheil comments: "Whenever a patient makes such a deprecatory remark about a dream, we take it for granted that the dream contains a very important detail."
The cesareanlike scar in the dream was connected with the dreamer's mother when he was a child. She often said, "When you were born you ripped me open." The patient had always thought that the mother held him responsible for this "cruel act," and that she didn't like him for that reason.
The dreamer's ability to integrate
An area where the neo-Freudians have modified Freud's work is in the psychology of creativity. Freud thought that artistic creativity was wish fulfillment, but one of his successors, Ernest Kris, has described the creative process as "regression in service of the ego." By this is meant that the creative person can think and experience in a primitive and infantile manner, but that this is in no way pathological; on the contrary it is a criterion of psychic health, provided the ego can use the regression for its own purposes. A number of other Freudian psychoanalysts have transferred this viewpoint to the dream state, which is then regarded as a regression with a certain degree of control and selection of unconscious material.
This theory has important consequences for dream interpretation. It means that you can't, on the basis of the regression's depth in a dream, draw conclusions about the dreamer's psychic health if you don't at the same time take into consideration the ego's ability to integrate the dream contents. Not all dreamers can integrate like amounts, and conversely a dreamer's ability to integrate dream interpretations can be used as a measurement of ego strength.
Bela Mittelmann has described five degrees of integration ability:
1. The dream is clear; the patient accepts the interpretation and supplies relevant associations.
2. The dreamer accepts the interpretation only after some effort.
3. The dreamer supplies relevant associations but is emotionally indifferent toward the dream.
4. There are numerous lengthy dreams, but the associations are not coherent and the dream can't be placed in connection with daily life.
5. The interpretation of a dream makes the dreamer even more anxious and unsure of himself.
As an example of high integration ability, Mittelmann uses two dreams from the above fifty-year-old housewife with phobias.
1. She is four or five years old and is about to make sexual advances to an idiot, a girl, in the lavatory, when the door opens and she stops with anxiety, shame, and guilt.
2. Her mother is away from the house and she feels happy and free.
In connection with the dream, the patient reported that her mother had severely shamed her for masturbating when she was five years old. She couldn't stop; she developed nightmares and the fear of being alone in the house, and she clung to the mother. There was an idiot living in the house then, but she recognized that the idiot in the dream represented herself. She suffered from "affective stupidity," which resulted in difficulty in her schoolwork.
The dream was interpreted as an attempt to deny responsibility for her sexual activity as well as for her hostility toward her mother. This, together with the constantly anticipated disapproval and condemnation by the mother, increased her fear of abandonment. The patient readily accepted the interpretation and supplied relevant associations.
A lower integration ability is exemplified by a forty-two-year-old homosexual's dream. According to Mittelmann, the dreamer presents all of the significant emotional experiences but lacks contact with the dream. He sees a curving staircase down which a Negro man is running toward him and then disappears.... He looks at the stairs in a manner which can make them appear as vertical or horizontal. This gives him the feeling of being in complete control of the situation. The dreamer was for the first time in his life developing both a sexual and an affectionate relationship. During the dream analysis he recalled that the Negro's movement was characteristic of his friend's. He experienced no anxiety in the dream, but the Negro appeared afraid. Mittelmann saw the dream as expressing the dreamer's attempt by magic omnipotence to master his fear of the prospective relationship, an anxiety which he in fact did not feel.
Around the 1940s there occurred a shift of clientele in psychoanalytic therapy, with an increase in so-called narcissistic neuroses cases. Narcissistic disorders originate earlier in the child's development, and the narcissistic ego calls upon more primitive defense mechanisms than do the psychosexual conflicts Freud worked with most often.
The disorder of narcissism is serious when it involves pathological narcissism or "borderline states." The American psychoanalyst Masud Khan has pointed out that such clients often misuse dreams and their interpretations, because even the ego functions that are to integrate the dream have been distorted. The dreams are then used to create a magical and all- powerful fantasy world and to flee from contact with their surroundings. Among Khan's clients were many who, while being able to understand the dreams and associate from them, "froze" with anxiety. I myself have encountered clients with such anxiety about what the dreams could tell that the only thing which interested them was "Is it good or bad?" In my experience, in such cases it is a waste of effort to work with the dream before you have worked with the anxiety.
Dream and transference
In the period from the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams until the formulation of the theories of death drive and repetition compulsion, Freud changed substantially the practical procedure for working with dreams. While originally the client was merely brought to recollection of the Repressed experiences, the goal now was to get him to repeat the events of the past as an immediate experience in the present. This could take place by living the forgotten emotions (hatred, love, impotence, etc.) in the company of the analyst—in transference.
Many innovators among Freud's successors have placed more weight on the transference aspects of dreams than he did. Prominent neo-Freudians have claimed that self-analysis is impossible for most people because there needs to be a person from the outside world to whom conflicts can be transferred. An even harder line suggests that it isn't the dream which is therapeutic but its connection to the transference situation. That Freud actually used his own self-analysis as the point of departure for The Interpretation of Dreams has been regarded in part as an ingenious exception, or explained in terms of his having a transference relationship to his friend Wilhelm Fliess.
Some examples from various prominent neo-Freudian dream theorists follow.
The German Hermann Schultz, in his dissertation on dreams that initiate a psychoanalysis, has provided the following dream from a twenty-four-year-old woman: She was lying on the beach, couldn't move from the spot. Anxiety. The woman had no associations.
The dream is understood in connection with the treatment situation: She has to lie on a couch with the analyst sitting behind her. He can regard her while she can't see him. She is psychologically exposed, just as she is physically exposed on the beach.
Heinz Kohut, a more well-known neo-Freudian, has in The Analysis of the Self given this example: A patient dreams that he is in a rocket, circling the globe, far away from the earth. He is, nevertheless, protected from an uncontrolled shooting off into space by the invisible yet potently effective pull of the earth. The uncontrolled shooting off into space is regarded as psychosis; the earth symbolizes the analyst; and the gravitational pull represents the narcissistic transference.
Another example comes from the English analyst Patrick Casement's book, On Learning from the Patient. A female patient, at a critical point in the analysis, expresses the fear of "going to pieces or going mad." Casement felt that he could help her by telling her that he himself had found lasting strength in daring to face his own deepest fears, including going mad. To the following session the patient brought "a terrible dream": I was going up a mountain in a cable car. Suddenly it broke down and stopped. I was stuck halfway up the mountain, unable to go any further and unable to go back. I was stranded. What made it much worse was that the door of the cable car kept swinging open. It was all glass in a metal frame—a casement frame.
The type of metal frame in question is called a casement frame, the same as the analyst's name. Patrick Casement understood the dream as saying that the framework for the analytical situation was threatened, and he should have allayed the patient's fear instead of saying that he, too, could be afraid.
From latent to manifest dream
While Freud concerned himself almost exclusively with the latent dream, which was arrived at through free association, neo-Freudians have increasingly concerned themselves with what the manifest dream can tell. The American analyst L. J. Saul found that on the basis of the first ten to fifteen dreams which a patient brought for analysis he could characterize the central conflict and the most important aspects of his "neurosis structure." C. W. Reiss, another Freudian, attempted to characterize subjects going from dream series both with and without free association. He was successful in statistically demonstrating a fair correspondence between personality profiles obtained with the two techniques.
Other investigations isolated different client groups in order to see whether the dreams differed. Children in puberty as opposed to elderly, schizophrenics as opposed to nonschizophrenics, and so on. And the results were encouraging.
Reiss thought that the manifest dream gave the skeleton, or basic outline, of the personality, while weekend associations added plastic clarity, and Erik H. Erikson, who shall be discussed in a following section, found that interpretations of respectively the manifest and the latent dream could supplement each other. Meanwhile, analyses of manifest dreams are much more worked out by other theoretic movements and will be discussed in these connections.
Dreams and psychosexual development
One of the cornerstone theories in Freud and his successors is that of Psychosexual development in childhood. From infancy to age five the child goes through oral, anal, and phallic stages in which sexual instinct and pleasure are associated with the mouth, the anus, and the genitals respectively. These areas are called erogenous zones. The child's behavior in these stages follows prototypes—that is to say original patterns—for personality traits which can persist throughout life. The early experiences that led to these traits are as a rule thoroughly repressed. Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious." Accordingly, the patterns from these stages must reveal themselves in dreams.
The oral stage covers the first and second years of life, when According to Freud the mouth is the primary source of the child's pleasure. The main associations are with ingestion, holding fast, biting, spitting out, and closing; these are the prototypes for later psychological behavior patterns. Ingestion through the mouth is the prototype for greediness, holding fast for stubbornness and resoluteness, biting for the destructive urge, spitting out for rejection and contempt, closing for refusal and negativism. During development the original function modes are channeled via the defense mechanisms so that they are frequently displaced, converted, sublimated, and so forth, and develop into a network of interests, attitudes, and forms of behavior. You can ingest or spit out knowledge, love, or power. Or, as a reaction formation (conversion of emotions), you can "swallow everything raw."
According to this conception, symbols in dreams that are related to eating, biting, ingesting, and so forth, or to derivatives of the original prototypes, can be placed in connection with oral behavior. The Berlin analyst Hans Dieckmann mentions that one of his female patients who at the beginning of an analysis displayed character traits corresponding to "an extreme oral inhibition" used to dream that she went into empty shops where she couldn't buy anything, or that she didn't get anything because other people crowded in front of her. But around the point in the analysis where her behavior begins to change, she finally dreams about buying what she wants and getting it.
I went inside the canteen; it's pleasant there, no work to be done but neighbors whom I meet. We're all happy, and there was somebody who recommended an especially nice pastry. I looked hastily down in my purse: yes, I could just afford it. But there were also a couple of rolls which could be sliced and would be nice with liver paste, and for only I Mark. My mouth was watering at the thought, and so feeling guilty I spent my last mark and plunged into enjoying the tasty and rare treat.
The anal stage is the period in the child's life when he or she Begins gaining control over defecation and toilet training is introduced. To "do" can be the prototype for creative work, but also for primitive discharge reactions like peevishness and fits of rage.
If the parents praise and motivate the child he will experience joy in creating for himself and others, and the person will be generous and productive. If the parents are strict and negative he will develop compulsive neatness, stinginess, and a need to control—or as a reaction to this, slovenliness, uncleanliness, and wastefulness.
A type of dream I have often encountered in people—particularly women—who are very controlled and have difficulty being spontaneous is where she goes into the toilet, but just as I sit down I see a man staring in through a window, or suddenly a lot of people pour inside, or the toilet doesn't work. In contrast, as a preface to creativity or spontaneous emotional outbursts I have heard about dreams of defecating in the proper place, etc.
It should be recalled that Freud's dream of urinating excrement off of a bench was connected with his creative work. In dreams excrement can be replaced with garbage, and in Freudian symbolism it can also appear as gold and money. Defecation problems can dominate the dreams of those with compulsive neuroses. And in Northern Europe, where character types are designated as anal compulsive, dreams of relieving oneself in a good way are nearly always important and positive.
The phallic stage is different for boys and girls. According to Freud, the boy falls in love with his mother, and the love becomes more incestuous as the sexual drive increases. The father is regarded as a rival, and at the same time the boy is afraid the father will geld him. This fear is called castration anxiety.
The girl, meanwhile, falls in love with her father (the female Oedipus complex) and is jealous of the mother. She isn't afraid of being castrated by the father, but in Freud's opinion she suffers from penis envy and puts the blame for this lack on the mother.
In the previous section on defense mechanisms, I used an example from Charles Brenner that illustrates how a woman's unresolved infatuation with the father can reveal itself in many forms. Likewise the male Oedipus complex can, according to the theory, reveal itself in camouflaged ways.
If one wants to adhere fairly closely to the manifest dream, one can here work chiefly with dreams in which the parents themselves appear, or where sexual advances are made toward persons who are considerably older than the dreamer or have a parental function, such as a nurse or a teacher.
With regard to castration anxiety and penis envy, Calvin S. Hall has established criteria for both men's and women's dreams. These give a good impression of how broad a psychic area the concepts cover in practice. The following criteria apply to castration anxiety in men's dreams: injury to or pain in a part of the body or the whole body as well as to animals or things that belong to the dreamer—or the threat thereof. Something on the dreamer's body is childish or too small. Difficulty in using the penis or phallic objects and in placing things in receptacles or hollow objects. A man displays feminine traits or is dressed like a woman. Criteria for penis envy in women's dreams: acquisition of a penis or phallic objects. The dreamer envies or admires a man's physique, manner, or possessions having a phallic appearance. She displays masculine traits or is dressed like a man.
The phases mentioned here are termed collectively the pregenital stages. The subsequent developmental phases—the latency period from around ages seven to twelve, and the genital stage leading into adult life—are not regarded as such important generators of dream material.
The infantile sexual stages and the reaction patterns associated with them are exhaustively described in Otto Fenichel's authoritative expounding of Freud's theories and are even more accessible in Calvin S. Hall. What is important is that knowledge of these stages' symbolism can provide information about complex character structures in the dreamer.
Those who are critical of Freudian theory and even reject some of the main theses can benefit from a knowledge of these stages when interpreting dreams. An example is the concept of penis envy, which in the neo-Freudian literature refers to a broad spectrum of personality traits in women that can be compared with the dream symbols; it is not necessary to believe that the little girl envied the boy his penis. Correspondingly, it is useful to compare the general description of "anal personality traits" with dreams of defecation, even though it is not supposed that these traits are due exclusively to faulty toilet training.
Dreams and psychosocial development
One of the most cited neo-Freudian attempts to carry dream interpretation further was made by Erik Homburger Erikson. Erikson overstepped some of the Freudian boundaries with a new psychosocial development model he termed epigenetic, which served as the starting point for his expanded understanding of dreams.
The concept of epigenesis is taken from the biological theory that egg and fetus develop according to certain inherited timetables which operate in conjunction with the external environment, and that for each new development stage a completely new, higher controlling structure is formed in the organism in question. Applied to psychosocial development, Erikson believed that "development" implanted specific resources or fundamental virtues, both in the blueprint for the individual's life stages and in human institutions. He thought there existed universal development sequences for the individual human being, and that every society in different ways tried to provide for these stages.
In Erikson's model, human growth and crises are described as a number of fundamental attitudes or stances; development is comprised of eight ages of life, each having its characterizing concept.
1. Basic trust versus basic mistrust
2. Autonomy versus shame and doubt
3. Initiative versus sense of guilt
4. Workmanship versus sense of inferiority
5. Ego identity versus role diffusion
6. Intimacy versus isolation
7. Generativity versus stagnation
8. Integrity versus disgust
The first five stages are parallels to stages in the Freudian development model. The last three are Erikson's own, but according to science historian Henri F. Ellenberger, they are clearly inspired by C. G. Jung.
What is new in Erikson's theory of dreams is that like the waking ego these steps are involved in adapting the individual's timetable to the demands society universally places on such critical stages; they try to create a synthesis between the individual's development and the expectations and needs of his surroundings.
Erikson launched his theory in a 1954 article, "The Dream Specimen of Psychoanalysis," in which he tested it on a dream from Freud himself. The dream, referred to as "Irma's injection," was from the night of July 23-24, 1895, when Freud received the determining inspiration for The Interpretation of Dreams. The day before the dream Freud had been informed by his friend and fellow physician "Otto" that a female patient named Irma was not doing as well after his treatment as could be desired.
A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving.—Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my "solution" yet. I said to her: "If you still get pains, it's really only your fault." She replied: "If you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it's choking me"—I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that.—She opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose.—I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it.... Dr. M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven.... My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: "She has a dull area low down on the left." He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) ... M. said: "There's no doubt it's an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated." ... We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls ... proprionic acid ... trimethylamine (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type).... Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly.... And probably the syringe had not been clean.
This is a very complex dream. Freud devotes thirteen pages to it and has still only scratched the surface. Erikson uses close to thirty-five pages on it. Here I will keep exclusively to the really new aspect of Erikson's dream theory, namely the connection between age of life and social function.
The age of life that the dream was preparing Freud for was, according to Erikson, the seventh age, whose dilemma is generativity versus stagnation. At the time of the dream Freud was thirty-nine years old, and at that age the decisive life task is reproduction. In biological terms this means parenthood, but in a psychological sense it could also be the passing of ideas on to the younger generation. That interpretation is based both on Freud's own many associations and on knowledge of his life and thoughts as they were expressed in his letters to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess.
That Irma was given an injection with an unclean syringe can naturally be construed sexually. And that Freud, as recently as the previous night, had felt inspired to his life's most important work, the injection can be conceived not carnally but as a spiritual insemination. (I have in my own practice encountered in dreams the same coalescing of injection and insemination motifs. One woman dreamed that she became pregnant following a lecture I had given, but then had to get an injection from the doctor in order to hold on to the fetus.) Otto, who had given the injection, can for his part be seen as a disguise for Freud's friend Wilhelm Fliess.
The connection to Fliess is torturous and camouflaged, but it suits Freud's dream-style generally and is hardly odd when considering his eye for the camouflaging propensity of dreams. Fliess had "inseminated" Freud with some of his most important ideas.
Freud and Irma were to a certain degree identified in the dream. Freud had pains in his shoulder just like Irma. Irma's sickness is associated in the dream with something shaped like the turbinal bones of the nose. Freud had been treated for a nasal symptom by Wilhelm Fliess.
Freud had remarked that he could feel an odd homosexual affection for Fliess, and it was in the final letter to him that for the first and last time in their correspondence he had addressed Fliess as "dearest" (Liebster). The word trimethylamine, as well, could be traced to Fliess, who thought That trimethylamine played a decisive role in sexual metabolism. And Fliess's ideas about the sexual metabolism "inseminated" Freud with one of his most important concepts, namely that man is "constitutionally bisexual."
Moreover, the dream contained a number of birth allusions. It was Freud's wife's birthday, and she was actually pregnant. And curiously enough he receives guests, which in German is called empfangen, meaning also "conceives."
Erikson's view of the dream is less reductive than Freud's. He sees it essentially as a statement with many facets. He agrees with Freud that infantile wishes supply the energy for the dream, and that one can arrive at a latent dream by means of free association. But at the same time he thinks that the manifest dream material in itself contains valuable information, and that one can combine interpretations of the latent and the manifest dream in a fruitful way. He thinks, too, that every dream contains a transference conflict.
To illustrate the universal character of dreams he—like C. G. Jung—drew parallels to the rites of passage and religious symbolism of other peoples.
(Continues...)