The Interpretation of Dreams

“The Interpretation of Dreams” constitutes the centrepiece of Sigmund Freud’s writings on human consciousness and existence; it aims to dispel any and all misleading myths regarding the most common questions and doubts that arise when thinking critically about the act of dreaming as well as the content of the dreams in and of itself.

In “The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream”, Freud outlines the procedure of two essentially different methods which are commonly – and wrongly, according to him – employed when carrying out an analysis of a particular dream; the first of the two being the “Symbolic” technique, which takes into account the content of the dream as a whole and then proceeds to replace it with “another content which is intelligible and in certain aspects analogous to the original one”; the second one, on the other hand, focuses its attention on each and every single sign found in a dream, as it could potentially bear particular significance when analysed in accordance with a fixed set of interpretations – it is thereby referred to as the “Decoding” method of dream-interpretation.
Freud debunks the validity of both as individual methods, and to solve the problem, puts the two together. The decoding method can supplement the symbolic method, as it can interpret individual fragments. The dream is then treated as a particular type of symptom – common to us all – which can be interpreted with the assistance of word-associations during a psychoanalytic session:

what is crucial, during this procedure, is that there must be a suspension of the critical faculties, what Freud calls “a relaxation of the gates of reason.” The rational, organising, judging side of the brain must be supressed in order for its pleasure-seeking counterpart to come up with associations that the rational side would not normally have sanctioned.

Although this text has helped me recognise the importance of the role Freud played in the development of psychoanalysis, his conception of “hysteria” as a predominantly female disease is something I strongly take issue with, as it feeds into patriarchal misconceptions that have no basis in reality and has been largely harmful to women throughout history.