You really can’t talk about dream interpretation without talking about Sigmund Freud. And there’s still plenty to talk about, almost 85 years after his death. While his portrait may no longer be prominently hung in your local therapist’s office, there are still a handful of hard-core acolytes out there trying to push Uncle Siggy, and his Victorian era ideas, onto the deck of the sinking ship of humanity, the HMS Anthropogenic End Times.
Let’s see what’s what...
Freud has never really been all the way dead and buried. Valium took a lot of starch out of his trousers back in the 1960s, but there are still plenty of professional Freudian organizations and schools around, breeding heretical in-fighting, debating terminology, forging new schisms. (Anyone up for a Kleinian hermeneutics debate?) The fact remains that Freud’s works are still very much studied, and he remains a towering Colossus that first-year psych students are required to sail beneath on their way to accreditation.
And rightfully so. Freud’s groundbreaking work has had a massive influence not just in psychology, dream interpretation, and the scientific study of the nature of the mind, but also in linguistics, semiotics, literary studies, film theory, and other big-brain topics.
Carl Jung, whose methods are still widely used in modern therapeutic settings — and in kinky-spanky (but historically unfounded) movie scenes — didn’t just come up with his ideas out of thin air. He had a mentor and father figure in the great man himself. So, the same way you couldn’t fully appreciate and understand the films of Brian De Palma without first knowing Hitchcock, you will need to slog your way through the swirls of Freudian cigar smoke to fully appreciate Jung and all other major brands of psychology (Perls, Adler, et al.).
Freudian Babies & Psychological Bathwater
While Freud’s star has most definitely waned, you can still find therapists in New York City and elsewhere doing good old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis — although the preferred noun nowadays is psychodynamics. (With some charging upwards of $450 an hour, you’d best rehearse what you want to cover beforehand, and you better talk really really fast in the session.)
According to a 2022 paper in “The International Journal of Psychoanalysis,” a typical Freudian analysis lasts three to seven years. That’s a lot of time, and a big bag of cash, to spend to come to some kind of murky Freudian conclusion about your mother, when a little bit of CBT and a couple of Paxils can get you straightened up and flying right in one afternoon.
Professor Rachel Blass, a training analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, audited current Freudian trends in her 2002 book, “The Meaning of the Dream in Psychoanalysis.” She takes the basic premise that Freudian psychoanalytic theory as a whole is valid and justified (this assumption, among modern therapeutic professionals, is highly disputed), but that there are “special obstacles” to Freudian dream theory that have been neglected in the community. I’ll cover her book in another post.
For now, I think this article, with the clickbait fighting words title, “Freud Is an Outdated Fossil,” gets it more or less right: our bearded Austrian friend is still relevant, but only as a reference point.
Swiss Side Trip
It’s kind of like this: one of the most treasured books on my bookshelf is “Murray’s Handbook For Travelers in Switzerland, 1838,” a 1970 reprint from a series of travel guidebooks penned by Englishman John Murray, that I picked up at The Book Nest in Los Altos, California, many moons ago.
Murray traveled extensively throughout the world back in the 19th century. He went all over Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa to gather information for his books — Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Ireland, Scotland — back and forth, multiple times, in an age when travel was a little more rugged, to say the least. No 5G, no Lonely Planet, no aeroplane customer support agents on standby ready to assist you. His guidebooks were absolutely essential if you wanted to venture out of your little village and see some of the world.
The guide on trekking through Switzerland was one of Murray’s first. He covered everything you needed for your 1838 itinerary: where to stay, where to find a hot meal and, most importantly, where to get fresh horses. He described everything in astonishing and exhaustive detail, peppering his prose with historical tidbits, local customs, politics, mannerisms, musicology — not to mention myriad interstitial blurbs of poetry and philosophy — so you get a full 3D rendering of the sights and smells of every little town you pass through on your Swiss adventure. I guess that’s how sharp and crisp a mind can be when it’s not distracted by social media, television, or anything else electricity-related.
And here’s my point (finally): just as you wouldn’t rely on Murray’s guide to hike through the nowadays Alps as anything more than a quaint lark in your backpack, the same thing goes for the science of Freud. Many of the ideas about neuroscience, consciousness, and dreams heralded by Freud back in those pre- MRI, EEG, and CT scan days are the very definition of antiquated.
To summarize: setting your dream interpretation method dial to Pure Freudian would be like trying to replicate “Avatar” using a hand-cranked Bell & Howell 2709 silent film camera on a wooden tripod. Not recommended.
The Year Was 1900
Freud got modern dream analysis going with “The Interpretation of Dreams,” first published in 1900, and which he revised numerous times in his lifetime. It was one of the most important and influential texts of the 20th century, by any measure, a true game-changer in the way people thought about their inner and outer lives, especially their dreams.
In that book, he said two primary things about dreams: that the motivation of all dream content is wish-fulfillment, and that the instigation of a dream is often found in the events of the day that just passed.
The second part is pretty accurate. The first dreams we have right after we hit the hay are heavily informed by the previous day’s drama and events, on what we’ve seen and heard and what we did. (Last night I watched a movie starring Cate Blanchett, and sure enough, there she was in my dream this morning, just chilling, minding her own business, sunbathing in my backyard.) But — as the night progresses, the dreaming mind starts tapping into the deeper recesses of our memory and unconscious, which is why you get someone or something that you haven’t thought about for ten or twenty years inserting its image into your dream narrative.
As for Freudian dream wish-fulfillment, well. No doubt we certainly have dreams that clearly fit this idea, like wild dreams of hypersexualized power and so forth. The problem with this view is the same problem that Jung and others have had with Freud, and that is: he insists that all of his ideas have to be used as a dogmatic hammer, and that every aspect of human psychology is a nail. True believer Freudian dogma is a narrow-slitted sausage-making machine (if you will) through which everything must needs be pushed.
But there’s more to life, and our dream life, than sex and death and your relationship with your mother or father. We all have a unique essence to our Self that is by definition ours and ours alone, that is heavily informed by our ongoing experience, not from the conclusions reached by someone from the Olden Oldie Old World who would most definitely lose his mind if he saw the kind of things we’re exposed to in modern society on a daily basis.
But all of the above aside, “The Interpretation of Dreams” is a great piece of autobiographical scientific literature, original and genius in many regards. It pointed everyone in the right direction when it came to dream interpretation, and shed light into areas that previously were filled with the darkness of dogma and superstition. I mean, 1900 folk still believed in fairies and Martians, even in democracy. Things have changed a lot in the past 123 years.
In general, the ideas promulgated by Freud on the nature of dreams and the unconscious still have value in dream interpretation, as long as you pick and choose their usage à la carte.
As far as a general reading audience goes, “The Interpretation of Dreams” certainly has some accessibility and length issues. The ideas contained within, however, are important to understand, as they more or less launched a thousand ships of not just dreamwork study but also psychological work in general. It’s a dense but fun read, probably best enjoyed in a darkened, velvet-curtained drawing room, portrait of Queen Victoria on the mantle, sitting in a comfy chair in front of the fireplace with a glass of port and a line of blow, and without the threat of a future exam hanging over your head.
So, like I said at the top, still lots to talk about when it comes to Freud. He remains a towering figure of history, and rightfully so. We’ll stop by Uncle Siggy’s couch a couple more times here on our dreamwork journey. It’s hard not to.