Bruno Cassarà

23.02.2019
Psychoanalysis

Freud’s Theory of the Dream

After an ample discussion of Fehlleistungen, or “parapraxes,” Freud’s Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis transitions to a detailed account of the significance of dreams for the
analytic theory of psychic disturbances. There are, in fact, significant parallelisms between
Fehlleistungen and dreams. Freud’s exposition of the former establishes that it is possible for
there to be multiple and contradictory intentions in everyday practices, that Fehlleistungen are
“signs of an interplay of forces in the mind,” and it is precisely such an interplay that Freud once
again finds in his dream analysis. Furthermore, Freud notes that both with Parapraxes and in
dreams, we “vigorously deny” the presence of contrary forces of the mind that become readily
apparent upon reflection.
There is in fact a scientific stigma against taking dreams to have meaning, and what was
once a common and even hallowed practice—namely, that of dream interpretation—is now
denigrated as mere superstition. But dreams really do speak, they really express meaning, they
really signify something. In asserting the psychological importance of dreams, Freud went
against the scientific consensus of his time, which was that dreams have purely physiological
causes. Yet Freud finds them particularly helpful for developing his theory because, while they
are a common occurrence for all human beings, they can also be a symptom of neurosis.
The essence of dreams is that they fulfill wishes, even wishes we might not be aware of.
This becomes clear if one takes up the dreams of young children, children, that is, whose dreams
are not yet distorted. The dreams of such children almost always follow the same pattern: they
almost always relate to something that happened the previous day, and the way in which they
relate to this recent past is as attempts to fulfill a wish that was not satisfied. Thus, Freud relays
the experience of a girl little more than three years of age who sailed across a lake for the first
time. At the end of the boat ride, the girl did not want to disembark and wept bitterly. The next
day, she recounted that she went on the lake once again, this time for a longer ride. Dreams thus
present themselves as attempts to fulfill frustrated wishes that would otherwise disturb sleep.
They are not the disturbers of sleep; they are its guardians.
The similarities between dreams and Fehlleistungen become clearer. In the latter, two
contradictory intentions can be identified, one which disturbs and one which is disturbed. The
Fehlleistung is a compromise between the two, the result of diverging intentions each of which is
partially fulfilled and neither of which triumphs over the other. The dream, too, is a compromise
between two demands, namely, the demand of the wish and the demand to sleep, to withdraw
from disturbing stimuli and rest. The dream intervenes as an attempt to fulfill the wish and
preserve sleep and, just as with the Fehlleistung, it only partially succeeds in both of these
efforts. It manages to preserve sleep by occurring during sleep, though it still disturbs the sleep
with some stimuli. At the same time, it manages to fulfill the wish by presenting situations in
which it is fulfilled, but it is only a hallucination and, therefore, no real fulfillment of the wish.
By contrast to the dreams of children, adult dreams are subject to distortion. Therefore,
whereas in children’s dreams the meaning of the dream coincides with how it is presented (that
is, the dream simply represents the fulfillment of the wish, as with the girl who wanted to remain
in the boat and dreamed that she was on the lake again), adult dreams present a divergence
between the Manifest Dream Content, or how the dream appears on the surface, and the Latent
Dream Thoughts, i.e., the unconscious wish and other unconscious material which analysis seeks
to uncover. The problem of distortion in dreams is a serious one because, though there is a logic
to the series of replacements that constitute the distance between manifest content and latent
dream thoughts, this logic is wholly idiosyncratic and thus inaccessible to anyone other than the
dreamer herself. However, the dreamer is precisely the one who has covered over the true
meaning of the wish in order not to become conscious of it, and for this reason this meaning is
not immediately accessible to the dreamer, either. The burial of the latent dream thoughts is
called Dream Censorship, and it takes place because the dreamer has been taught, or has
decided, to disdain and disavow the wish that motivates the dream.
Because the wish has been disavowed, the analyst has the patient engage in Free
Association, allowing her to say whatever comes to mind such that images and words
spontaneously follow from one another, even if the connection between them is not readily
apparent. In fact, the process of free association is a form of unconscious thinking and, despite
the apparent illogicity of the train of thought, inevitably leads to something that is significant to
the patient. It is thus in the work of free association that the meaning of a dream begins to
surface. The challenge, however, is in deciphering the enigmatic “language” of dreams, for while
the wish seeks to come to the surface, the unconscious endeavors to mask it and make it
unrecognizable. This distorting activity is called the Dream Work.
The dream work is carried out according to specific rules. The first is that thoughts,
which are discursive in nature, are turned into images, which are representative in nature.
Second, the wish that motivates the dream is turned into actual experiences of wish fulfillment.
Third, the unconscious “reaches back,” as it were, to the “archaic experience” of the species
which, as a rule, each human being carries within themselves and recapitulates. This means that
the unconscious of all people will represent certain concepts through stable symbols, e.g.,
weapons and tools always stand for the male genitals while things that are worked upon, such as
soil or a hunk of marble, always stand for the female genitals. These symbolic relations would
be, according to Freud, “the residue of an ancient verbal identity; things which were once called
the same name as the genitals…now serve as symbols for them in dreams.”
By far the two most important rules of dream work, however, are Condensation and
Displacement. By condensation we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller
content than the latent dream thoughts. What is manifest is, as it were, an abbreviated translation
of what is latent. In general, condensation can take place in three ways: (1) as the total omission
of certain latent elements; (2) by carrying into the manifest dream only parts of what is latent; (3)
by the combination into a single element of several related latent contents. Most commonly,
however, the term “condensation” is reserved for (3). It is remarkable that the dream work is able
to condense into a unity latent contents which can be quite different from each other, especially
because this is achieved by seeking out an ambiguous word which can signify two quite different
thoughts, just as one does with jokes.
Displacement, by contrast, manifests in two ways: (a) a latent element is replaced by an
allusion, something more remote than what would count as condensation; (b) the “psychical
accent” is shifted away from an important element and onto an unimportant one—a sort of
decentering of significance. As far as (a) is concerned, it is something that we perform in waking
life as well, but with the difference that the point of this allusion is to be as remote and
unintelligible as possible. Whereas in waking life we want our allusions to be understood, the
purpose of this kind of displacement is for the latent content to be incomprehensible. (b) has no
place in waking life except in certain kinds of humor.
Now, we recall that all dreams, those of children as well as those of adults, carry within
themselves elements of the previous day which remained in some way unaddressed. However,
the events of the previous day are not sufficient for causing a dream. What motivates the dream
is, as we began to mention, the wish that demands to be addressed. For this reason, while dreams
often feature elements carried over from recent experience, their meaning is always the attempt
to fulfill a wish so as to preserve sleep. Of particular interest for psychoanalysis, then, are those
dreams which particularly disturb the dreamer. If dreams are meant to appease the wish and
attempt to preserve sleep, then dreams which disturb sleep particularly are likely to be those at
the root of which we find a particularly abhorrent wish which receives its fulfillment. In cases
involving such wishes, the dreamer is divided against herself: she desires something hateful, and
hates her desire for it. The dreamer experiences anxiety in the face of the fulfillment of a
disavowed wish for, as Freud puts it, “anxious dreams are open fulfillments of repressed
wishes.” It is with this possibility, namely, the possibility that dreams may express wishes which
have been repressed, which makes dreams particularly significant for psychoanalysis. They are
the “royal road to the unconscious,” both because they express what has been repressed and
because they show the way in which the unconscious thinks.