Classics and the Western Canon discussion

VII. The Psychology of the Dream-Process

Freud begins this part with the account of a dream that a father had the night after the death of his child. Freud says this dream offers no problems of interpretation. That the father dreams of his child being on fire is a wish-fulfillment dream, the wish being that the child were still alive. The being-on-fire part he takes as incidental - it was nothing more than bright light coming from an open door falling on the father's face, combined with some other scattered memories about the child. This strikes me as a rather cold-blooded analysis. Why does Freud begin this part with this particular dream? It's interesting that he uses this "unproblematic" dream as a prologue to the psychology of dreaming, which he says is a journey "into the dark."

a. Forgetting in Dreams

Freud argues that what we forget in dreams is the work of the censor. What we doubt and what we revise upon retelling the dream are the most significant parts of the dream because the psyche is trying to cover up "an outlawed dream-thought." Dreams are made possible by the lowering of resistance in sleep -- we can dream what conscious waking thought will not allow us to think about, but we forget them as soon as we awaken. Nevertheless, outlawed dream-thoughts like this can be recovered in psychoanalysis.

Freud then addresses what I think is the most obvious objection to his method of interpretation, one that has been bugging me all along:

The objection made in criticism of this procedure runs more or less as follows: there is nothing wonderful about getting from one particular element in a dream to anywhere at all. Something or other can be linked by association to every idea...

If I understand his defense correctly, it runs as follows: 1. The associations that the interpreter makes are simply too exhaustive and illuminating not to be valid. 2. They are very similar to the kinds of associations made by his hysterical patients, and since he has been able to cure them with associative psychoanalysis, then associative dream-analysis must also be valid. He admits that these two defenses are not very strong.

His best defense is that the uncontrolled flow of thoughts is purposive. There is a reason, albeit a hidden reason, that thoughts flow from one to another. This argument leads into a very interesting description of the censorship function of the psyche. The reason why dreams rely on loose, almost arbitrary connections is that the censor will not allow the psyche to speak plainly. The gravity of what the psyche wants to express must be made safe by making it look superficial or arbitrary or absurd.

b. Regression

Freud sums up to show the forward progression of the dream process from dream thought to representation as image in the dream content. The dream thought in the example at the start of the chapter is the father's wish that the son were still alive. How does the psyche generate images to represent this?

Freud suggests what looks like a thought experiment. He envisions the psyche as a "composite instrument" (which actually looks a lot like a motor neuron.) It receives a stimulus at one end and discharges at the other. In waking life, perceptual stimuli result in conscious, voluntary motor responses. These same sensory stimuli may leave trace remains in the form of memories, and these may be recalled to mind consciously in waking life, or unconsciously during dreams. He separates the perceptual system from the memory system and provides a diagram to illustrate how they are arranged.

Memories are unconscious, but connected via associations of varying strength. Despite being unconscious, memories are critical to human psychology; he goes so far as to say "what we call our character rests upon memory-traces of impressions made on us."

From his previous discussion we know of two psychical agencies, one of which is critical of the other, i.e. the unconscious and the censor. Dreams originate in the unconscious, but to reach consciousness they must pass through the resistance of the censor. (Waking thoughts reach consciousness this way as well, but the censor is stronger when we are awake so less gets through.) Dreams can go the other way, however, a process Freud calls regression. Dreams of this type are vivid and hallucinatory because they move toward the sensory end rather than the motor end and they are less processed. "In the course of regression, the close-knit web of dream-thoughts is unravelled into its raw material."

If it makes any sense to speak of the "where" or "when" of pscyhic process, where does the censor reside? At first I thought it was in the pre-conscious, but it may be before it. Regression seems to be an attempt on Freud's part to account for vividly visual images in dreams, such as the father's dream of his son on fire, as opposed to Freud's own "Autodidasker" dream, which is very language-oriented. I'm not sure this distinction is necessary, and for me it seems to just muddy the waters. This whole section puzzles me, and I have to agree with him when he says: "It may be that we ourselves have not found this first part of our psychological study of dreams particularly satisfactory."

Some things I understand or misunderstand and may be really basic.
I think "regression" is the basis of Freud's psycho-analytic technique.
That's what he means by "analysis." And it is not 1 or 2 sessions a week of "therapy." It's 5 days a week of lying on a couch talking. The talking is associative. That's psychoanalysis. The trains of association should bring us back eventually to the infantile wishes that Freud says must be the sources of the dreams. Then the dreams bring up the contents of the unconscious like buckets of water from a well (that's my analogy not F's). Freud gives examples of how he can bring up memories from when he was 2-3 years old. (That seems suspicious to me. How does he know these are memories?) His diagrams supposedly show the cycling of the psychic material: regression to pre-conscious thoughts, then coming forward to sensory images which have deceived the censor, by means of distortion, culminating in a product which is amenable to interpretation.
That's what I've got and would welcome being straightened out.

After reading the section on regression carefully twice, I have come to the conclusion (with hesitation) that he is just trying to show how the psyche generates visual images in dreams. Regression is reaching back for memories, which is something we do consciously when we try to remember something, and something we do unconsciously in dreams. I don't know much about psychoanalysis, but I would guess that regression as a technique is an attempt to retrieve unsconscious memories that are resistant to consciousness. Dreaming is similar to psychoanalysis in this way: it draws out unconscious memories that the person does not want to face in waking life. I honestly do not understand his fascination with infantile memories, but I expect we would have to delve into some of his other work to get an understanding of why he thinks these are so important.

Thomas wrote, "I honestly do not understand his fascination with infantile memories, but I expect we would have to delve into some of his other work to get an understanding of why he thinks these are so important."
The infantile memories are a problem for me too. Maybe he needs them for the "structural" picture of his whole theory. Like a foundation or a base, and to justify the importance of treating each element individually. because where else is there to go? I do recall a while ago there was some controversy over the veracity of childhood memories.

As I understand it, 'regression' means starting with memory and working towards the creation of the dream hallucinations we sense in our sleep. This is opposed to what we do in waking life, because in waking life we start with our current sensations and then use these to create memories.

Childhood memories were important to Freud ever since his discovery in 1897 of the 'Oedipus complex'. Although this is not a part of the theory of dreams per se, it played a large part in emphasizing the infantile roots of the unconscious wishes that underlie our dreams.