The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

The Integration of Psychoanalytic Theory in the Sciences Dealing with Living Systems

FREUD'S The Interpretation of Dreams seems particularly appropriate for discussion in the present issue of Dædalus because it was first published in the opening year of the twentieth century, 1900, when Freud was forty-four years old. It was the first major publication of what came to be known as psychoanalytic theory. This field, if not his unique creation, is overwhelmingly dominated by the figure of Freud. The main outline of psychoanalytic theory is clearly present in The Interpretation of Dreams and, indeed, in a surprisingly subtle and fully developed form. In preparation for writing the present article, I entirely reread the book in its seventh German edition, since I had not read it for a good many years.¹ I was more profoundly impressed by it than I was originally, essentially because, on the one hand, I have a much better understanding of psychoanalytic thinking than I did, and secondly, because I now connect Freud's book with a great many theoretical preoccupations of my own which have undergone very substantial development since I first read Freud.

¹ My reading was done, as I noted, in the 7th German edition (Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1945).

Reprinted by permission of Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston, Massachusetts. Winter 1974 (vol. 103, no. 1), Twentieth Century Classics Revisited.

In a great many respects this is a unique book. Although there was a rather extensive literature on dreams in his day, which Freud meticulously reviews in his first chapter, there was surely nothing of a scope and depth comparable to his interpretations. Another unusual aspect of this book is the fact that, as Freud himself points out, many of the theoretical problems it deals with are adaptations of the problems he had encountered in trying to understand his own field of the psychoneuroses over a series of years before writing it. So far as we know, Freud himself was not in any gross or obvious sense a neurotic. Through a variety of channels - notable through his recognition of the phenomenon called transference - he became increasingly aware that a person who attempts to treat the neuroses of others through the psychoanalytic procedure must first acquire a very unusual knowledge of himself. This requirement has, within the

psychoanalytic movement, been institutionalized in the didactic analysis which is a primary condition of admission to psychoanalytic practice. Freud was the only psychoanalyst, however, who ever carried out the procedure of psychoanalysis on himself. Among its other features, The

Interpretation of Dreams is the primary documentation of this self-analysis.

The Interpretation of Dreams contains, as far as I know, Freud's first published statement about the Oedipus complex, which was to figure so very prominently in his general theory. It is, I think, highly significant that Freud's father died in 1896, four years prior to the publication of The

Interpretation of Dreams.² Painful and disturbing as it was at the time, there is reason to believe that the death of his father had the long-run effect of freeing Freud from a good many of the inhibitions that had impeded his work of self-analysis. In the book, he recounts and analyzes

a considerable number of his own dreams, as well as those recounted to him by his patients then subjected to analysis in the course of a therapeutic program. He also draws, though not so heavily, on dreams from the more general literature.

One might ask why Freud chose, as the primary subject matter of his first major theoretical work in psychoanalysis, the study of dreams rather than the direct study of neurotic symptoms and the conditions of their resolution through therapy. Part of the answer lies in his own convictions concerning the importance of his self-analysis for the furtherance of his

work. Through his psychiatric practice, he had come to realize that neurotic symptoms were very generally connected with dreams. [2002/1/19 jjd: thank you, paxil] Since he was personally, for the most part, free of neurotic symptoms, dreams provided a particularly appropriate vehicle for his self-analysis.

At the same time, he surely realized that in the history of science, indirect attacks on fundamental theoretical problems have frequently proven more fruitful than direct ones.

In addition, as a responsible physician, Freud may have considered the very fact that the study of dreams was at one remove from the focus of his clinical responsibilities * as an argument in its favor since it enabled him to concentrate on psychological problems as such, rather than on the balancing of therapeutic success and failure. * [jjd: is not that my whole reason for doing parsons before elaborating into public access?]

² Freud's relation to Wilhelm Fliess was particularly important to Freud. On this and the whole background of Freud's life, see the monumental biography in three volumes by his close English associate and friend Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953, 1955, 1957). The relation to Fliess is discussed in Vol. I, ch. 13.

continued ...