The Importance of Dreams and Unconscious Mental Activity

A century ago, Sigmund Freud, in the spirit of scientific inquiry and after years of research as a neurologist, published The Interpretation of Dreams. The book began his exploration of the mind and his development of psychoanalysis.

The book's publication also marked the real beginnings of scientific research into the mind and the development of a truer understanding of mental health problems. The line where the brain and behavior meet is the focus of much of modern neuroscience. And dreams are proving to be a foundation for much of that research.

After a period when dreams were thought to be little more than mental fireworks, scientists are finding that they provide many insights into the mind’s workings. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious." Modern scientists, using technology such as PET scans, are discovering that Freud's "road" is indeed "royal."

The interpretation of dreams

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious mind can be studied." —Sigmund Freud

The history of The Interpretation of Dreams is as fascinating as the book.

What happened when Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams?

You could say that the fields of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology were born, but much more importantly, scientific thinking about the mind began. Before that, the brain was something physical, and the mind was a kind of pixyish spirit world. There was science about the brain and pie-in-the-sky speculation about the mind. After Freud, the study of the mind became more serious and scientific.

How did The Interpretation of Dreams do that?

To put it very simply, it was through Freud's theory that we understood for the first time that we dream for a reason; that reason is to deal unconsciously with the problems the conscious mind can't deal with. That theory meant that the mind obeyed its own rules. People set out to discover those rules and the reasons for them.

Was Freud the first person to look at the mind scientifically?

No, but in The Interpretation of Dreams, he was the first person to look at the mind and to develop a theory about its basis and creation. The statements Freud made in Dreams about the conscious and unconscious gave labels to the ethereal parts of the mind that make us human. In effect, he established the foundation for our current thinking about the mind. Before that, the thinking was much more spiritual or even alchemic.

So Freud established a baseline?

In Dreams, he began to create a means of thinking and studying the mind. Compare it to Newton's discovery of the laws of gravitation: Without them, you have no way of studying much of physics; with them, you can study everything from planets to quarks and gluons. With the work Freud began in Dreams, there is a basis for studying everything from war to a person's most secret fears and hopes.

When and how did Freud come to discover psychoanalysis?

Freud was always interested in examining his own thoughts and motivations; after his father died in 1896, he underwent a self-analysis.

He analyzed his dreams, his childhood memories, screen memories, slips of the tongue, and episodes of forgetfulness. Screen memories are memories of events that actually stand in for other memories which have been forgotten. These memories may have an unusually vivid quality because they represent a convergence of a variety of scenes.

He had a dream ("Close the eyes dream") the night after his father's funeral in October 1896, which led him to undertake an ongoing, systematic process of self-examination (in contrast to isolated episodes of analysis before this). This analysis included an examination of the complex and ambivalent emotions he had about his father. During this self-analysis, he developed the idea of the Oedipus Complex (that is, the complicated feelings of a child towards his or her parents).

Where did Freud write about his self-analysis and his own dreams?

Mainly in The Interpretation of Dreams. By 1902, he had recorded 50 dreams. Forty-three are described in The Interpretation of Dreams, four in On Dreams, and three in his letters to his colleague, Wilhelm Fliess.

Did Freud realize that the death of his father was a central stimulus to his self-analysis and his dream book?

In a preface to the second edition in 1909, he wrote:

". . . this book has a further subjective significance for me personally—a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death—that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life. Having discovered that this was so, I felt unable to obliterate the traces of the experience."

What does it really mean to analyze dreams and other elements such as memories?

To analyze dreams and memories is to try to understand how events from the past, including the distant past in childhood, continue to actively influence our current behavior and feelings without our conscious awareness of their influence.

How did Freud analyze a dream?

He listened to the dreamer's associations (his own or his patient's) to the dream. Through the associations and connections, one could understand the motives for the dreams: current and past conflicted situations.

How do these events continue to affect us if we are not conscious of them?

Freud hypothesized that these memories continue to exist outside our awareness, unconsciously.

What is the connection between unconscious mental activity and dreaming?

Freud said, "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." He meant that because dreams are such an unconscious activity, they give an almost direct insight into the workings of the unconscious mind.

What was Freud's first dream in which he understood that dreams have meaning?

The dream of "Irma's injection" (dreamt on July 24, 1895). He discussed his associations with this dream in about 25 pages of The Interpretation of Dreams. In a letter to his colleague, Fliess, Freud wrote: “Do you think that one day there will be a marble tablet on the house, saying: ‘In this house on July 24, 1895, the Secret of Dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud’? At the moment, there seems little prospect of it."

According to Freud, what was the major stimulus to dreams?

Dreams are fueled by a person's wishes, particularly wishes of which the person was not conscious. On another level, the purpose of the dream is to allow the person to continue sleeping.

What was problematic about the idea that all dreams are wish-fulfillments?

Anxiety dreams and punishment dreams. Freud came to understand that anxiety often results from the gratification of a person's wishes. The phenomenon of punishment dreams was one of the factors that led Freud to the concept of the "superego" (that part of the mind dealing with a person's sense of morality and his or her unconscious need to be punished).

Traumatic dreams proved to be a problem for Freud (were they an exception to the rule that all dreams are wish-fulfillments?). Freud came to maintain that traumatic dreams functioned to master trauma rather than to gratify wishes. Other analysts have maintained that there is no need to contrast the two types of dreams.

What are the major mechanisms that Freud postulated of how the mind works in dreams?

Dream-work, as it is called, has four major elements.

Displacement is the way the importance of an idea shifts from one idea to another. (For example, the most significant ideas or feelings for a person may shift from one idea in the latent content of the dream to an insignificant detail in the manifest content of the dream.)

Condensation is the notion that one idea or image may represent several ideas that converge on one dream image.

Considerations of representability are where all meanings, including abstract thoughts, are represented through images.

Secondary revision explains how the apparent incoherence and absurdity in the dream are eliminated by filling in the gaps to make the manifest content of the dream more logical.

What is the difference between the manifest content of the dream and the latent content?

The manifest content is the dream as it is perceived by the dreamer. The manifest content is a result of the dream-work.

Latent content is the meaning of the dream as revealed by analysis. The latent content does not appear as a narrative (like the manifest content) but rather as a group of thoughts expressing one or more wishes.