Abstract
by Morton F. Reiser
The Interpretation of Dreams, despite having been published 100 years ago, remains fresh [[1]]. It continues to be highly regarded for its contemporary interest, and it continues to be a subject of vigorous debate. High regard and interest stem from the intellectual appeal and importance of Freud's proposed theory of mind, and from the logic and literary elegance of his exposition. (He received the Goethe prize for literature in 1930.) Debate and controversy centre on the fact that his hypothetical model of the ‘mental apparatus’ postulates functional mental mechanisms for which the known brain physiology of the nineteenth century provided no counterparts. Nor were they then, or even now, amenable to empirical scientific tests that would provide definitive proof or disproof. (More about this later.) Yet there are many clinicians and scholars who, on the basis of extensive experience, are of the opinion that his ideas have considerable face validity as well as heuristic value. And the ideas proposed in this and his other writings have gained wide acceptance and influence throughout the world of arts and letters, and upon contemporary thinking about the nature of man and society.
Freud considered The Interpretation of Dreams his most important work. In it, he described the empirical psychological observations upon which he based and developed his major discoveries. The first chapter provides a detailed review of the prior scientific literature on dreams. This chapter, because it is so dated is mainly of historical interest and can easily be skipped by contemporary readers without this special interest. Chapter 2 then recounts the use of his method of free association in analysing a ‘specimen dream.’ Chapters 3, 4 and 5 recount Freud's detailed analyses of a large number of dreams (of his own, his friends’ and patients’), dreams that illustrate various features that will be accounted for in the theory that is to follow in chapters 6 and 7. For each dream the dreamer's associations to manifest dream elements are provided along with a clinical perspective on the life circumstances that constituted the psychological background for the dream. Freud then shares with the reader his reasoning in arriving at his interpretation of (the meaning of) the dream. He accomplishes this by tracing the path taken by associations to manifest dream elements as they illuminate cogent (emotionally meaningful) connections between current and past life experiences. These give rise to ‘data close’ inferences, inferences that lead up to chapter 6 (‘The Dream Work’). In this chapter he conceptualizes the existence of functional mental mechanisms, mechanisms that do the ‘work’ of converting the latent to the manifest content/ meaning of the dream. These include for example ‘The Work of Condensation’ whereby one image can stand for a number of emotionally related ideas, and ‘The Work of Displacement’, whereby the emotional significance of one idea can be shifted to another image that stands for it. Other important topics related to the dream work include: ‘The Means of Representation in Dreams’, ‘Considerations of Representability’, ‘Secondary Revision’, and ‘Affects in Dreams’. Less important are sections E (‘Representation by Symbols in Dreams’), F and G which, like chapter 1, are mostly of historical rather than contemporary importance and can easily be skipped or read over lightly by most readers. Chapter 6 in turn leads up to the final chapter (7), ‘The Psychology of the Dream Process’ in which Freud develops a psychologically based model of a hypothetical ‘mental apparatus’. This chapter provides the reader with a window into Freud's thinking as he developed his theory of mind, a theory that grew out of his original and unique observations and discoveries: regression and the ‘Picket Fence Model’, primary and secondary process, wish fulfillment, and the unconscious and reality.
Freud was a master of the explanatory metaphor. The process by which he constructed his hypothetical model of the dream process is itself a model of clear logic and careful reasoning. The last two chapters make it clear that the nature of the model proposed is virtually forced by the observations detailed in the preceding chapters. Good enough, but how about the empirical status of the model? Freud was a neurologist and empirical scientist. In constructing his model of the mental apparatus he made it clear that he would have preferred a biologically based model if the available brain physiology of his time had been adequate to the task of correlating with the detailed psychological observations he was making. Earlier, in 1895, he had abandoned such an attempt (the Project for a Scientific Psychology) for just this reason. Consequently he based his hypothetical model of the mind exclusively on his psychological observations while at the same time expecting that biology could ultimately ‘blow away the artificial structure’ of his hypotheses. As will be discussed below it turns out that the psychology and biology of the dreaming mind/brain are better regarded as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (chapter 7, p.511), he introduced the theoretical model as follows:
But before starting off along this new path, it will be well to pause and look around, to see whether in the course of our journey up to this point we have overlooked anything of importance… Hitherto, unless I am greatly mistaken, all paths have led us towards the light – towards elucidation and fuller understanding. But as soon as we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into the mental process involved in dreaming, every path will end in darkness. There is no possibility of explaining dreams as a psychical process, since to explain a thing means to trace it back to something already known, and there is at the present time no established psychological knowledge under which we could subsume what the psychological examination of dreams enables us to infer as a basis for their explanation. On the contrary, we shall be obliged to set up a number of fresh hypotheses which touch tentatively upon the structure of the mind and upon the play of forces operating in it. We must be careful, however; not to pursue these hypotheses too far beyond their first logical links or their value will be lost in uncertainties… No conclusions upon the construction and working methods of the mental instrument can be arrived at or at least fully proved from even the most painstaking investigation of dreams or of any other mental function taken in isolation… Thus the psychological hypotheses to which we are led by an analysis of the process of dreaming must be left, as it were, in suspense, until they can be related to the findings of other enquiries which seek to approach the kernel of the same problem from another angle.
Later in the same chapter he wrote (p.599):
The mechanics of these processes are quite unknown to me, anyone who wished to take these ideas seriously would have to look for physical analogies to them and find a means of picturing the movements that accompany the excitation of neurones.
Twenty years later, in 1920, he wrote [2], p.60]:
This confusion is merely due to our being obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language, peculiar to psychology (or, more precisely) to depth psychology. We could not otherwise describe the processes in question at all, and indeed we could not have become aware of them. The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were in a position to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones… Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.
What about this predictive expectation now, in the beginning of the 21st century? Can we, in the light of the vastly expanded neurobiological database provided by modern neuroscience, cognitive–affective neuroscience, and the psychophysiology of dreaming sleep (including PET scans of the dreaming human brain), replace Freud's ‘psychological terms’ by ‘physiological or chemical’ ones’? The answer depends, I suppose, on whom you ask. It is still, as noted earlier, a topic for debate. The numbers and details of issues involved in such debates are too extensive to deal with in a book review of this nature. I refer interested readers instead to an extended account of the debate between J. Allen Hobson and Mark Solms that was held at a meeting of the neuropsychoanalysis group of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in New York City on November 1988 [3]. It is noteworthy that the disagreements for the most part were not as much about the data, as they were about their interpretation. While most students of the dream consider that Freud's theory is in need of revision, how and how much, is not entirely clear. On careful study the main functional principles of the theory turn out in my opinion to stand surprisingly intact. It is in fact astounding that Freud in 1900 anticipated so much that we have since learned about the psychophysiology of dreaming and the activated state of the dreaming brain in REM sleep. Parallel study of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific observations and concepts regarding the dreaming mind and the dreaming brain, respectively, reveals that information from mind and brain sciences are in fact converging [3, 4]. As noted earlier the psychology and biology of the dreaming mind/brain are better regarded as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Hopefully the time is not far off when psychoanalysts and neuroscientists conducting research on dream process may be positioned to generate testable hypotheses for collaborative interdisciplinary research. The Interpretation of Dreams is an important book, and it is an exciting good read. Beyond this, it provides readers with the special privilege and pleasure of coming into intimate contact with the mind of one of the world's most original scientific observers and thinkers.