The Interpretation of Dreams

Overview

The Interpretation of Dreams is six hundred and fifty pages, published in November 1899 with 1900 on the title page because Freud wanted the new century. It sold six hundred copies in eight years. He was forty-three, in private practice in Vienna, professionally isolated, and had just been through the self-analysis that followed his father’s death.

It is not an easy book, and the difficulty is unevenly distributed. Chapter I is a hundred-page literature review of everything written about dreams before him and can be skipped entirely. Chapters II to VI are the method and the evidence and are readable and often gripping, because they are full of dreams, mostly Freud’s own, analysed in detail. Chapter VII is a piece of theoretical psychology, much harder than the rest, in which he builds a model of the mental apparatus.

The self-exposure is worth noting. Freud uses his own dreams as the principal evidence, which means publishing his ambition, his professional jealousies, his resentment of his father, and his anxieties about money and Jewishness. He edits, and says he edits, and it is still the most personally revealing book any scientist has published about himself.

He revised it eight times over thirty years, adding material and, in later editions, a great deal about symbolism contributed by followers. The Strachey translation is of the last edition, so some of what reads as Freud’s is a later accretion.

The argument

The specimen dream. Chapter II introduces the method by way of a single dream, Freud’s own, of a patient called Irma whose treatment had not gone well. He reports the dream, then takes it apart element by element, saying whatever each brings to mind, and reaches a conclusion: the dream is an elaborate argument that Irma’s continued illness is not his fault. It is a wish, and the wish is his own.

This chapter is the template for everything that follows, and the technique is the discovery. Earlier dream books asked what an image means in general; Freud asks the dreamer what this image brings to mind, and treats the associations rather than the image as the material.

Wish-fulfilment. Chapter III states the thesis: a dream is the fulfilment of a wish. The easy cases are children’s dreams and adults’ dreams of convenience, thirst producing a dream of drinking. The rest of the book is the hard cases.

Chapter IV handles the first and most obvious objection: distressing dreams. If dreams fulfil wishes, why are so many unpleasant? Freud’s answer requires the second half of the theory. The wish belongs to a part of the mind that the waking self will not acknowledge, so it must get past a censorship, and it does that by distortion. The unpleasantness is the price of the disguise, and in some cases the dream fulfils a wish to be punished.

The dream-work. Chapter VI is the core and the most useful part. Freud separates the manifest content, what you remember, from the latent dream-thoughts, what it was made of, and describes the processes that convert one into the other.

Condensation: a single figure or image carries several thoughts at once, so a dream is always shorter than its interpretation. Displacement: the emotional intensity is detached from what matters and attached to something trivial, which is why dreams so often feel oddly weighted. Considerations of representability: abstract thoughts must be turned into pictures, which forces the use of concrete substitutes. And secondary revision, the tidying that happens as you wake, which imposes a storyline on material that had none.

He treats symbolism cautiously here and more expansively in later editions, and he is explicit that a dictionary of symbols is a last resort when associations fail.

The Oedipus material. In Chapter V, discussing dreams about the death of parents, Freud offers a few pages on why Sophocles’ play still grips audiences who do not believe in oracles: because it presents something that was once a wish of our own, and its power comes from that recognition. This is the first statement of the idea, and it is brief.

Chapter VII. The theoretical chapter, and the hardest. Freud sketches a mental apparatus with systems rather than anatomical locations, running from perception to memory to the unconscious to the preconscious to motor discharge. He distinguishes primary process thinking, which is what the unconscious does, mobile, indifferent to time and to contradiction, from secondary process, which is ordinary reasoning. And he argues that the unconscious is not a lumber room of forgotten things but an active system with its own laws and its own aims, which the rest of the mind spends its energy keeping in check.

How to read it

Skip Chapter I. Freud himself told readers they could.

Read Chapter II entire, slowly, with the Irma dream in front of you. It is the method demonstrated once, completely, and everything else assumes it.

Then read Chapters III to VI, which contain the argument and the dreams. Chapter VI on the dream-work is the part that has survived best and is worth the most attention.

Attempt Chapter VII only if the theory interests you. It is dense, it uses a quasi-physical language of energy and cathexis that Freud later abandoned, and nothing in the practical account depends on following it.

Work through a dream of your own before you settle on a verdict. Freud invites precisely that, and free-associating to an element and watching where it goes is a different experience from reading an account of it.

Keep the objections in view. The theory is close to unfalsifiable, since an apparent counter-example can be absorbed as a disguised wish or a wish to refute the analyst. Sleep research since the 1950s has found dreaming to be a regular physiological process tied to REM sleep, which the wish theory does not predict. And the method’s reliability is a real problem: two analysts working from the same associations may reach different latent content.

What survives is substantial anyway: that dreams are worth interpreting, that mental life has a large part we do not have access to, and that meaning can be carried by distortion rather than destroyed by it.

Questions it raises

• Is every dream a wish-fulfilment? The theory absorbs its own counter-examples, which is either depth or a defect.
• Free association moves the authority to the dreamer, and the analyst still decides when the interpretation is complete. Who is doing the interpreting?
• Condensation and displacement describe how a dream is built. Could they be true as an account of dream formation without wish-fulfilment being true?
• Freud used his own dreams as evidence and edited what he published. What does that do to the status of the demonstration?
• If the unconscious has its own rules, indifferent to time and contradiction, what makes it a mind rather than a mechanism?
• Sleep science has found that dreaming happens on a schedule. Does a physiological account of when we dream tell us anything about what dreams mean?