______________________________________________________ Dream Work: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
ego, evolves. Sleep dulls the censor, allowing ideas that have been rejected in waking hours to slip through, finding disguised expression in dreams. Dreams answer the ego’s wish to sleep; dreams sometimes fail, however, and the dreamer awakens. Physical stimuli that occur in sleep must be interpreted by the brain in a way that will not wake the sleeper. Occasionally, the sensations are too intense or the disturbing ideas are too poorly disguised to permit sleep to continue. Anxiety dreams—those frightening visitations that jolt dreamers awake—are partly explained in this way. Freud considered dreams to be “the royal road to the uncon- scious” [2]. One of the first dreams that Freud understood to be meaningful was his own “Dream of Irma’s Injection.” Freud described his dream in this way [2]: A great hall—a number of guests, whom we were receiving—among them Irma whom I immediately take aside, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not accepting my “solution.” I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your fault.” She answers: “If you only knew what pains I have now in the throat, stomach, and abdomen – I am choked by them.” I am startled and look at her. She looks pale and puffy. I think to myself that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection. I take her to the window and look into her throat. She offers some resistance to this, like a woman who has a set of false teeth. I think, surely she doesn’t need them. The mouth then opens wide and I find a large white spot on the right, and elsewhere I see extensive grayish-white scabs adhering to curiously curled formations, which are evidently shaped like the turbinal bones of the nose. I quickly call Dr. M, who repeats the examination and confirms it…Dr. M looks quite unlike his usual self; he is very pale, he limps, and his chin is clean-shaven…Now my friend, Otto, too, is standing beside her, and my friend, Leopold, percusses her covered chest and says: “She has a dullness below, on the left,” and also calls attention to an infiltrated portion of skin on the left shoulder (which I can feel in spite of the dress)…M says: “There’s no doubt it’s an infec- tion, but it doesn’t matter; dysentery will follow and the poison will be eliminated.” We know, too, precisely how the infection originated. My friend, Otto, not long ago, gave her when she was feeling unwell, an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls…propionic acid… trimethylamin (the formula of which I saw before me, printed in heavy type)…One doesn’t give injections of that sort ought so rashly… Probably, too, the syringe was not clean. THE ROUTE FROM WISH TO DREAM Freud discussed his associations to the Irma dream in The Interpretation of Dreams , in which he examines the dream image by image, ponders the meaning of the various thoughts that come to his mind in connection with each image, and begins to notice a recurrent theme. Although the dream presents a number of different explanations for Irma’s pains, it portrays Freud as utterly blameless. Freud concludes that the dream shows how he wishes things were (i.e., blameless for Irma’s pains). Thus, the wish was the dream’s motive, and the dream represents the wish fulfilled. The “secret” revealed to Freud through the Irma dream is that dreams are the fulfillment of wishes. In response to opponents who questioned how a ter-
rifying nightmare could possibly be the fulfillment of a wish, Freud responded that it was important to distinguish between the dream’s manifest content and its latent content [1; 12; 13]. MANIFEST AND LATENT DREAM CONTENT Freud asserted that dreams embody two levels of meaning or content: manifest and latent. He defined manifest content as that which the dream relates; it is the dream as dreamt and consciously remembered by the dreamer. Manifest content more often consists of visual images than thoughts and words. It is the surface meaning of the dream that is reported on waking (e.g., you dream you are running, but when you look behind you, no one is there); it is a disguised representation of the true thoughts underlying the dream. These underlying thoughts are what Freud called latent content, consisting of unconscious wishes and fantasies that have been denied gratification. Latent content is the deeper, hidden, symbolic meaning of the dream. It is the disguised, repressed part that translates threatening, underlying impulses (e.g., unconscious sexual, aggressive impulses) into the more acceptable manifest content. Latent content is disguised by a censorship process into manifest content. Because latent content is repressed, and therefore unobtainable by the dreamer’s consciousness, it is accessible only by the analysis of ideas. The process of trans- forming unconscious latent content into acceptable manifest content is called dream work [14; 15; 16; 17; 18]. THE MECHANISMS OF DREAM WORK Dream work takes the raw material of dreams (e.g., memories, feelings, wishes, events of the day) and combines it to analyze a dream [1; 13; 18]. This is carried out through three primary types of transformation: condensation, displacement, and sec- ondary revision. Condensation refers to dreams’ compression of many associated thoughts, memories, fantasies, and images into a single figure. There are different types of condensation, each with an everyday application. Videos that combine two images into a new composite image, disparate individuals that form groups based on a commonality, slips of the tongue, and double entendre jokes are examples of condensation at work in everyday life. Displacement occurs when an emotion associated with one idea or experience is detached from it and attached to another idea. It describes the dreaming tendency to hide an important idea or feeling in something trivial, allowing objectionable ideas to pass censorship. A type of displacement that is of particular importance to the formation of dreams is what Freud termed “considerations of representability.” This involves turning underlying abstract dream thoughts into pictorial, concrete language before the abstract thoughts can be used in the dream. Freud likened the process to writing poetry; in order to combine thoughts as succinctly as possible, they are translated into concrete, imagistic language. Freud asserted that displacement and condensation were the “two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams” [13].
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