The Interpretation of Dreams

“One of the sources from which dreams draw material for reproduction—material of which some part is not recalled or utilized in our waking thoughts—is to be found in childhood.”

Freud believes that our childhood experiences, including repressed desires, traumas, and conflicts, have a profound influence on our adult personalities and behaviors. He suggests that these experiences often become buried in our unconscious mind but can be expressed through dreams. In fact, Freud thinks that most dreams have some relation to memories of childhood we have since forgotten.

"We can readily understand how the strange preference shown by the dream-memory for the indifferent and therefore disregarded details of daily experience must commonly lead us altogether to overlook the dependence of dreams on the waking state, or must at least make it difficult for us to prove this dependence in any individual case."

Freud notes that the dream-memory often focuses on the "indifferent and therefore disregarded details of daily experience." In other words, our dreams often seem to be made up of random, insignificant details that we do not usually pay much attention to when we are awake. Freud argues that this focus on the insignificant details of waking life can lead us to overlook the fact that dreams are actually dependent on the waking state—our dreams are not created in a vacuum but are instead influenced by our experiences and thoughts in the waking world. However, these waking-state memories often disguise the more significant unconscious content of the dream, to which they have been attached.

“Every impression, even the most insignificant, leaves an ineradicable mark, indefinitely capable of reappearing by day. It might even occur to one to reduce the phenomenon of dreaming to that of remembering, and to regard the dream as the manifestation of a reproductive activity, unresting even at night, which is an end in itself.”

Dreams offer a window into knowledge and experiences that we do not know we possess but that still exist in our subconscious. This direct connection of dreams to the unconscious through memory is central to Freud’s conception of the use of dreams in psychoanalysis, as they allow us to explore events in our life that have had a major impact on us but that we have either forgotten or blocked from our thought.

“The problem of dream-formation may be solved by the disclosure of an entirely unsuspected psychic source of excitation.”

By exploring the unconscious mind, one can gain insight into the underlying causes of dream formation. Freud suggests that there may be unconscious impulses and desires that are not immediately apparent to the conscious mind but that are nevertheless responsible for the content of dreams. By recognizing this "psychic source of excitation," Freud believes that people can better understand the motivations and desires that drive their behavior, both in their dreams and in their waking lives.

“The dream is neither pure derangement nor pure irrationality [...] The image in a dream is a copy of an idea. The main thing is the idea; the vision is only accessory. This established, it is necessary to know how to follow the progression of ideas, how to analyse the texture of the dreams; incoherence then is understandable, the most fantastic concepts become simple and perfectly logical facts. Even the most bizarre dreams find a most logical explanation when one knows how to analyse them.”

Unlike other scholars of his time, who saw dreams as random images produced from activity in the brain and body during sleep, Freud sees dreams as a significant form of mental activity that demonstrates yet-unknown aspects of our minds. When we know how to interpret dreams, their seemingly random elements become totally clear.

“Plain speaking is rendered especially difficult by the fact that it dislikes expressing an object by its actual image, but prefers to select an alien image, if only the latter is able to express that particular aspect of the object which it is anxious to represent. Such is the symbolizing activity of the phantasy [...] It is, moreover, very significant that the dream-phantasy reproduces objects not in detail, but only in outline, and in the freest possible manner.”

The difficult aspect of dream interpretation for most people is the fact that dreams express themselves in a different language than our waking thought. Dreams express themselves through symbols, and the interpreter must be capable of following the knotty connections of these symbols to concepts in order to deduce the true meaning of the dream.

“For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention it is advantageous that the patient should take up a restful position and close his eyes; he must be explicitly instructed to renounce all criticism of the thought-formations which he may perceive. He must also be told that the success of the psycho-analysis depends upon his noting and communicating everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical. He must preserve an absolute impartiality in respect to his ideas; for if he is unsuccessful in finding the desired solution of the dream, the obsessional idea, or the like, it will be because he permits himself to be critical of them.”

Freud describes the process of free association, a central technique in psychoanalysis. This requires the patient to sit with their eyes closed, in a near trancelike or hypnotic state, and divulge whatever thoughts may appear to them in a noncritical manner. This allows the analyst to gain insight into the particular landscape of their unconscious mind.

“When the work of interpretation has been completed the dream can be recognized as a wish fulfillment.”

Freud believes all dreams to be wish fulfillments: dramatizations of the fulfillment of a desire that we hold in our unconscious but are unwilling to express in conscious life. The work of dream interpretation is to uncover this hidden wish through analysis and present it to the patient.

“Wherever a wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable and disguised there must be present a tendency to defend oneself against this wish, and in consequence of this defence the wish is unable to express itself save in a distorted form.”

Freud explains the core concept of distortion. This is that the dream constructs a disguise for the wish, dividing the dream into its latent (hidden) and manifest (obvious) content. It does so because if the dream wish were expressed directly, the conscious mind would reject it as undesirable.

“I have written the word plagiarism—without definite intention—because it occurred to me, and now I see that it must belong to the latent dream-content and that it will serve as a bridge between the different parts of the manifest dream-content. The chain of associations—Pelagieplagiarism-plagiostomi *(2) (sharks)-fish-bladder—connects the old novel with the affair of Knödl and the overcoats (German: Uberzieher = pullover, overcoat or condom), which obviously refer to an appliance appertaining to the technique of sex. This, it is true, is a very forced and irrational connection, but it is nevertheless one which I could not have established in waking life if it had not already been established by the dream-work.”

Freud gives an example of the often-complex chains of associations (this time, linguistic associations) that can distort content in dreams. He notes that the root of the association is only apparent in waking life since it had already been made in the dream. This demonstrates a few facets of Freud’s theory of dreams. First, that interpretation is necessary to fully unpack the meaning of the dream. Second, the interpretation is based on the individual’s memory and knowledge.

“If the somatic sources of excitation during sleep—that is, the sensations of sleep—are not of unusual intensity, the part which they play in dream-formation is, in my judgment, similar to that of those impressions of the day which are still recent, but of no great significance.”

Freud explains the perceived role that somatic stimuli (for instance, a pain in the stomach) play in dreams. To his mind, these stimuli do not provide a very important aspect of the dream content unless they are of very great intensity. This sets the stage for the import of mental, not physical, stimulus in his theory.

“It is not difficult to see that the character even of a well-behaved child is not the character we should wish to find in an adult. A child is absolutely egoistical; he feels his wants acutely, and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially against his competitors, other children, and first of all against his brothers and sisters [...] And this is as it should be; for we may expect that within the very period of life which we reckon as childhood, altruistic impulses and morality will awake in the little egoist, and that, in the words of Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay and inhibit the primary ego.”

Freud finds psychic life in early stages of development to be very important for the rest of our lives. Here, he describes the mind of a young child in analogy to what in other texts he will call the "id:" the aspect of our personality that is purely selfish and pleasure-seeking. As we mature, we force down the id through ego and superego, but these desires of pure selfishness remain, immortally, in our unconscious. This explains why they manifest in dreams.

“[P]arents play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all persons who subsequently become psychoneurotics. Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material of the subsequent neurosis. But I do not believe that psychoneurotics are to be sharply distinguished in this respect from other persons who remain normal [...] psychoneurotics do no more than reveal to us, by magnification, something that occurs less markedly and intensively in the minds of the majority of children.”

Parents play a significant role in the early psychological development of individuals, including those who go on to develop psychoneuroses. Specifically, Freud suggests that children often experience conflicting emotions of love and hate toward their parents, and these emotions can persist into adulthood and contribute to the formation of later psychological problems. This affection for one parent and hatred of another he deems the Oedipus complex (later, the Oedipus/Elektra complex). Freud sees this as a near-universal stage in childhood development that contributes to neurosis in only some cases. This suggests that psychoneurotics may not be fundamentally different from other individuals in terms of their early psychological development but rather may simply be more susceptible to the magnification of certain psychological impulses.

“The whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilization, and the progress, during the course of time, of repression in the emotional life of humanity, is manifested in the differing treatment of the same material. In Oedipus Rex the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence—as we discover the relevant facts in a neurosis—only through the inhibitory effects which proceed from it.”

Freud sees literary themes as important indicators of unconscious concerns of the individual that reverberate through history, elsewhere stating, “Sometimes the penetrating insight of the poet [...] has traced a poem to a dream” (170). Here, he suggests that two great literary works Oedipus Rex and Hamlet express the same unconscious drive, shaped into their specific plots by the historical context that surrounded their authors.

“It has been my experience—and to this I have found no exception that every dream treats of oneself. Dreams are absolutely egoistic. In cases where not my ego but only a strange person occurs in the dream-content, I may safely assume that by means of identification my ego is concealed behind that person.” 

Every dream is fundamentally self-centered, and the dreamer is always the central figure in the dream, even when other people or entities appear in the dream. According to Freud, even when a stranger or unfamiliar person appears in a dream, it is actually a representation of the dreamer's own self, concealed behind the image of the other person. This idea of dreams being "egoistic" is based on Freud's theory that dreams are essentially the expression of unconscious desires, wishes, and conflicts that are rooted in the individual's own psychology. Therefore, even when the dream content seems to be unrelated to the dreamer's personal life, Freud suggests that it is actually a manifestation of the dreamer's own psychological state, disguised in the form of other people or things.

“Wherever there is affect in a dream, it is to be found also in the dream-thoughts; the converse, however, is not true. In general, a dream is less rich in affects than the psychic material from which it is elaborated.” 

Freud discusses the role of affect in dreams, which often confuses his patients, as they assume that their feelings in dreams express their feelings about the dream content. This is only partially true: affect in dreams only refers to the latent content. Since the latent content is disguised by the manifest content, affect often seems to mismatch the dream symbol.

“One can never tell beforehand which is to be posited; only the context can decide this point.”

Freud states throughout his book that interpretation of the dream cannot be done in a vacuum: This is the problem with a purely symbolic method. The context of the individual dreamer’s life is the ultimate source of information on a dream, and therefore the value of the interpretation springs from the analyst’s understanding of the patient’s personal psychic landscape.

“It cannot be denied that great self-control is needed to interpret one's dreams and to report them. One has to reveal oneself as the sole villain among all the noble souls with whom one shares the breath of life.” 

Much of The Interpretation of Dreams focuses on Freud’s analyses of his own dreams in order to exemplify principles of interpretation. Here Freud reflects on the necessity for self-control in this process: One must note the remarkable mix of personal biography and scientific/ philosophical text that The Interpretation of Dreams presents. Although today considered an endearing aspect of the text, such candor was quite unusual in Freud’s own time.

“The forgetting of dreams, too, remains inexplicable until we seek to explain it by the power of the psychic censorship.”

Freud sees the censorship of unconscious content as the cause of forgetting one’s dreams. However, if any piece of the dream is remembered, it can often be revived in its completion. This concept that censorship causes memory loss is central to the Freudian concept of repression, which is today debated as a genuine psychic process.

“These ever-active and, as it were, immortal wishes of our unconscious recall the legendary Titans who, from time immemorial, have been buried under the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods, and even now quiver from time to time at the convulsions of their mighty limbs.”

Freud frequently compares psychic structures to figures of myth. Here, he draws an extended simile of the unconscious to the Titans of Greek myth, imprisoned by the Olympian gods. Like these Titans, our unconscious remains imprisoned beneath the earth (i.e., beneath conscious experience) yet still shakes our worlds through eruptions of intense psychic power.

“The mortification suffered thirty years ago operates, after having gained access to the unconscious sources of affect, during all these thirty years as though it were a recent experience. Whenever its memory is touched, it revives, and shows itself to be cathected with excitation which procures a motor discharge for itself in an attack.”

Freud sees the content of the unconscious as essentially immortal in our lives. Even if we wholly repress a thought or memory, it still exists and drives our experience. Since these thoughts and wishes are immortal, and because they emerge in dreams, dream interpretation can be a method to uncover repressed memories, even from infancy.

“The dream has taken over the task of bringing the excitation of the [unconscious], which had been left free, back under the domination of the preconscious; it thus discharges the excitation of the [unconscious], acts as a safety-valve for the latter, and at the same time, by a slight outlay of waking activity, secures the sleep of the preconscious.”

Near the end of his text, Freud describes the essential purpose of dreams. Dreams serve as a release valve of psychic pressure, returning the psychic system to a sort of homeostasis.

“The interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life.”

Translated in many editions as “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” this quote serves to provide purpose for Freud’s entire book. Dreams are a temporary release of restrictions on the unconscious. As such, they offer an opportunity to observe how the unconscious functions, and its potential effects on our lives when not properly controlled, as in Freud’s theories of hysteria and neurosis.