Dr. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis who made “the Oedipus complex,” “penis envy,” and “repression” household words, is perhaps less well-known for his theory of dreams. However, as Freud explained, the theory was central to his work:

"During the long years in which I have been working at the problem of the neuroses I have often been in doubt and sometimes been shaken in my convictions. At such times it has always been The Interpretation of Dreams that has given me back my certainty." (1908, p. 130)

Published in 1900 as Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), and followed in 1911 by a pamphlet titled “On Dreams,” Freud’s dream theory can be distilled in a phrase as, “a dream is the fulfillment of a wish” (Freud, 1900, p. 142).

However, it has been argued by Bruno Bettelheim (1982) in his critique of the available English translations of Freud’s work that “Interpretation” is not an accurate translation of Deutung, given that “‘interpretation’ is a German word as well as an English one, and “if it had been the word Freud had in mind for his title, he would have used it” (p. 65). According to Bettelheim (1982), Traumdetung evokes in German an association with the word “astrology” and by failing to evoke such associations, the English translation of the title “does not suggest the parallel between the discovery of the true nature of the universe and the discovery of the inner world of the soul” (Bettelheim, 1982, p. 70), as Freud meant it to. In a nod to this understanding, I imagine Freud’s work on dreams as a “dreamology.”

Introduction to Freud’s Structure of the Psyche

Id, Ego, and Super-ego

Since Freud developed his dreamology in concert with a more elaborate psychological understanding, I find it useful to preface this discussion of his theory of dreams with an overview of how he conceived of the “structure” of the psyche in which these dreams are occurring. Over the course of his life, Freud came to understand the individual human psyche as having three parts. His names for these parts are popularly translated into English as the “id,” “ego,” and “super-ego.” For a clearer sense of the connotation of each of these three terms, I look to Bruno Bettelheim’s (1982, pp. 53-59) alternate translations: the “ it,” “I” or “me,” and the “above-I,” respectively. What Freud calls the ego, I understand as the everyday personality and consciousness, that part of a person that one identifies as himself. According to Freud (1923, p. 656), it is the ego’s job “to mediate between world and the id.” The ego is caught in between pressures “from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego” (Freud, 1923, p.656). The super-ego, as explained by Bettelheim (1982, p. 58), “includes not just the ‘conscience’…but also the wider aspect of the psyche which comprises both its conscious and fairly reasonable controlling aspects and its unconscious, unreasonable, compulsive, punitive and persecutory aspects.” The id, I find more difficult to define, which, I suppose, makes sense, given its nature. My best understanding is it is that which a person does not identify with as part of himself, including that which is repressed, rejected, or unknown. Freud (1923, p. 635) identifies the id as “the other part of the mind…which behaves as though it were unconscious.”

Conscious, Unconscious, and Preconscious

“The division of the psyche into what is conscious and what is unconscious, as Freud (1923, p. 630) explained, is the “fundamental premise of psycho-analysis.” In addition to the conscious, unconscious and preconscious, Freud also distinguishes among three “levels” of consciousness. These are the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious. The conscious includes what a person is conscious of at a given time, while the unconscious includes that which one is not conscious of at that time; the preconscious includes that which is on the point of, or is capable of, becoming conscious (1923, pp. 630-637). It is my understanding that the id can be loosely, though not exactly, correlated to the unconscious, and that the ego, while having unconscious aspects as well (1923, p. 631), can be thought of as being generally preconscious and conscious, while the super-ego, as noted above, clearly has both unconscious and conscious aspects.

Basic Elements of Freud’s Dream Theory

“The Guardians of Sleep”

With these divisions of the psyche in mind, one can then examine Freud’s dream theory. According to Freud (1911, p. 167), during one’s sleep, because the ego is focused on the sleeping, internal censorship is relaxed and thus repressed material is able to “prance around” in the psyche. However, since the dreamer is unconscious, these repressed impulses, or wishes, still do not have access to consciousness “and their access to movement is barred” (1911, p. 168). Thus the intensity of these instinctual forces, which are activated but unable to play out in the form of action, could interrupt sleep (1911, p. 168). Enter the dream, which, by providing “a kind of psychical consummation for the wish that has been suppressed…by presenting it as fulfilled” (1911, p. 168), is able to satisfy the instinctual energies and maintain sleep at the same time. Hence, Freud (1911, p. 167) referred to dreams as “the guardians of sleep.”

The “Dream-work”

Censorship of one’s own impulses, however, is not fully undone by sleep, and thus still succeeds in some censorship of the dream. Freud (1911, p. 148) calls this censorship, or the alteration of the dream content from “latent content” (material that will be rediscovered in analysis) into “manifest content” (the dream as it is remembered by waking consciousness), “the dream-work” (1911, p. 148). Analysis, then, reverses the process of the dream-work. The dream-work transforms the “latent dream thoughts” into the manifest dream as remembered; analysis uses the manifest dream to make conscious the latent dream thoughts and integrate them into awareness (1911, p. 148).

In Freud’s (1911, p. 172) theory, this transformation from latent to manifest dream content occurs through the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and dramatization. As I understand it, the dream-work thus accounts for the nonsensical nature of dreams as we remember them in the morning.

Condensation, Displacement, and Dramatization

As a mechanism of the dream-work, condensation refers to the creation of composite personages and structures (Freud, 1911, p. 153), for example, a person in a dream who seems like a combination of two people, perhaps having the name of one and looking like the other. Condensation, or compression, is responsible for the fact that it takes much more space to write down the latent dream thoughts that are uncovered in analysis than it took to write down the manifest dream itself.

Displacement, on the other hand, occurs when the significant experience that prompted the dream is displaced and a seemingly indifferent experience appears in its stead. This seemingly trivial incident is always linked to the significant one “by copious associative links” (Freud, 1911, p. 156). Because “dreams are never concerned with things which we should not think it worthwhile to be concerned with during the day” (1911, p. 156), any appearance of triviality in dream material should be seen as a red flag that displacement has occurred. “It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream content” (1911, p. 157).

Finally, dramatization is “the transformation of thoughts into situations” (Freud, 1911, p. 154) in dreams. It seems to me that dramatization accounts for the bulk of the material, or the stories, of our manifest dreams. It is what, for example, transforms an anxiety I might have about my schoolwork into a story in which I am at school and it starts raining and a group of alligators and snakes start making themselves at home in the parking lot. Tied into this dream process is a final revision based on “considerations of intelligibility,” and it is when this type of revision has occurred that a dream seems particularly “well-constructed” as a story (1911, p. 161).

Three Types of Dreams

In addition to these three mechanisms of the dream-work, Freud (1911, p. 148) also identifies three types of dreams based on “the relation between their latent and manifest content,” or on to what extent they make sense prior to analysis. These dream groupings are as follows: first, “those dreams which make sense and are at the same time intelligible” (1911, p. 148). In other words, these dreams not only follow their own internal logic – for example as a story that makes sense – but also make sense to us in the context of our lives. We understand them. In the second category, as in the first, the dream itself makes sense, but we do not understand what it means to us. These are the dreams that inspire us to ask ourselves, “How did I get hold of such an idea?” (1911, p. 148). The final category “contains those dreams which are without either sense or intelligibility, which seem disconnected, confused and meaningless” (1911, p. 149), and accounts for most of our dreams. Since in the first category, there seems to be little contrast between the latent and manifest content of the dream, it is on the second and, particularly the third, category that Freud (1911, p. 149) focuses his analysis.

Analysis and Free-association

The applicability of Freud’s theory of dreams, first and foremost, to the most nonsensical dreams is undoubtedly my favorite aspect, as to me it does for dreams what I feel Freud’s work in general does for psychology as a whole: it tells us that all is not what it seems. Here, dreams are made to make sense by their very nonsensicalness. Just as Freud is able to make sense of his patient’s symptoms by believing that there is some underlying logic to them, he is able to look at the most confusing aspects of dreams and say not only is there a sense to this confusion, but this very confusion is, through analysis, a path to finding sense.

Analysis, as previously mentioned, finds this sense by reversing the process of the dream-work (Freud, 1911, p. 148) through the method of free association. As I understand it, free association is not to be confused either with saying random things, or actively thinking about what a dream image might bring up or remind you of. Instead, free association is the speaking (or in the case of Freud’s analysis of his own dreams, the thinking and writing), without censorship, of whatever comes to mind as you talk about your dream (1911, p. 144). The work of free associating is not in searching your mind for connections, but rather in not censoring what comes, as connections call one another forth.

Beyond that, I think the best way to explain free association is to give an example from Freud himself, explaining his process of working with his famed “Irma” dream. This is the dream that, according to a letter Freud (as cited in Freud, 1900, p. 142) wrote to his friend, William Fleiss, revealed to him “the secret of dreams.” As Freud detailed the process of free association from the dream:

"I had never had any occasion to examine Irma’s oral cavity. What happened in the dream reminded me of an examination I had carried out some time before of a governess: at first glance she seemed a picture of youthful beauty, but when it came to opening her mouth she had taken measures to conceal her plates. This led to recollections of other medical examinations and of little secrets revealed in the course of them—to the satisfaction of neither party….The way in which Irma stood by the window suddenly reminded me of another experience." (1900, p. 133)

From this example, you can see the way in which his thoughts flow. He is merely following them. That, to my mind, is the hallmark of free association.

Wish-fulfillment

As the free association flows, according to Freud (1900, p. 142), it reveals the latent content of the dream, the fulfillment of a wish. Dreams of the first category, those that make sense as dreams and are readily understood to the dreamer, “are undisguised wish-fulfillments” dealing with wishes that are “known to consciousness…left over from daytime life…and decidedly of interest” (Freud, 1911, p. 165). In alignment with this, dreams of the third category, those that neither make sense within themselves, nor to the dreamer in connection with her life, those dreams “are disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes” (1911, p. 165). I gather from this that dreams of the second category are to be seen here as straightforward fulfillments of repressed or unconscious wishes. Freud understands dreams in his first and second categories, those fulfilling repressed wishes, as a compromise between the forces of repression and the repressed, brought about by the relaxation that occurs during sleep (1911, p. 166).

My Engagement with Freud’s Wish-fulfillment Theory

Wish-fulfillment as the universal basis of dreams has always been the most difficult aspect of Freud’s dream theory for me to grasp. I have simply never been able to feel that this concept leads me to the most meaningful interactions with my dreams. I have experienced my dreams much more often as shamanic journeys, precognitive guidance, or as revealing repressed feelings and “knowings,” than as fulfillments of wishes, disguised or undisguised.
I am also not entirely comfortable with the idea that it is possible to put forward a theory of dreams that is so universal, that claims to explain everyone’s every dream, especially not when my dreams seem to come in a variety of types, most of which, as I have said, do not seem to me to be about wish-fulfillment.

In addition, I have a bias against the analysis of other people’s dreams in general, and approach dreams from a tradition of dream interpretation based on the theory that only the dreamer is able to know what his own dream means. This makes more sense to me than the idea of interpreting someone else’s dream, because I recognize successful interpretation through somatic resonance. I can feel when I have arrived at the value in my dream, whereas I can almost never do so when hearing someone else talk about their dream, and even if I could, I would expect to cede authority to their felt-experience, if it disagreed with mine.

However, when I read Freud’s descriptions of his analysis of his own dreams, his mastery is clear to me. To my judgment, he demonstrates himself able to apply his theory, with success, to his own dreams. By success, I mean that he was able to derive meaning and self-awareness from them. It is this recognition of Freud’s masterful engagement with his own dreams that draws me to his theory and encourages me to want to understand his other theories.

On Freud’s part, his deep faith in the validity of his discoveries is conveyed by his words at the beginning of this paper concerning the centrality of his dream theory. That he returned to his understanding of dreams when he was beset by doubts indicates to me that this aspect of his theories was core to him and served as a grounding force, as a way of connecting to his own knowing. I recognize this because I also experience dreams as a locus of knowing. I often say that, to me, “dreams are God,” meaning that I believe what my dreams tell me (the knowing I gather from them) above any outside input, and when I find guidance in them, I do as they tell me, without having to understand why.

I have little doubt that if Freud were to read what I have just written, he would likely accuse me of mistaking my wishes for truth, for he says (Freud, 1911, p. 165) in response to the idea that dreams foretell the future that “the popular mind is behaving here as it usually does: what it wishes, it believes.” To this imagined criticism, I can only respond that I derive the same certainty of knowledge from my dreamology that I perceive Freud derived from his. My instinct, then, with all of this in mind, is to conclude that Freud’s theory of dreams undoubtedly applied to his own dreams, and seems to apply to at least some dreams of some other people, including some of my own, but that he made the mistake of assuming that all dreams function in the same way, and that the dreams of all people function in the same way as his.

Still, my respect for Freud as a dreamer and psychological theorist prompts me to engage in one more attempt to take his theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments as true. I cannot remember where, but I once read that when having a conversation with someone with whom you clearly do not agree, the best way to remain engaged in the conversation is to ask yourself something like, “What would it take for this to be true?” In using this technique I attempt one more time to embrace Freud’s conceptualization of dreams as wish-fulfillments.

It occurs to me that perhaps Freud’s theory becomes true if situated in time. Perhaps dreams are the fulfillment of repressed wishes to the extent, and in the way, that repression is a factor in society, so that if repression of instinctual desires was a hallmark of Freud’s day, for example the sexual repression of the Victorian era, then perhaps a hallmark of dreams in that place and time was the fulfillment of repressed instinctual wishes. Perhaps it is the relaxation of repression in general, due to sleep, that is a constant in dreams, and it is simply a question of what is repressed in the society of the dreaming individual as to what sorts of dreams he will have. Thus, universal taboos like incest and murder are bound to be dreamt of from time to time, by all of us, in the form of wish-fulfillments, either disguised or undisguised, but perhaps other repressions would play a greater role in the dream life of other populations. Perhaps, then, it is because my culture discourages me from feeling what I feel and knowing what I know, and encourages me to instead take my data from outside myself, that I experience my dreams as revealing those things to me. Perhaps I could even say, in conclusion, that my dreams are thus the fulfillment of my wish to feel my feelings and to know my knowings.

References

Bettelheim, B. (1982). Freud and man’s soul. New York: Vintage Books.

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (pp. 130-142). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Freud, S. (1908). Preface to the second edition. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (pp. 129-130). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Freud, S. (1911), On dreams. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (pp. 142-172). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (pp. 628-658). (1989). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

© 2009 Layla Holguin-Messner. Quotes copyright to their respective sources, as cited.