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RupesMaharjan
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If Freud's sweeping generalisations are unsustainable, it does not follow that his theories are inapplicable to a narrower set of circumstances. Take his second major hypothesis - that the function of the dream is to protect the sleeper from waking up. We do not have to deny research indicating that the dream has other functions (information processing, emotional modulation, creative thinking) in order to acknowledge the face validity of its role as a 'guardian of sleep'. When I depress a 'snooze' button on my clock, the alarm temporarily stops in order to allow me to continue sleep and drift gently into wakefulness. Recently, however, I noticed that I had improved upon this system by obviating the need to press the button. When the persistent beep began, I simply dreamt myself pressing it, and hallucinated the ensuing silence.
It is almost a hundred years since The Interpretation of Dreams was first published, and it is pertinent to ask whether Freud's ideas are still relevant. During the 1950s researchers discovered that sleep was characterised by phases of rapid eye movement (REM), which occurred about every 100 minutes. When volunteers were woken during such phases they frequently reported dreams; and when repeatedly woken at such times and thus deprived of REM sleep, a compensatory increase in REM sleep occurred. It was further suggested that a person deprived of REM sleep would become mad and that dreams therefore were necessary, not merely to preserve sleep but more importantly to preserve sanity. Little evidence has emerged to support this view, and subsequent work revealed that volunteers woken from non-REM sleep also reported dreams, though they were on the whole less colorful. In any event, whatever the somatic correlates of dreaming, they come no nearer to discrediting Freud;s central idea - an understanding of dreams in terms of intentionality - than does human physiology to discrediting our normal daytime experience.
Two Freuds present themselves in The Interpretation of Dream. One Freud draws on prevailing concepts in the science and technology of his time to generate models of the mind. Were he alive today, he would no doubt be likening the mental apparatus to a computer rather than a camera, and talking in terms of silicon-based intelligence. But another Freud is concerned with meaning rather than mechanism, the metaphorical transformations of desire as opposed to the oscillation of energic impulses. From today's perspective, this Freud is not so much wrong as over-dogmatic. Some dreams certainly seem to mislead and disguise, but others are given to truth telling. The prevalence of clearly comprehensible dreams, the creative activity, the intellectual achievements and the emotional experience available together indicate that dreams are as various in their nature as all of mental life - their non-discursive aspects as much poetry as propaganda. Freud's essay into the mind's activity while we sleep was faulted by logical inconsistency and extravagant generalisation. It was not the universal key he took it to be. Nonetheless its seminal genius is beyond doubt.
Stephen Wilson
Oxford
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Robert Louis Stevenson, 'On Dreams', in Across the Plains, Chatto and Windus 1913
Ella Freeman Sharpe, Dream Analysis, Hogarth Press 1978
Calvin Hall, The Meaning of Dreams, McGraw-Hill, New York 1966
Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams, Oxford University Press 1981
Alexander Welsh, Freud's Wishful Dream Book, Princeton University Press 1994
Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg, Freud Scientifically Reappraised, John Wiley 1996
NOTE ON THE TEXT
This text id that of the third edition (1932) of A. A. Brill's authorised translation of the first German edition, published in 1900.
To be continued...