Freud used his own dreams as case studies. A landmark dream of his that he analyzed was about a patient named "Irma," which revealed a great deal about his own anxieties about his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess and the progress of his own career.

As for Irma, she has my sympathy. I would not want to be Freud's patient, let alone one that he shared with Fliess.

Sigmund Freud believed that dreams are one way in which the Unconscious communicates with the conscious mind. (Other methods include parapraxes, otherwise known as "Freudian slips"; obsessive thoughts; compulsive behaviours; and, believe it or not, jokes.)

The bad news is that messages from the unconscious are always garbled. This is because unconscious drives (rooted in what Freud would later call the id) tend to be dangerous, embarrassing, socially unacceptable, or gruesome; therefore, early in life, our minds develop an internal censor (representing what would later be called the superego) which tries to prevent us from facing our own darkest motivations and desires.

In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the latent content of dreams -- that is to say, a dream's "real" meaning -- is compressed, edited, obscured, and encoded by the internal censor. The content of the dream that you actually experience and remember is called the manifest content. As everyone knows, the manifest content of a dream can seem completely nonsensical at first. But Freud believed that a trained analyst could "reverse engineer" the dream, as it were, and figure out what its latent content originally was. If there are psychological problems to be found in the patient, analysis could use dream interpretation to discover them, and then the therapist would be equipped to address the underlying issues.

The Dream-Work

Freud believed that the unconscious mind used a number of techniques to transform hidden wishes and fears into the images a dreamer actually encounters in dreams. These techniques include condensation, displacement, abstraction, and secondary elaboration.

1. As is the case with all censors, the mental censor will shorten a dream by removing its objectionable bits. This process is called condensation. However, there is more to condensation than deleting things. Condensation is like mental shorthand: complex ideas are compressed so that they can be experienced quickly. For example, something like "the fear that my girlfriend will leave me for the guy she met at work" could be represented by an image of the door to her workplace. The therapist would need to ask the dreamer what kinds of associations he has with that building; needless to say, it might take some time before they come upon the particular association that drives this dream (and thus, by extension, the fear that gave rise to it).


2. Displacement is another tool that the superego uses to distract the ego from the id's hidden desires. Simply put, the latent image is replaced by another, vaguely related one. For instance, if you know two men named James, you may dream about one of them when what you're really working out is your issues about the other. Dreams, Freud believed, are filled with wordplay and visual puns which need to be decoded. Put another way, it's like you need to play a game of charades with the frantic gestures of your dreams: three words! first word! one syllable! uh, uh, sounds like... what? sounds like rabbit! what? rabbit -- bunny -- hare -- hair!


3. Finally, since dreams are by nature visual, they have to take liberties when expressing abstract concepts. If displacement is a game of charades, then perhaps abstraction is a game of Pictionary: your mind is trying to tell you that you are resentful of the way your daughter prefers your husband's model airplanes to the gardening that you have tried so hard to get her excited about and which, come to think of it, you're actually losing interest in yourself -- and all it's got is thirty seconds, some graph paper, and a big black marker.


4. Secondary elaboration is the process by which the mind tries to make a narrative out of the dream thoughts it's working with. Sometimes this attempt is successful, and the final dream makes sense as a self-contained story. Sometimes... not so much.

Random memories or images from waking life might be commandeered to serve all these purposes. Sometimes an image is forced to serve many functions at the same time. (In Freudian lingo, this is called overdetermination.) Thanks to condensation, several fears or desires might be found in each image that the dreamer encounters; but thanks to displacement, none of them are expressed directly!

The entire process whereby the mind transforms latent content into manifest content is called the dream-work. Note that the job of therapy is to undo the dream-work; contrary to popular belief, dream-work is not what happens on the analyst's couch the next day.

Psychoanalysis and contemporary culture

Like so many of Freud's theories, the ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams have been appropriated into contemporary literary criticism. When Freud was still alive, the Surrealists had already begun to see his book as an inspiration. They used their art, not only as an excuse to revel in weird images, but also as a way to explore dark (i.e., unconscious) realities that could not be expressed directly.

In the second half of the 20th century, literary critics began to consider, not just the unconscious desires of individuals, but also the "unconscious" of a text. Scholars like Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes believed that books, films, and advertising could contain latent content which can be decoded with the same techniques that Freud used to interpret dreams. In fact, condensation works very much like metaphor (e.g., using a rose to represent beauty, pain, and love all at once), and displacement is not unlike metonymy (e.g., saying "Washington" when you mean "the U.S. government"). It is assumed among most literary critics today that texts can sometimes "mean" things that their authors did not intend to say, or that they were not even able to bring themselves to think. Careful analysis of such a text can discover the moments when it betrays its author's (or its culture's) unacknowledged wishes and fears.

Further Reading:

The Interpretation of Dreams is a very long and difficult book, but Freud wrote a simplified, introductory version called On Dreams which is a bit more accessible. It is available in an inexpensive paperback from W.W. Norton.

There are also some very good web pages on Freud's theories. Here are three of the best.

http://cc.cumberlandcollege.edu/acad/english/litcritweb/theory/freud.htm

http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/freud.html

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/fgloss.html