The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
Sigmund Freud

One of the most compelling aspects of Freud’s theory is his account of the unconscious mind. In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud states that the ego “is not even master in his own house.” The ego – a part of the mind that we are conscious of – is only a small element of what is going on in our heads. There is another part, a chaos of repressed desires, childhood experiences and phantasies, which we have very little access to. We catch glimpses of the unconscious mind through jokes, accidents, slips of the tongue, misreadings and misplaced objects, but it is in dreams that the unconscious has the widest scope to express itself. Towards the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states that “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” The major aim of the book, then, is to demonstrate how dreams can be read in order to reveal some of the contents of the dreamer’s unconscious mind.

 

Wish Fulfillment

One of the central claims of Freud’s book is that “a dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.” Freud arrives at this conclusion through the analysis of dozens of dreams, both his own and those of his family and patients. Freud relays, for example, how whenever he eats anchovies, he is woken by thirst. Immediately before waking, he dreams of drinking “great gulps” of water. To take another example, he recounts the dream of a medical student whose landlady called through the door to wake him up. Instead of getting up to go to the hospital, the student dreamed that was lying in a hospital bed. Since the dream reassured him that he was already in hospital, it fulfilled his wish to carry on sleeping. This second dream is also an example of Freud’s claim that the desire to continue to sleep is always one of the motives of a dream.

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Manifest and Latent Content

If the above examples are straightforward and unremarkable, it is because the meaning of the dreams is both obvious and banal. No great act of interpretation is required. Freud argues, however, that other dreams undergo a process of distortion whereby the latent content of the dream – what the dream really means; the wish – is transformed into the manifest content of the dream – the dream as experienced by the dreamer. Freud’s claim is that it is possible to derive the latent content from the manifest content through therapy.

 

Freud claims that dreams are distorted by a process which he calls censorship. So as not to wake the sleeper, the disturbing latent content is changed into the strange but acceptable manifest content. This is how Freud is able to account for distressing dreams. While a distressing dream does not appear on the surface to fulfill a wish, analysis can reveal the wish hidden in the latent content. For example, a woman dreaming about her inability to buy food for a dinner party is really expressing a desire not to provide food for a woman of whom she is jealous. The distressing nature of these dreams is accounted for by the distressing nature of the wish – we all have wishes which we are ashamed of. These dreams are distorted precisely because the dreamer wants to repress the wish.

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The Oedipus Complex

One of the most significant parts of The Interpretation of Dreams is where Freud explains typical dreams such as dreams of appearing naked in public or dreams of the death of a sibling. He notes the frequency of dreams involving the death of a parent. In particular, he claims men tend to dream of their fathers’ death, while women dream about the death of their mothers.

 

Freud’s analysis reveals a hidden hostility in the relations between children and their parents. This hostility is traced back to early childhood when girls develop a sexual attraction for their fathers and boys desire their mothers. Since the mother and father are already in a relationship and are therefore unavailable to their children, the father becomes a rival to his son and the mother becomes a rival to her daughter.

 

Freud finds a striking example of this phenomenon in the myth of Oedipus Rex which tells the story of an abandoned baby who grows up to unwittingly kill his father and marry his mother. Accounting for the continued popularity of the Sophocles version of the tale, Freud notes:

 

His [Oedipus’] destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes.

 

The play is compelling since it gives the (male heterosexual) viewer an oblique insight into his own psyche where these desires have been repressed.

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The Dream Work: Condensation and Displacement

Freud describes the manifest content (which he also calls dream-content) as a transcription of the latent content (dream-thoughts) into “another mode of expression.” He notes that the dream-content is a massively compressed version of the dream-thoughts. An account of the dream-thoughts could be as much as 12 times longer than that of the dream-contents. And even then, Freud frequently notes that any account of dream-thoughts is only ever partial.

 

This enormous discrepancy is accounted for by the process of condensation. Freud claims that important elements within the dream-contents are “overdetermined.” In other words, a single element can mean more than one thing. He gives an example of a dream about a botanical monograph. Through analysis and by following what he calls “trains of thought,” he connects the word “botanical” to a friend called Professor Gardner, the blooming looks of his wife and to his patient Flora. “Monograph” connects to an event at Freud’s school, an examination from his university days, Freud’s favorite flowers and a scene from his childhood. Freud unpacks the work of condensation through considering associations, literary references and wordplay such as puns.

 

The second process of distortion between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content is displacement. This concerns the “psychical value” of elements in a dream. By this, Freud means the amount of emphasis placed on an element in the dream. Freud notes that the most important element of the dream-thoughts may comprise only a minor part of the dream-content.

 

Freud also considers the formal limits of what a dream can represent. In particular, he stresses that dreams have few resources for representing the logical connections between different elements:

 

When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is brought under the pressure of the dream-work, and its elements are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together— almost like pack-ice—the question arises of what happens to the logical connections which have hitherto formed its framework. What representation do dreams provide for ‘if,’ ‘because,’ ‘just as,’ ‘although,’ ‘either—or,’ and all the other conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences or speeches?

 

Since dreams have only the most limited ways of expressing logical connections, it is largely left to the interpreter to reassemble the logic of a dream.

 

In addition to condensation and displacement, Freud also notes that dreams, as reported by patients, are subject to secondary revision. This is where a patient will fill in gaps and inconsistencies and make logical connections when relaying the dream-content. Here, Freud is aware that just putting a dream into grammatical sentences will comprise a further translation.

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The Interpretation of Dreams and Literature

In a footnote, Freud observes that “at bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep.” What interests Freud, as we noted above, is that this form of thinking involves a relaxation of the barriers which normally fence off access to the unconscious mind. As Freud emphasizes: “the state of sleep makes the formation of dreams possible because it reduces the power of the endopsychic censorship.” This said, these barriers are never fully lowered and an analyst will often run into what Freud calls “resistance” when trying to elicit from the patient the most crucial elements of a dream.

 

Even if we do not follow Freud in all of his assertions, his techniques of interpretation alone make The Interpretation of Dreams worth reading. The idea that creative texts contain meanings of which their authors are unaware opens the way to a host of new interpretations. The book has emboldened critics to attempt unconventional and original readings of literature. Freud himself, also uses his theories in order to read literary texts. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he uses the Oedipus Complex to frame a reading of Hamlet, noting that the protagonist is unable to kill his uncle since he identifies too strongly with him. Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, does precisely what Hamlet unconsciously wants to do – to kill his father and marry his mother.

 

We will close by examining one of the strangest paragraphs from the text:

 

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

 

Freud, here, points to the limits of interpretation. In the end, there is a part of a dream which evades interpretation where meaning remains opaque to both the dreamer and the analyst. For all the certainty that Freud displays when describing the processes of the unconscious mind, he has to concede (despite his protestation that it would add nothing to our knowledge) that there are parts of the psyche which remain unknowable in their complexity. Freud deploys a rich system of metaphors involving a tangle of threads, which morph into a mycelium and which produces a mushroom. Along the way, we are told that this is the dream’s navel. Like a dream, this section of text is difficult to unravel and as a consequence, it is the closest that Freud comes to admitting the limits of his text. In so doing, he points to the richness of dreams as objects of study, revealing that the work of the interpreter is never done.