AUTHOR: SIGMUND FREUD
DATE: 1899
‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.’ So wrote Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, in what became his most famous work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Published at the dawn of a new century, Freud hoped it would spur a Copernican revolution in the study of the mind. Instead, it took years to sell more than a few hundred copies. But gradually, Freud’s revolutionary ideas seeped into the mainstream and became a staple of popular culture. Moreover, he provided us with a lexicon of terms that remain in widespread use today. If nothing else, Freud made it acceptable as never before for people to try to make sense of themselves – and we have never really looked back.
Born in Freiburg in the Austrian Empire in 1856, Freud had a quite unremarkable early career. Having qualified as a doctor of medicine from the University of Vienna, he was a specialist in neurology with a passion for psychology, leading him to study abnormalities of the mind like hysteria and neuroses. However, his engagement with dreams saw him extend his practice to exploration of the mind as a whole – both ‘abnormal’ and ‘normal’. In doing so he birthed psychoanalysis, which he would describe in 1925 as ‘the starting point of a new, a deeper science of the mind which would be … indispensable for the understanding of the normal’.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, he laid out a model of the mind divided into three distinct areas – the Conscious, the Preconscious and the Subconscious:
•Conscious – that part of the mind taken to comprise those things of which we are aware, and that we may contemplate and discourse upon in a rational manner
•Preconscious – made up of all those ideas and memories that are latent most of the time but that may easily become conscious. (For instance, a mobile phone number, which may not immediately roll off the tongue but which can be dredged up as required without too much effort)
•Subconscious – those desires, impulses and wishes that are normally inaccessible to the conscious mind but that can significantly influence our behaviour
Just as only a small proportion of an iceberg is ever visible above the water line, so in Freud’s model only the Conscious can be ‘seen’ (or at least, recognized), while the vast majority of the mind (i.e. the Preconscious and Subconscious) goes ‘unseen’ beneath the waterline. Yet, so Freud argued, dreams allow us to examine what is going on under the waterline. As he put it: ‘Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles.’ He believed dreams allow us to safely address those thoughts and feelings that are too shameful or unsettling to confront in our conscious existence.
A FISHY TALE
On one notable occasion, one of Freud’s patients related a dream in which she held a wriggling fish in her hand. Doubtless a keen student of her doctor’s work, she confidently announced to him that the fish surely represented a penis. Freud had a different view, though. He knew the woman’s mother disapproved of her appointments with him and that she was also an avid astrologer born under the sign of Pisces. The fish, Freud held, was far more likely to represent the patient’s mother than a penis – a mixup that neatly emphasized the subjective nature of dream interpretation.
He claimed that dreams communicate information in two distinct ways. First, there is manifest content, the events of the dream as recalled by the dreamer. But there is also latent content, the unconscious ideas that lie hidden and coded behind the manifest content. Manifest content, he contended, results from sensory experiences while asleep, combined with recent worries and concerns (‘day residue’). But the really interesting stuff is in the latent content, which comprises repressed wishes from the subconscious that attach themselves to the manifest content in a disguised manner (a process known as ‘dreamwork’).
The two chief modes of disguising unconscious thought that Freud identified were condensation (where multiple ideas, objects and themes are brought together in a single object or person) and displacement (in which meaning is transferred to a different person, object or action). For instance, if you see a man being stabbed in front of a blue car, you may displace your fear of the assailant into a fear of blue cars. ‘Dream-displacement and dream-condensation,’ Freud said, ‘are the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams.’
He made other bold assertions too, perhaps most famously: ‘When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.’ Expanding on the subject, he said: ‘The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams, the readier one becomes to acknowledge that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes.’ Such claims inevitably caused a good deal of outrage in turn-of-the-century European society, where the notion that one’s deepest passions and feelings might be read in one’s dreams caused much discomfort. Perhaps wary of this, Freud was somewhat cautious on the subject. ‘In dream-interpretation,’ he said, ‘this importance of the sexual complexes must never be forgotten, though one must not, of course, exaggerate it to the exclusion of all other factors.’
One of Freud’s pivotal suggestions also left him open to potential mockery – his claim that it is possible to interpret the ‘hidden’ meaning of all sorts of signs and symbols evident in even the most innocuous details of a dream. Take, for example, his observation: ‘It is perfectly true that dreams contain symbolizations of bodily organs and functions, that water in a dream often points to a urinary stimulus, and that the male genitals can be represented by an upright stick or a pillar, and so on.’ Given the inevitably subjective nature of such interpretation, it has been apocryphally suggested that even Freud was once moved to note that ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’
There is no doubt that The Interpretation of Dreams is deeply flawed as a scientific treatise. Much of what Freud had a tendency to frame as scientific truth has been shown up as speculation, opinion or conjecture in the decades since his death in 1939. From his structural models of the psyche, his theories of psychosexual development and his methodology of dream interpretation, little has survived intact. Yet still his book helped to bring a profound energy to the scientific study of the psyche that remains to this day.
Freud was, for example, responsible for a sea-change in attitudes to mental illness. Where people had once been cast out as variously physiologically compromised, morally degenerate or even agents of devilry, Freud offered hope that the causes of psychological imbalance could be discovered and addressed. More fundamentally, he originated concepts that allow us to view the world differently. He redirected our gaze from the world around us and its constructions – the universe, society, theology – to the world within us – our psyches. It is worth noting that the window above Freud’s desk was adorned with a mirror that permanently enabled him to look at himself even while he stared out on the world.
Without The Interpretation of Dreams and Freud’s other works, our daily discourse would be devoid of such terms as the unconscious, the ego and the id, the libido, the Oedipus Complex, penis envy, the Freudian slip, the psychiatrist’s couch, anally retentive … Indeed, he is one of those few individuals whose name has even gained adjectival status. As the psychologist and Freud academic John Kihlstrom once noted: ‘More than Einstein or Watson and Crick, more than Hitler or Lenin, Roosevelt or Kennedy, more than Picasso, Eliot, or Stravinsky, more than the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Freud’s influence on modern culture has been profound and long-lasting.’