Interpretation dream science

The Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was an imaginative theorist who created psychoanalysis when his dream of a scientific psychology built on the foundation of brain science had to be abandoned. Dreaming was the altered state of consciousness that Freud tried first to explain in psychoanalytic terms. This is because the concepts that became foundational for psychoanalysis via Freud s masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), are the direct intellectual descendents of the key ideas in the failed Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). By equating what he took to be the psychodynamics of dream formation... 

As he was so close to us in time and spirit, and because our brain-based theory is so different from his, in this chapter we focus on Freud s psychoanalytic model as it was developed in his Projectfor a Scientific Psychology (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud wanted his psychology to have a solid foundation in brain science, but he was 100 years too early to build it as we now can. For this reason, he was forced to resort to speculative philosophy, the medium of all pre-modern dream theories that analyse content. The differences between Freud s content analytical scheme and modern theory are shown in Table 1. 

In both cases - which are common, everyday occurrences - we have the same problem as the dream interpreter. We must project causal narrative structure on to events as a matter of course. It must be a category of mind to look for, and to find, causality in nature. Fortunately for us, it is often there. That s why we have survived and that s why science has progressed despite the errors into which our tendency to project narrative causality plunges us. But, we make at least as many mistakes in assigning causality as we make correct inferences. Sometimes we are able to see this, although usually not. 

The concrete biochemistry of cortical enhancer regulation, the puzzle of the amalgamation of order and chaos in the human brain is still unsolved. As usual, attractive descriptions remedy such deficiencies. Freud s work was the hitherto most influential description of the coexistence of rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, in the human brain. It is no accident that his fascinating writings, enjoyable readings closer to fiction than science, have always deeply influenced many artists. Freud also provided a delightful interpretation of dreams at the boundary between art and science. It was probably the pseudo-scientific nature of his brilliant books that precluded him from receiving the well-deserved Nobel Prize for literature. 

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