Fall 2008

Article

The Method of Interpreting Dreams:
An Analysis of a Specimen Dream

By Sigmund Freud
Edited by Laura Partridge, Barbara Thomson

In this paper Freud states and shows through his example that dreams are capable of being interpreted.

This was a bold statement in the 1900's, as the traditional scientific community saw dreams as a somatic process signaling it's occurence by indications registered in the mental apparatus.

Freud's theory states that the interpretation of a dream means assigning "meaning" to it, replacing it by something that fits into a chain of mental acts as a link having validity and importance equal to the rest.

Through time, lay opinion has agreed that dreams do have meaning but that the meanings are hidden and are to be examined in two ways.

The first way, called the Symbolic Dream Interpretation, considers the content of the dream as a whole and tries to replace it by another content which is intelligible and analogous to the original one.

The second way, called the Decoding Method, treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning. This method does not look at the dream as a whole, but at each portion of the dream's content independently, which, in Freud's view, was disconnected and confusing.

Freud felt that neither of these dream interpretations was valid for scientific treatment of the patient. The symbolic method was too restricting and the decoding method depends on the trustworthiness of the "key", the dream book. In response, Dr. Freud offers his theory that dreams do have a meaning and that scientific procedure for interpreting dreams is possible.

Freud's idea for dream interpretation came out of his analytic work with patients. If he could trace the patient's pathological idea to its origin, the patient would be free of it. This gave him the idea of how to interpret dreams. As the patient reported their every idea or thought that occured to them in connection with subjects/dreams, Freud learned that a dream can be inserted into a physical chain that can be traced backwards in the memory from a pathological idea. It was then only a "short step" to treating the dream itself as a symptom. Then, Freud applied to dreams the method of interpretation that had been worked out for symptoms.

Freud said that this involves psychological preparation of the patient. There must be two changes in the patient to do this work: increased attention to his own psychical perceptions and the elimination of his self-criticism. The patient "must renounce all criticism of all thoughts" to achieve the desired unraveling of his dreams. He was also aware that the "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release the most violent resistance.

Freud felt that the dreams of his patients holds their case histories, which underlies their neurosis. Making use of dream material is a preliminary step towards solving the most difficult problems of the psychology of neurosis.

In this paper, Freud goes on to illustrate how he interprets a dream by using his own dream as an example.

Freud's theory was that dreams do have meaning and that when the work of interpretation has been completed, we see that a dream is a fulfillment of a wish.

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