Psychoanalysis dream theory

In 1900, when Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis upon his dream theory, he was still heavily under the influence of the erroneous neurobiology of his Project for a Scientific Psychology, the work he abandoned in 1895. Because of this, the underlying mechanistic model of psychoanalysis and the practice that it justified was fatally flawed at the outset. The details of this argument have been amply described in The Dreaming Brain and are widely accepted. 

As this book has proceeded, I have first knocked Freud down, then picked him up again, dusted him off, and put him back on a pedestal. But it is not the same pedestal on which I would want to place our own dream theory. How can we now summarize the similarities and differences of the views of modern neuroscience with those of Freudian psychoanalysis My colleague Bob Stickgold puts it well when he says, Freud was 50 per cent right and 100 per cent wrong . In this final chapter we unpack this paradox, hoping to make clear what speculative philosophy can and cannot do, and to show that only experimental brain science can hope to correct any picture of ourselves based on intuition alone. 

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