This is the first post of our Academic Dialogues series, to be continued on a weekly basis. In this series, we attempt to revisit some of our favourite (and typically obscure) topics learned in previous classes. This post is about dream interpretation and psychoanalytic theory. If you know nothing about these topics and would like to be a self-declared expert in about ten minutes, this post is for you. If you know a lot about it and wish to contribute, you are highly encouraged to do so — even if that means I got something wrong. 

Prelude

If your dreams usually feature epic battles, surreal landscapes, or maybe even some occasional intimacy with your friends…you’re not alone. Dreams can be weird, and even though not everyone remembers (or assigns any meaning) to them, they have undeniably intrigued humanity for a long time…

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with my dreams. Some of them were so impactful that I was tempted to think my mind was divided into two parts: the one making the dream, and the one analyzing it. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on dream journals, trying to investigate every little corner of my mind for something I might have not known about myself…

Yet, with today’s understanding of dream psychology, there is a lot of controversy on the idea that we can somehow abstract objective meaning from dreams (much less use that meaning for some healing purpose). As we will explore in a later blog post, newer biological theories of dreaming (i.e. activation-synthesis theory) propose that the dreaming process is nothing but the brain’s interpretation of a rather random pattern of neural firing. It appears that a great body of scientific evidence can indeed back up this claim.

But that is for a later time. Today, I want to take a historical approach with psychology. I believe it’s crucial that one learns the historical progression of any field or discipline, rather than accepting whatever is given as the current mainstream theory to be the ultimate truth. Today, we honor this principle by examining what psychoanalysis, once a mainstream theory, can teach us about dream psychology.

Now, If you know nothing about Freudian psychoanalysis, you are in for a treat. Though you may also be in for a lot of confusion. As I learned the hard way by re-writing this post nine times, it’s pretty difficult to summarise Freud’s concepts in only a few paragraphs. There are many interconnected constructs, and some basic (but important) assumptions that need to be held true for the system to work. Thus, I warn in advance that for me to explain Freud’s theory of dreams in a way that makes sense, I have to start with the basic pillars of his psychoanalytic theory.

Still interested?

Good. Let’s get right on it…

The basics of psychoanalysis

As far as I know, the first structured attempt to understand dreams in the modern era of psychology comes from psychoanalysis, a school of thought perhaps mostly famous for Sigmund Freud. His work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), is unquestionably one of the most influential — and complicated — works in psychology, and certainly at the time, a Bible-like work for the dream world. But, as I said right above, I truly think one has to understand the basic concepts of psychoanalysis before any of his dream talk makes sense.

One of these basic concepts is that the mind is divided into different parts. Psychoanalysis likes to stress that the mind has a conscious and an unconscious part (some also make reference to a “preconscious part”), and they work in fundamentally different ways. By and large, the focus of psychoanalysis was on the unconscious mind, which they postulated to be where most of the action happens. One’s true wishes, fears, and desires are all there. Cognitive biases are created there. Dreams are created there. Think of the image of an iceberg in the water. The conscious mind in psychoanalysis would be just the little tip you see above sea-level. However, most of the iceberg would be under the sea-level, as is postulated for the unconscious mind in psychoanalysis.

But the division of the mind doesn’t end there. Freud also separated the mind into a sort of “trinity”: (a) the socialized rational self, which he called the ego, (b) the pleasure-maximizing/pain-miniziming self, which he called the id, and (c) the mediator between the parts, which he called the superego. It is really important to note that Freud did not think of these divisions as neuroanatomical, but rather conceptual, separations. He never said “this part of the brain is where the ego is, and that part is where the id is…”

These distinctions are important because, as you maybe guessed, there could be a conflict between the parts if they “want” fundamentally different things. Another huge focus of psychoanalysis is the diagnosis and resolution of psychic conflict. There are many reasons why a psychic conflict would arise, though in the end of the day, Freud always found a way to trace it back to some of his other ideas like a psychosexual fixation, an unresolved degree of the Oedipus complex, a repressed trauma, or something of the sort. It is also important to note that there is a variety of ways a psychic conflict could express itself. Freud wrote several clinical case studies (all extremely fascinating) that illustrate this. One of the weirdest ones, The Rat Man, features a man with intrusive obsessive thoughts about a rat being inserted in his father’s anus. I know, that’s weird. Freud, of course, found a way to link this up with unresolved feelings for his father, as well as using the case to evidence his ideas of ego defense mechanisms.

What mechanisms, you ask? Now that’s a very good question!

Because psychic conflicts are painful, we must resolve them. Freud conceptualized all sorts of reaction mechanisms and defense strategies that the mind employed to fix psychic conflicts. Some of these were primarily at the conscious level (i.e. rationalization), while others were primarily at the subconscious level (e.g. repression, sublimation, etc.).

And this is where we start to get into dreams.

Dreaming, Freud argued, is a rich, meaningful unconscious process that primarily serves the purpose of wish fulfilment. It exposes, in many occasions, the root of the psychic conflict, and thus, could be seen as both a symptom and, concurrently, a mechanism of conflict resolution.

Let’s explore that thought a little more…

The psychoanalytic dream

Dreams, Freud would argue, are not supposed to be taken literally. Rather, they are messages encoded within symbols. Usually, the hidden message is something that reveals a wish of the id, our pleasure-maximizing self. Usually, that something is a desire the ego (our socialized self) did not let slip through in conscious life because of its potential consequences. Back to the Oedipal conflict: if a boy loved his mother so much that part of him wished he had sex with her, that thought probably wouldn’t make it into his conscious mind because of how disturbing and disgusting the ego would judge that to be. However, the wish does not go away simply because the ego finds it disgusting — the id wouldn’t care about that and would continue to push through for the wish to be fulfilled. This could turn into an ugly conflict, but perhaps a workable compromise could be reached before that becomes true. For instance, through a dream, the id could get what it wants.

And no, this doesn’t mean the dreamer would have a dream of sexual intercourse with his mother. Because dreams are usually encoded, the dreamer would wake up and remember the manifest content of the dream — what actually happened in the dream. This could be something like the dreamer encountering a snake slithering around a tree with an apple, and the dreamer goes on to reach the apple, proceeding to eat it as the snake begins to sing. But the manifest content speaks more to the ego than it does to the id. The wish fulfilment in the dream would be found only in the latent content of the dream — the hidden meaning that could only be consciously extracted through dream interpretation (according to the guidelines of psychoanalytic theory). In analyzing the dream, one could say the forbidden fruit stands as a symbol for something the id wants to do (in the case of an Oedipal complex, to have a sexual act with the mother). The act of eating the fruit could be interpreted as the actualization of such desire, and the snake…

Well, I don’t know…maybe the snake is just a snake.

Freud used many examples of dreams in his works to illustrate the possible ways in which they could fulfil wishes. It is important to note though that he built an objective guide for dreams and probably had his own interpretation of what it meant to have a dream that features “an apple”, or “a snake”. This is perhaps the biggest point the critics of his works make, and understandably, a very important one. However, there is no clear consensus on how strict Freud was to his own guide because his writing (most importantly, the section we’re heading next) adds so much complexity to the dream process, that it’s hard to believe that any given dream element could have a narrow archetypical meaning for everyone, across the board…

So for now, we will ignore the possible objectivity of dream elements and focus on what I think is probably the big point of Freud’s The Interpretation Of Dreams: how dreams are created in the first place.

The dreamwork

Freud believed that dreams were created in a process called the dreamwork. Think of the dream as a “product”, the brain as a “machine”, and the dreamwork as the “manufacturing process”. If we were to investigate this manufacturing process further, we would see a lot of subprocesses (or mechanisms) in action. Some of these mechanisms include:

• Condensation, namely, the action of grouping several different themes and emotions into one element (e.g. the forbidden fruit from above).
• Displacement, namely, the action of placing meaning from one thing into another (this is how the latent content becomes the manifest content)
• Repression, namely, the action where a repressed wish of the id gets buried in the unconscious mind and finally has a chance to let itself out in a dream, often masked by a manifest element

Freud also postulated that the dreamwork, as a whole, works within the framework of “overdetermination”, that is, it works in such a way where we can’t easily infer cause and effect, because elements combine themselves in a way that is self-altering. Let me try to explain that again. What it means is that a dream is a resultant of several factors that interact to jointly create the dream, but this works in such a way where we couldn’t break down the dream-content and say: “this little part of the dream referred to this thing that happened last week, and this other part of the dream referred to this feeling I have towards my parents”. Rather, the combination of my feelings for my parents and whatever thing happened last week jointly determine why the dreamwork condensed specific elements to create the dream.

I know, this was a really shitty explanation, but honestly, overdetermination is as hipster as it goes when it comes to explaining causation, and though Freud was one of the first major thinkers to use the idea, you will find that very few psychologists, even at the time, resorted to it. Today, you are more likely to find overdetermination in post-structuralist neomarxian economics than anywhere near psychology.

The point is: The dreamwork, as postulated by Freud, is a complicated process, but also an intelligent one. It works in a very peculiar framework to condense different ideas, emotions, and themes into a rich narrative that we can then consciously interpret and methodically break down to learn about our own repressions, wishes, fears, and desires. It is, as far as I know, still the best theory you can linger on to if you truly believe there is any objective self-meaning to be extracted from the dream.

Why does any of this still matter?

Even though a lot of scientific evidence points towards a different understanding of dreaming, there is still plenty of space within the theory for a framework that allows for successful dream interpretation, cognitive self-reappraisal, and meaning-seeking (perhaps in a more subjective level). Most anyone seeking therapy these days will find themselves talking about their dreams, yet if the therapist is helping out (or even conducting) the actual interpretation, it’s important to know the underlying assumptions that therapist holds when doing so.

Lately, I’ve also noticed a huge insurgency in interest for a range of dream phenomena in the Internet. Today, we have forums dedicated to discussing dreams, an online bank of dreams, and a bunch of online guides from “how to control your dreams” to “how to avoid sleep paralysis“. This is great on one hand, but also potentially harmful if people don’t know what they are talking about (kind of like what I’m doing now).

The Big Picture

As you can see, psychoanalysis is kind of trippy. It’s easy to see why the theory has so much appeal: the ideas are cool, huge, and so confident in themselves that you barely want to question them. But by all means, you should! All we have discussed is one perspective in psychology, and perhaps, while at that, not necessarily the healthiest one. Framing your dream self and your conscious as two entities having a dialogue, or imagining your mind as being split into different parts may be cool…but as I learned through experience, it could also be pointlessly hurtful. It’s not a healthy thought to imagine yourself as constantly being at an internal war, and even if all divisions were purely conceptual, in the end of the day, it still speaks of a conflict that doesn’t have to exist. Not everyone experiences the Oedipal concept. Not every dream has sex, violence, or weird narratives. Some dreams are boring because some people are boring. These are probably also the happy people, anyway…

**cries in a corner**

But in all seriousness, it is rather strange and somehow anti-Occam’s razor that we have to resort to psychologically overdetermined systems to explain something we probably could also explain decently well with much simpler ideas, like positive feedback loops and a posteriori interpretations of otherwise random neural firings. Ok, maybe they are not that simple, but I can assure you, they are simpler…

It’s also important to know that we don’t have to reject everything in psychoanalysis. One of the greatest exercises in this historical exploration is precisely seeing which ideas can be recycled and rephrased. While I don’t think dream interpretation will help everyone (or even have any objective meaning built in), I do think some frameworks of dream interpretation can be healthy. But only if we see it for what it is: a conscious process that tells us way more about our conscious abilities of self-understanding rather than a mining process to dig up non-existing repressions from the past.

What do you think?

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Disclaimer: This article was my best take on what I understood and could synthesize from Freud’s works on dream psychology. For this post, I consulted his book, “The Interpretation Of Dreams” (which I have twice read) and several notes taken in a personality psychology class that extensively covered the history of psychoanalysis. However, I do not have a doctorate in psychology. If any readers familiar with his work, and possibly (hopefully) with more credentials than I have can contribute with any corrections or additions, that would be excellent. The whole point of the “academic dialogue” is to teach and especially to learn.