We begin this week’s piece with our two favorite psychoanalysts – Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Both these individuals contributed significantly to the theories surrounding dream interpretation. More than anything, they transformed this mystical, misunderstood pseudoscience into a psychological one which could be studied. However, their overall perspectives on dreams differed greatly.
Freud’s Theory on Dreams
Freud’s work on dream interpretation began in the mid 1890’s during one of his self-analysis periods. It was during this period he would have a significant dream known as Irma’s Injection.
Irma’s Injection
Irma was a patient of Freud’s who was refusing his treatments. In the dream, Freud encountered a sick Irma at a party. He initially approached her and said “If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.” To his surprise, she responded to this snarky remark by stating “’If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen – it’s choking me.” Next, Freud proceeded to call another doctor friend who was able to treat her. The dream concluded with the doctor stating her illness was caused by an injection.
The contents of this dream prompted Freud to dive deeper into its meaning. It was the first time he encountered a dream directly correlated to events in his life. He was able to draw several important insights by analyzing it including anxieties about his own health, represented by a white scab inside Irma’s mouth. The scab was indicative of the cocaine treatment he was undergoing at the time and the fear he would die from it like his colleague did.
He derived another insight from Irma’s response, which Freud believed was representative of his own shortcomings as a psychiatrist. Remember, Irma was refusing Freud’s treatment recommendations, which is why he believed he made that initial comment.
Both these insights led Freud to conclude dreams were expressions of repressed wishes and desires. In Irma’s Injection, the repressed wish was him treating Irma. From that point forward, Freud dove deeper and deeper into the meaning of dreams, culminating in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams. Many believe this book was Freud’s greatest work.
Freud’s Perspective on Dreams
Freud’s perspective on dreams is pragmatic. As previously stated, he believed their contents revealed a patient’s repressed wishes and desires. When he was with a patient, he began by identifying the symbols in the dream representing these repressions. He would then probe the patient for characters and events in his or her past that would cause these symbols to appear.
There were two parts to a dream – the manifest dream and the latent dream. The manifest dream the dream a patient remembers: the actions, characters, and scenery. The latent dream was the meaning behind the manifest: what did these actions, these characters, and this scenery represent? Freud believed the latent dream was the real dream.
His pragmaticism goes further. He also believed dreams were not a necessary part of sleep. The only reason for a dream to appear would be if a patient was repressing something. Furthermore, while recalling a dream, he postulated the patient went through a four-step process to cloud the latent dream’s content – condensation, displacement, symbolism, and secondary revision.
Condensation reduced the dream to its “important” content. Displacement substituted any personal connections (names, places, etc.) with generic ones. Symbolism attempted to attach the latent dream content to specific symbols. Finally, secondary revision was the patient attempting to make connections between non-correlated pieces of the dream.
That’s Sigmund’s perspective on dreams. Now, let’s discuss Carl’s.
Jung’s Theory on Dreams
Initially, Freud saw Jung as the next carrier of the psychoanalysis torch. The two corresponded often during Jung’s early career. However, as Jung advanced, he began to disagree with his colleague, with the significance of dreams being one major area of disagreement. Ironically enough, Jung happened upon this conclusion inside a dream.
Jung’s view was dreams were a compensatory mechanism which attempted to connect the conscious and subconscious mind. This mechanism was also connected to another one of Jung’s primary concepts – the Shadow. We discussed this concept in a previous Becoming Polymathic piece.
To recap, the Shadow is the part of ourselves we elect not to show the world but its characteristics are often projected on others via harsh criticism. In the context of Jung’s theory on dreams, the Shadow would be our subconscious mind and the dream would be the place where the mind attempts to connect the Shadow to our conscious self.
Jung’s Perspective on Dreams
Unlike his colleague, Jung took a fluid approach to analyzing his and his patient’s dreams. Instead of examining dreams as individual instances, he allowed them to linger and evolve over time, affording him the opportunity to connect dreams to other memories. This process is known as dream amplification.
Though he believed the symbols in dreams were significant, he understood these symbols meant different things to people of different demographics and that the manifest dream was the only dream. Over his lifetime, it is estimated Jung analyzed over 80,000 dreams. Above everything else, he believed dreams were the birthplace of thought.
Freud and Jung’s Theories in Modern Times
It’s important to remember neither Freud nor Jung had access to modern neuroscience. Freud died in 1939, Jung in 1961. For perspective, the MRI was invented in 1977. The invention of the MRI is significant in that we can now examine which parts of the brain are active during sleep and better understand the mechanisms underpinning dreams.
With these new insights, several new theories have emerged which not only discuss the mechanisms of dreams but also their significance. These modern theories are where we will begin the next part of the Inception Series…
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.” – Carl Jung, The Red Book