FREUD REASONED THAT, IN a strict sense, “True self-analysis is impossible, else there should be no illness.” Since Freud now considered himself hysterical and obsessive, it followed that repressive forces must be at work, creating symptoms from forbidden thoughts. But perhaps where a direct approach would fail, indirection might succeed. Freud had concluded that dreams resembled symptoms, as embodiments of inner conflict. He would examine his dream material, looking at it objectively, like an outsider—the excavator of ruins. In this fashion, he would become, as he put it in his letters to Fliess, his own most important patient.
Freud analyzed his patients’ dreams as well. But his own experience was central. In his inquiry, Freud’s mind stood in for the mind of human beings in general. By subjecting his dreams to minute analysis, he hoped to discover how thought and feeling were constructed altogether.
His conclusions built on his theory of hysteria but reversed the direction of a critical element: Not parents’ but children’s incestuous drives were the starting point. Freud found that all dreams are meaningful, and their meaning finally is of a single sort. They express wishes grounded in infantile sexual desires. The critical fact of psychic life is that children, starting before age three, have sexual impulses directed at their parents. Because these feelings are socially unacceptable, they are pushed out of awareness—repressed—but their residue can be uncovered in virtually every dream dreamt by any adult. As important as the dream content is the manner of the distortion. In the form of the dream, Freud discerned a censoring mechanism that transformed unacceptable thoughts, so that they did not disturb sleep. The dream revealed the process of repression in action.
The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1899, but it was postdated 1900; in any event, it must be counted as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Though it is intended as relentlessly logical argument, in its form, The Interpretation of Dreams harks back to the messy, picaresque novels at the origins of the genre, Gargantua or the Quixote. Freud’s magnum opus is overstuffed with stories—tales of folly and worldly wisdom, perversion and innocence. Often, Freud casts himself in the mold of his fictional contemporary Sherlock Holmes, detecting the obscure in the seemingly obvious and the obvious in the obscure. Often, the book reads like sociology—a portrait of a certain stratum of Viennese society. It veers from memoir to social commentary to compendium of questionable humor. Freud draws eclectically on academic monograph, folktale, and classical text. His tone is confessional and boastful, frank and reticent, poetic and pedantic. Within Freud’s oeuvre, the book constitutes a turning point. If it reaches back to awkward accounts of the physics of mental energy, it also looks forward to the theories that will link symptoms to the vicissitudes of modern culture.
Where The Interpretation of Dreams fits least comfortably is in the progression of science. Today, we still know too little about sleep to be certain how dreams are created. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that dreams are assembled by higher brain regions from chaotic internal signals produced by primitive parts. A summary by a researcher, Rita Ardito, has it that “Dreaming is the way our cognitive and signifying schemes give sense to stimulation that is in itself nonsense.” Even so, the tenor of dreams is not emotionally obscure. During intervals of depression, dreams’ content and affect tend to be negative. When trauma threatens, dreams are anxious. Joy and elation can animate dreams, not in hidden form, but openly.
The function of dreaming remains in dispute. The leading theory has it that dreams serve a housekeeping role, allowing mammals to discard or to store and order recent memories. A competing hypothesis holds that dreams keep the brain adequately stimulated to permit an easy transition back to full consciousness—think of a computer that is “put to sleep” instead of being shut down. Some researchers believe that in species such as ours that are typically prey rather than predator, dreams—most especially repetitive dreams of trauma—do serve a function, allowing animals to review biologically important situations, such as “threat events,” and to rehearse in anticipation of further danger. But it is easy to find responsible proponents of the more skeptical position, that dreams serve no purpose at all.
What would be harder to locate today are defenders of the view that dreams are minutely and complexly constructed to hide and yet retain evidence of unacceptable beliefs and feelings. Some of the variety in dreaming relates to the range of sleep stages that can produce dreams. In certain stages, recent events stimulate the dream material; researchers can shape these dreams through having subjects engage in standard exercises (like playing a computer game) at bedtime. Many such dreams are transparent.
In other sleep stages, dreams are confused. By Freud’s account, the lower, unconscious mind has dangerous thoughts and the higher, conscious mind censors them, creating distortions that appear bizarre but contain meaning. Today, scientists believe that when dreams are bizarre, it is because, as a normal aspect of sleep, parts of the brain that organize thought are underactive. The bizarreness comes directly from the primitive and emotional regions of the brain that generate the material of the dream. There is no censorship—so the mechanism of repression cannot be revealed by studying the dream narrative.
Nor are dreams mostly wishful. Dream material is as often negative or threatening, emotionally, as it is positive or pleasurable. As the dream researcher J. Allan Hobson puts it, “Unconscious wishes play little or no part in dream instigation, dream emotion is uncensored and undisguised,…and dream interpretation, via free association, still has no scientific status whatsoever.”
Freud famously proclaimed that “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of mind.” Even psychotherapists, for the most part, no longer view the dream as a privileged entry point to the recesses of thought. Associations to dreams may lead in fruitful directions, but the value lies primarily in the chain of waking ideas attached to the dream. Other starting points, such as behavior, can serve the associative process equally well. And dream recollections have a particular risk attached. Patients of Freudian analysts tend to report dreams that correspond to Freudian theories. Jungian analysts are handed Jungian dreams. It seems that each of us is Blanche Wittmann, supplying the very material the doctor desires.
If the last fifty years of sleep research is valid, then it is impossible that a neutral examination of dreams could have led Freud to discover reliable clues to mental mechanisms. Not only in form, but also in content, The Interpretation of Dreams is likely to strike scientifically informed readers as fiction tinged with autobiography. But on its own terms, read apart from contradicting knowledge about the sleeping brain, The Interpretation of Dreams is a convincing text. In particular, Freud’s own dreams seem to provide rich support for the theories he favored. If he was his own Blanche Wittmann, he filled the role in the fullest sense, with flair.
Dream analysis was an active topic in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud referenced seventy-nine books that among them contained most of the claims that he would advance. These include assertions that dreams speak symbolically, they enact moral dilemmas or unsolved problems, they involve elaborations or distillations of waking thoughts, they contain ideas that have been dismissed or gone unrecognized, they entail a rearrangement of impressions outside of consciousness through a sort of “dream work,” they expose deeper layers of thought than are accessible in waking life, and they are valuable tools for psychological inquiry. These ideas had each been championed by serious physicians and biologists—although Freud would need to reargue each point, against a competing scientific view, prevalent in his time as in ours, that understood dreams as a residue of random brain activity.
Even the notion of specifically sexual symbolism in dreams had been broached. In 1861, a philosopher, Karl Scherner, proposed that dreams are interpretable. He saw phalluses in clarinets, towers, and pipe stems. Freud’s library contained two copies of Scherner’s book, with the sections on sexual symbolism underlined.
Regarding dreams, Freud’s contribution was his usual one—not originality but selection, simplification, legitimation, and emphasis. He would have it that all dreams are meaningful and almost all represent wishes, indeed wishes that are fulfilled in the act of dreaming, so that in sleep the dreamer experiences success.
Freud introduces his conclusion with a metaphor, one that draws on his expertise as a hiker:
When, after passing through a narrow defile, we suddenly emerge upon a piece of high ground, where the path divides and the finest prospects open up on every side, we may pause for a moment and consider in which direction we shall first take our steps. Such is the case with us, now that we have surmounted the first interpretation of a dream. We find ourselves in the first daylight of a sudden discovery. Dreams are…fulfillments of wishes.
The claim is an odd one. On the face of it, a good many dreams have unhappy resolutions. Two of his contemporaries, Freud was obliged to note, had found that 57.2 percent of dreams are, on their face, “disagreeable” rather than “pleasant” in content.
The “examination dream,” to pick a common type, is problematic, and it took Freud years to wrestle it into submission. In this nightmare, a person finds himself unprepared facing a school examination from his youth. Freud concluded that the dream represents a consolation. The dreamer has in fact passed the test in question, so in the dream, he is predicting comparable success with a current, adult challenge. At the same time, the implicit reproach in the dream, that one is stupid, refers to “the repetition of reprehensible sexual acts” and to the punishments received for naughty behaviors, such as masturbation, in early life. Effectively, the past struggle, too—the conflict with a powerful and judgmental father—ends in victory within the dream. The child who was called dumb has graduated.
Freud’s reasoning may strike modern readers as preposterous. If an examination dream has any function it is to signal anxiety. But Freud was looking beyond dreams to the structure of the mind. In his new scheme, early trauma was no longer the critical factor in human development. Freud needed all dreams to be wishes because he was intent on demonstrating that hard-to-explain mental phenomena have a single source, illicit desire from infancy.
In October 1897, Freud updated Fliess about the progress of his self-analysis. He began with a nod to Fliess’s numerology—for three days, Freud had felt “tied up inside,” just as he had twenty-eight days prior. Freud had been dreaming about his childhood nurse, the “teacher in sexual matters.” To better understand his dream, he asked his mother about the nurse’s dismissal at Philipp’s behest. Freud then recalled his own despair during his mother’s pregnancy. “A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found in my own case, too, [the phenomenon of ] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and now I consider it a universal event in early childhood…If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex.” Everyone is an Oedipus, Freud speculated, “and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality.”
The same reasoning, Freud wrote, explains the logic of Hamlet. Though he has little compunction about murdering Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius, Hamlet is irresolute in exacting revenge on his regicide uncle, Claudius. The explanation lies in the torment Hamlet “suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother.” Interestingly, Freud never pursued the parallel between Claudius and Philipp, who usurped Jakob’s authority and gained a level of intimacy with Amelia. Freud did not seem to be pursuing a nuanced account even of his own experience. As always, he was intent on making a bold stroke. Hamlet, Freud, and Everyman harbor guilt over their incestuous wishes, from infancy, for their mother.
Freud’s method is his usual one, turning the particular into the general and the moderate into the extreme. He starts with personal history: the loss of his nurse, the absence of his mother, the looming figure of the half brother, and the prospect of a new sibling—ordinary grounds for jealousy and anxiety. These memories and feelings contain the basis for a set of useful psychological observations about the conditions of family life for the child. Jonathan Lear summarizes the elements as helplessness, prohibition, and ambivalence. Children are dependent and must be obedient. As a result, they are likely to have mixed feelings of love and resentment, emotions that may need to be sorted out as they recur in relationships in adulthood. Carl Jung made similar comments early in his acquaintance with Freud. In Jung’s view, Freud had done well to insist on the conflictual nature of family life but had gone wrong in giving the challenges of childhood a sexual cast.
In Freud’s hands, dependency and rivalry become sex and violence. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he concludes: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father…. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature…” Freud has taken common mixed feelings to their limit. All children want to murder their fathers and commit incest with their mothers—as a fact of nature. It was this dramatic amplification of the family drama that captured the popular imagination.
There is likewise a familiar quality to Freud’s dream interpretation. His first and most important example is a “specimen dream,” whose content Freud had noted down on the morning of July 24, 1895. That summer, he had been treating a young woman, “Irma,” who was also a family friend. He had proposed to her a solution to the mystery of her hysteria, but she had declined to accept it. A medical colleague reported, reprovingly, that he had visited with Irma while she was away on vacation and that she was not fully well. This much, Freud tells his readers in preface to an account of his dream.
The dream is full of detail. Freud reproaches Irma. She reports ongoing pains in her throat and abdomen. Fearing organic trouble, Freud examines Irma and finds a white patch in her throat that, however, has a structure that resembles the bones of the nose…and so on. The dream is populated by censorious physicians who suspect an infection. Strange or compound words abound: a colleague had inappropriately given Irma an injection of “propyl, propyls,…propionic acid…. trimethylamin.”
The dream is a mystery that Freud sets out to solve by examining each of its constituents. The resemblance of the throat to the nose, for example, reminds Freud of anxiety about his own health. He has been taking cocaine, and a patient who followed his example had suffered necrosis of a nasal membrane. His writings on cocaine brought him ill fame, and misuse of the drug may have hastened the death of a friend—and so on. Propyl leads to thoughts of malodorous fusel oil and also to propylaea, or monumental gateways such as exist in Munich, where Freud had recently visited his friend Fliess. And trimethylamin is a substance that Fliess believed was related to the chemistry and odors of sexuality. Then, too, Fliess was a specialist on the links between the vagina and the nose.
Freud is showing that each fragment of a dream is “overdetermined,” that is, formed by the condensation of a number of the dreamer’s thoughts and by meaningful relationships to other dream elements. Although Freud’s associations to the dream may seem scattered over numerous sources of anxiety—his mind turns to an illness suffered by his eldest daughter and then to his wife’s health during pregnancy—many refer to a single issue, Freud’s conscientiousness as a doctor. His wish is not to be held responsible for any harm that has come to his patient. The dream fulfills the wish since, in its narrative, it is a colleague who has failed Irma.
Freud would come to see the untangling of this dream as the signal achievement in his intellectual life. Five years later, when he thought that his peers had failed to appreciate the originality of his theories, Freud wrote Fliess: “Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words: Here, on July 24th, 1895 the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud. At the moment there seems little prospect of it.”
Taken on Freud’s terms, both the dream of Irma’s injection and its analysis are impressive feats. The dreamer’s mind has produced richly symbolic clues and strung them together to form an evocative mystery, one that Freud solves cleverly. But then, Freud knew a good deal that he had not shared with the reader.
Irma was largely modeled on a patient, Emma Eckstein. Her medical history contained ample grounds for worry. Eckstein’s numerous symptoms had included pain and bleeding in her nose. Imagining that the nasal symptoms might result from hysteria rooted in sexual problems, Freud referred Eckstein to Fliess. Fliess confirmed the diagnosis and operated on the nose, as a diseased sex organ. But soon Eckstein began to hemorrhage from her mouth and nose, which now gave off a fetid odor. In March 1895, a Viennese surgeon was called in. He discovered that Fliess had mistakenly left a foot and a half of gauze packed in the wound. Eckstein remained in a serious condition for months. Her face was permanently disfigured.
Freud had referred his patient to a friend who had committed malpractice, in the ser vice of a crank theory. Once more, Freud had disgraced himself before his colleagues. The object of his anxieties in those months should have been reasonably obvious. Imagine Freud speaking to someone familiar with the case and saying, “Last night, I had a strange dream about Emma Eckstein.” Knowing not a single detail from the dream story, and holding a quite indefinite view of the function of dreams, the listener might reply, “You must be worried about your reputation.”
As with “Miss Lucy R.,” the energetic detection—propyl, trimethylamin—seems beside the point. It is hard to know which scenario makes Freud look worse, that he had no notion what was making him anxious and required detailed dream analysis to arrive at a conclusion, or that he knew from the start but hid this awareness from the reader and then constructed a recondite analytic process to justify his psychological theory.
Freud’s account of “Irma’s Injection” illustrates the contention that dreams are transparent. In 1977, writing without awareness of the Eckstein debacle, psychologists performed a word count and theme analysis of the dream record. They concluded that 60 percent of the text was devoted to ill health and that without the aid of the dreamer’s private associations, one could conclude that he was anxious about bodily vulnerability. The psychologists also judged the dreamer to be hostile to women and supportive of male doctors.
Parenthetically, Freud would remain defensive about the Eckstein case for the rest of his life. In April 1896, over a year after the botched surgery, Freud wrote Fliess that Fliess had been right, Emma’s bleeding had been hysterical, a result of longing, and that it had probably occurred at the “sexually relevant times” in Fliess’s numerology scheme. In 1909, Freud added a reasonably deceptive footnote to the account of the Irma dream, saying that in time it had become apparent that Irma’s gastric discomfort, for which he had feared he would be blamed, was due to gallstones—but not mentioning the concrete basis for the throat (or nose) pain. As late as 1937, two years before his death, Freud wrote about the Eckstein case as a successful analysis of a hysteric, even though he knew that his patient had relapsed and spent a decade or more as a bedridden invalid.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud indicates that he has held back a layer of analysis of “Irma’s Injection,” presumably its roots in his incestuous wishes in childhood. Without knowing its content, we may be inclined to resist this further inquiry. The immediate worry behind the dream is so powerful that if we believe that dreams are meaningful, we will want to say that in the most important sense, this one is adequately explained without reference to infantile sexuality.
Setting aside the details of the dream and the issue of incest, we may want to acknowledge a theme in Freud’s life, of ambition and fear of humiliation. We can trace a line from the prophecies of greatness to urination in the bedroom to the father’s hat and then to Freud’s series of stumbles through overreaching. What is at risk extends beyond reputation to identity or self-worth. Instead of proving himself the hero his mother expected, Freud will turn out to be the bumbler that his father said he would be, or the bumbler his father was. Freud’s anxiety over the Eckstein case has roots in his early development.
It is tempting, today, to set aside the failed science and admire The Interpretation of Dreams as one of the great works of autobiography, alongside Benjamin Franklin’s and Benvenuto Cellini’s. But then, Freud’s book redefines what autobiography should be—how we should account for a life.
There is, to start with, the Oedipus complex. It may be less universal than Freud imagined, and its elements less extreme. Still, Freud opened the door for frank discussion of disagreeable emotions in childhood and intense rivalries in family life. Even between parent and child, mixed feelings prevail.
Then there are the many mental mechanisms that Freud named. We displace or transfer emotions; feelings that arise here are applied there. We compress or condense trains of thought, packing them into symbolic words or images. Unacceptable ideas are repressed, or perhaps set aside, only to reemerge in altered form. The mind is not unitary. Certain mental phenomena have a dynamic basis, emerging from a vigorous interplay of opposed aspects of mind. These concepts have lost their role in our explanation of dreaming. But Freud’s listing of them sets a new standard, for the sort of inquiry we will want to make in examining the self.
And The Interpretation of Dreams is a more effective attack on sexual prudery than were Freud’s varying accounts of hysteria. Freud sees sexual symbols everywhere. Those that are not immediately apparent can be accessed through association. A dream about candlesticks leads to a student drinking song about the Queen of Sweden masturbating. Freud proceeds directly: “Some transparent symbolism was being used in this dream. A candle is an object which can excite the female genitals.” An overcoat is a condom; a little box is a vagina. Freud is unembarrassed and, as always, expansive. Sex is not just present in dreaming, it is the cause of dreaming, as it is the motive force in child development. Our mental lives are built on sex.
Freud had arrived at a formulation that had enormous appeal in an era when the avant-garde—in fiction, in theater, in art—was demanding a new acceptance of sexuality. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud offered a confident discussion of intimate matters that constituted an attack on Victorian or Hapsburger reticence and piety—forces, it must be said, that were already in retreat. This synergistic combination, psychology as social criticism, would allow psychoanalysis to become a movement.