Freud's Lecture 11 'The Dream Work' - A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

A summary of the workings of my blue highlighter upon a largely imperfect photocopy of the material from this 1920 lecture by Freud.

The important relations of the elements of dreams are:

1) the relation of part to a whole;
2) the approximation they represent;
3) symbolic relations;
4) plastic representations.

The manifest content of a dream as a whole can be compared to the latent dream, that Freud proposes can be revealed by interpretation. Work that is achieved in the opposite direction to the interpretation is called the 'dream-work', by Freud.

There is an amount of infantile wish fulfilment which Freud encourages us to recognise as a component of our dreams.

Dream-work achieves condensation - that is, the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one. Condensation is brought about by:

1) the total omission of some latent elements;
2) by only fragments of latent complexes passing into the manifest dream;
3) by latent elements that have something in common and are fused into a single unity in the manifest dream.

The third point is interesting - here a new and transitory concept is proposed to be spawned in the dream process, per Freud's interpretation. There is an intriguing sentence here 'The 'creative' imagination, indeed, is quite capable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another'.

Freud says thoughts are translated in dreams, but it is not like a language translation, where the distinctions are kept, rather an economy is proposed to be in operation, censoring some information.

Displacement is also a component of dream-work. This is evidenced where:
1) a latent element is replaced by a remote allusion;
2) the psychical accent is shifted from an important to an unimportant aspect.

There's a odd little anecdote he provides to illuminate the displacement process - a blacksmith in a village commits a capital offence. The Court decides the crime ought to be punished - but as the village only had one blacksmith, and three tailors, one of them was hanged, instead.

Plastic representations in dreams are the visual interpretations of what Freud classes as abstract words - the parts of speech that indicate relations between thoughts. Doublets may appear, which Freud proposes are several symbols that represent one difficult, hard to digest, element of a latent dream.

Conformities in the latent material appear as condensations in the manifest dream, and contraries may appear as conformities as well - it's important to know that contraries do exist because Freud, with all his experience, proposes that unambiguous 'no' representations are not found in dreams.

I love this next paragraph - Freud describes findings in philology to parallel the contraries process occuring in dreams. In ancient languages 'weak-strong'. 'light-dark', 'big-small' pairs were expressed in the same primal root-words. Misunderstandings were avoided by slight differences in intonation. So, for example, 'sacer' in Latin means both sacred and accursed. I think we could beneficially mine this a little more deeply today  - I need to explore this idea more thoroughly. In terms of dreamwork, archaic systems are more likely to have free, superego unencumbered reign, this regression can be seen in operation in the dream-distortions, and contraries inherent in dream-work.

Freud cautions against trying to explain one part of a dream in terms of another. Dreams cannot compose speeches, nor do they contain justification, calculation or criticism. All of these are the products of after thoughts, after the fact.

My breath gets taken away over Freud's scientific, eulogising voice as it appears in this text. The hard cold (to me, dead) models that he applies to the warm, blood-fed, ill-defined realm of dreams has a disjunct at heart, a misalignment that I find it enormously difficult to reconcile with what I love about the field of psychology. To me the beauty of my field is the co-construction of meaning, that which we struggle with, and through, that which is in some ways the battleground of the schizophrenic, the market place for a cult leader, the place of deep restitution and deep division for all of us, mere mortals that we are, as we walk the earth.

That being said, this man was a genius, no doubt, and his ability to build abstract scaffolding from fantasy is unmatched, unparalleled, I think, really. Maybe brilliance requires, indeed demands, some blindnesses, in some ways. Chase the dream, lest the dream chase you.