Dream Psychology Psychoanalysis for Beginners

I. DREAMS HAVE AMEANINGIn what we may term "prescientific days" people were in no uncertaintyabout the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after awakeningthey were regarded as either the friendly or hostile manifestation of somehigher powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific thoughtthe whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; todaythere is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that thedream is the dreamer's own psychical act.But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation ofthe dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship toour psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbanceswhich, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its manypeculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between itsimages and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, theway in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as somethingbizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it-all these and manyother problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which uptill now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the questionas to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided.There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position withregard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function;secondly, has the dream a meaning-can sense be made of each singledream as of other mental syntheses?Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Manyphilosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which atthe same time preserves something of the dream's former over-valuation.The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar state of psychicalactivity, which they even celebrate as elevation to some higher state.Schubert, for instance, claims: "The dream is the liberation of the spirit fromthe pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters ofmatter." Not all go so far as this, but many maintain that dreams have theirorigin in real spiritual excitations, and are the outward manifestations ofspiritual powers whose free movements have been hampered during the day("Dream Phantasies," Scherner, Volkelt). A large number of observersacknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements-atany rate, in certain fields ("Memory").In striking contradiction with this the majority of medical writers hardly admit that the dream is a psychical phenomenon at all. According to themdreams are provoked and initiated exclusively by stimuli proceeding fromthe senses or the body, which either reach the sleeper from without or areaccidental disturbances of his internal organs. The dream has no greaterclaim to meaning and importance than the sound called forth by the tenfingers of a person quite unacquainted with music running his fingers overthe keys of an instrument. The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, "as aphysical process always useless, frequently morbid." All the peculiarities ofdream life are explicable as the incoherent effort, due to some physiologicalstimulus, of certain organs, or of the cortical elements of a brain otherwiseasleep.But slightly affected by scientific opinion and untroubled as to the originof dreams, the popular view holds firmly to the belief that dreams reallyhave got a meaning, in some way they do foretell the future, whilst themeaning can be unravelled in some way or other from its oft bizarre andenigmatical content. The reading of dreams consists in replacing the eventsof the dream, so far as remembered, by other events. This is done eitherscene by scene, according to some rigid key, or the dream as a whole isreplaced by something else of which it was a symbol.