Freud's approach to the interpretation of dreams was by way of the method of free association he had evolved in the course of his early studies of neurosis as a substitute for hypnosis, with which he had become increasingly dissatisfied. As in psychoanalysis proper, the subject is required to relax and allow his mind to wander freely from elements in the dream to related ideas, recollections, or emotional reactions which they may chance to suggest. By this route, he is gradually led from the dream as recollected, which Freud termed the manifest content, to the underlying thoughts and wishes, called by Freud the latent content — this, he believed, is typically based upon wishes, recollections, and fantasies related to the deeper emotional reactions of early infancy. In short, the dream is a heavily disguised form of infantile wish-fulfilment expressed as a hallucinatory experience in the course of sleep.
The activity which transforms the latent into the manifest content is known as the dream work. This makes use of three principal mechanisms, known respectively as condensation, displacement, and dramatization (also known as representation). To these is sometimes added a fourth, secondary elaboration, or revision. The major function of the dream work is to evade what Freud picturesquely calls the dream censorship. This is envisaged as the continued operation of the mechanisms of repression which serve in waking life to protect the individual from the effects of potentially disturbing wishes and fantasies originating in early life. In spite of its name, the censorship was not envisaged as primarily of social or cultural origin, i.e. as an instrument of society. As Freud saw it, repression, whether operating during sleep or during wakefulness, is an essentially biological process, supervening after the age of 5 or thereabouts with the onset of the so-called latency period. Inter alia, it is responsible for the onset and maintenance of childhood amnesia, as a result of which very little can be recalled of the experiences or emotions of earlier infancy. At the same time, repression can of course be reinforced as a result of identification and social learning in childhood and after, and its derivative, the dream censorship, may in consequence be in some degree acquired.
Of the activities constituting the dream work, the most familiar is almost certainly condensation, which few people fail to notice on occasions when recalling their own dreams. For example, a visual image in the dream may embody the features or manner of two or more quite distinct people, being evidently a composite figure. The same may also occur with places, buildings, and the like. Condensation also affects words; some neologisms in dreams are produced by condensing parts of two or more words or phrases. In a more general way, condensation of ideas may frequently be traced in dreams, often indicating that more than one theme or motive is being expressed in the same dream situation ('overdetermination'). In view of the drastic ideational compression brought about by condensation, it is not surprising that Freud referred to the manifest content as 'meagre, paltry and laconic' as compared with the richness and variety of the latent dream content.
Whereas Freud regarded condensation as, in part at least, intrinsic to the dream process, displacement he attributed wholly to the effects of the censorship. It consists in attributing emotional significance to some element in the dream that, on analysis, turns out to be essentially trivial. For example, a dream image may recur for some hours after awakening and seem to possess a disturbingly haunting quality. Yet analysis may reveal that it is operating essentially as a decoy to lure the attention of the dreamer from more dangerous themes. In Freud's view, a great deal of the disguise making the memory of the dream so obscure originates from the vicissitudes of displacement.
The term 'dramatization' refers to the transposition of thoughts into imagery, largely, though not exclusively, visual. Inevitably, this mode of representation of thought is highly concrete, and it has therefore been disputed whether abstract ideas can feature in dreams. While dream thinking is certainly concrete in much the same sense as the thinking of the young child or the brain-damaged adult, this does not mean that abstract ideas may not be represented metaphorically in the dream by concrete images. At the same time, it seems unlikely that genuinely creative abstract thinking can take place in dreams.
Secondary elaboration refers to the further distortion or elaboration of the dream that occurs after awakening. As much of this proceeds by rapid and often progressive omission of elements in the manifest content, 'secondary revision' is probably a better term for it. Although it is often held that the power of memory is intrinsically weaker in dreaming than in the waking state, the rapidity and completeness with which many dreams are forgotten only a few moments after awakening undoubtedly suggest that its basis is in part at least psychogenic. It would be interesting to compare the repeated reproduction of dreams with that of stories or pictures in the manner described by F. C. Bartlett (1932). Insofar as the writer is aware, such an experiment has not been attempted.
Although Freud relied for the most part on free association to 'undisguise' dreams, i.e. to provide clues to the nature of the persisting wish or motive behind the dream, he noted that on occasion no relevant associations were forthcoming. In some cases, Freud considered it legitimate to appeal to what he called 'primal symbolism', i.e. modes of representation which occurred so consistently in dreams that he could attribute a meaning to them independently of associative context. Among these are the familiar symbols of the male and female genitalia, based quite evidently on association by similarity. But Freud, unlike Jung, always supposed that such symbolic devices were acquired through individual experiences and should not be regarded as inborn modes of symbolic representation, independent of history and culture. The Jungian universal symbols, or 'archetypes', found no place in his theory.
Freud's hypothesis of the dream as wish-fulfilment and as representing the 'primary process' of human thinking, unaffected by realities of space, time, and logic, underwent some modification in his later thinking. In particular, he came to accept the existence of a class of dreams which in no sense embody the fulfilment of infantile wishes. These are the repetitive dreams in which the dreamer re-enacts a traumatic episode in his recent experience. Freud was obliged to concede that dreams of this character, not infrequently associated with war neuroses, do not accord with the 'pleasure principle' and merit explanation in other terms. It is also of interest that W. H. R. Rivers (1923), likewise on the basis of experience of war neuroses, was led to the view that many dreams could be interpreted in terms of an attempt in fantasy to resolve current emotional problems.
Although the respective parts played by infantile and adult experiences in the motivation of dreams remain controversial, and the concept of dream symbolism is undoubtedly treacherous, it is probably true to say that the dream is a mode of symbolic expression that has certain affinities with language. As Richard Wollheim (1985) has pointed out, however, the dream lacks what is most characteristic of language: a grammar or structure. Moreover, it lacks any real communicative function. None the less, as a form of personal expression it merits attention as a modest manifestation of human creativity.
(Published 1987)
See also dreaming.
— O. L. Zangwill
- Bibliography
- Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
- Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. In Strachey, J. (ed.), Complete Psychological Works (1900–1), vol. v.
- Rivers, W. H. R. (1923). Conflict and Dream.
- Wollheim, R. (1985). Freud (2nd edn.).
