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Freud, S. (1913). The Interpretation of Dreams. (A. A. Brill, Trans.). New York: Macmillan.
Introduction to “The Interpretation of Dreams”
Psychoanalysis takes human desire as its starting point – and in the history of the discipline, dreams have played a fundamental role in the exploration of desire.
Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is arguably not unlike more commonplace instances of interpretation in which the interpreter seeks out what the agent of meaning may desire “beneath” the surface of what is presented. This includes the interpretation of intentional action (Hopkins, 1991) and the interpretation of texts, such as poems, and other artworks. Paul Ricoeur suggests, in fact, that dream interpretation is in some sense a paradigm case of the interpretation of agents’ desires: “[i]f dream interpretation can stand as the paradigm for all interpretation it is because dreams are in fact the paradigm of all the strategems of desire” (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 160).
In Freudian terms, what lies beneath the surface or “manifest” content of a dream is its “latent” content; the latent content include’s the agent’s desires of which he or she will not be consciously aware. Freud suggests that beginning with this distinction naturally raises fundamental challenges about how manifest and latent contents might be related:
We are … confronted for the first time with a problem which has not before existed, that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the processes through which the former have grown into the latter. (Freud, 1913, p. 260)
The problem which Freud raises here is that of articulating an account of the processes by which desire may be transformed, from its latent into its manifest forms, in the dreams of human subjects. Freud describes this process of transformation as the “dream-work.”
Freud isolates several specific transformations which might occur, including those of “condensation” and “displacement.” These two are central to the psychoanalytic approach to dreams; as Freud puts it, “[d]ream displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream” (Freud, 1913, p. 286).
When simply describing the content of a dream, Freud suggests, only half a page may be required. By contrast, “the analysis, in which the dream thoughts are contained, requires six, eight, twelve times as much space” (Freud, 1913, p. 261). This difference results because the content of the dream can be condensed in various ways. Condensation can consist, for example, in the uniting of the features of several people in single dream images, resulting in “collective and composite persons” (Freud, 1913, p. 274). Freud describes a figure in his own dream of Irma’s injection as being, in just this way, a composite of Dr. M and Freud’s brother.
Next, in the case of displacement, Freud claims that dreaming can be “eccentric” in the sense that “[t]hat which is clearly the essential thing in the dream thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all” (Freud, 1913, p. 283). For example, his dream of the botanical monograph is at the level of manifest content merely about his leafing through the book. However, he suggests that various dream thoughts are displaced, including thoughts concerning “complications and conflicts which result from services rendered among colleagues which put them under obligations to one another,” and his own self-reproach that he is in the habit of sacrificing too much to his hobbies (Freud, 1913, p. 284).
Broadly speaking, then, the Freudian view is that transformations such as condensation and displacement mask over a subject’s desire as represented at the level of latent content – and a task that psychoanalysis sets for itself is to imagine what this desire might have been like prior to such transformations.
Above is a link to the full-text of Chapter VI of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, “The Dream-Work,” translated by A.A. Brill.
References and Further Reading
Anzieu, D. (1986). Freud’s self-analysis. International Universities Press.
Hopkins, J., (1991). The Interpretation of Dreams. In. Jerome Neu (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacan, J. (2007). The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious. In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits: The first complete edition in English.(1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud And Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cite This Introduction
Murray, B. (2016). Introduction to “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Retrieved from http://bradleymurray.ca
Links
Freud Museum – Interpretation of Dreams
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