Interpretation of Dreams, The

The most notorious example of post-Symbolist alchemical imagery in Erench artistic theory was that employed by Andre Breton (1896-1966), the Pope of Surrealism. Breton s many affinities with mainstream Symbolist art theory need not detain us here, with the exception of one familiar and ongoing leitmotif, le Rive. Besides being a recognized core idea in Symbolist poetics, the Dream was also much discussed by another spiritual step-child of Symbolismus, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. As seems conveniently overlooked, the Rives-Traume... 

Interestingly, in 1899, Sigmund Freud was paid only 209 for his famous The Interpretation of Dreams. After its publication, just 600 copies were sold in eight years, yet it later became a landmark book. Edgar Allan Poe received 10 for his famous poem The Raven ... 

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. 

As far as the data are concerned, Freud made no attempt to collect dream reports from people other than himself, and even those reports are few in number (about 40 are cited in the 700 pages of his Interpretation of Dreams) and fragmentary (his word counts, of less than 100, are many times less than most modern samples). In the 1890s, as today, it was an easy matter to collect an extensive, representative sample and to treat the data-set as a whole rather than using the piecemeal, axe-grinding, controversial technique that Freud used to discuss each one. 

Without disguise-censorship, what is there left for an interpretation of dreams using a psychoanalytically constructed theory If the dream-inducing instincts are not disguised and not censored, but entered into the dream plots directly, then the manifest dream is the dream, is the dream, is the dream ... 

Although dream emotions are the same in men and women, they are associated with highly individual content. It is in this spirit that the interpretation of dreams - particular dreams of specific individuals - can still find a place in personal psychology and psychotherapy. In all likelihood, this is probably what has been going on in psychodynamic psychotherapy anyway. 

We are all engaged in a kind of dream interpretation all the time. Why did so and so say such and such Why do I feel anxious when I pick up the telephone Why do I become angry at my daughter-in-law Our experience with the interpretation of dreams shows us that it is dangerous to assume causality and that our answers to these questions had better not be just local and narrow, and analyse only dream content. 

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. 

Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans A. A. Brill. New York Macmillan, Psych Web. Accessed December 8, 2008 ... 

The study of dreaming was long the exclusive territory of humanities which described this particular mode of mentation and tried to find its innate significance, most often by symbolic interpretation. With Freud (1900) this approach blossomed although already in the Talmud it is written an uninterpreted dream is an unread letter (Fromm, 1953). 

In the case of consciousness, you say, the situation is even worse because, by definition, no one else can see my dreams but me. And I would agree with that. I don t ask you to consider the details of my reports as scientific evidence, and I don t ask you to take my interpretation of those details as scientific proof of any particular dream theory. 

In his interpretation of these results, Solms emphasizes the apparent necessity of activating these forebrain emotion and motivation centers as so critical to dreaming that he favors the idea that dreaming occurs if and only if the brain is motivated. Solms then tries to use this notion to resuscitate Freud s idea that all dreams are wish fulfillments, that the forebrain activation in sleep is caused by dopamine (not acetylcholine), and that the forebrain is capable of creating the conditions necessary for dreaming without the participation of the brain stem. I will examine each of these ideas in turn. 

With these words he abruptly left me, without listening to my further questions and I awoke and found myself at home in Europe. May God shew to you, gentle reader, the full interpretation of my dreams Farewell ... 

---