How to interpret dreams – according to Freud

Hello friends!

One of the most fascinating things about studying Freud’s work is the sense that “what doesn’t mean anything always means something.” Perhaps you have already heard the phrase “Freud explains”, which means that Freud explains everything, or almost everything. And to talk about Freud’s genius, today I would like to share some excerpts and ideas contained in the book The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1900.

Dream interpretation before Freud

Basically, we can speak of two types of interpretation before psychoanalysis: interpretation by decipherment and symbolic interpretation. The first type of interpretation is found in the famous dream dictionaries. If I dream of an alligator it means that I must be careful with fake people. If I dream of a corpse, it means that I am fulfilling a hidden desire and so on.

The point is that interpreting the dream in this way is arbitrary. There is no defendable logic behind the meanings of each element. Why can’t alligator mean a contact with the divine and the sacred (as in some cultures)? Why can’t corpse mean the fear of death or a disease?

Well, as you might expect, this kind of meaning has gotten dream interpretation a bad rap.

The second type, the symbolic interpretation, can be found in dreams, let’s say, more prophetic, which indicate an unfolding of future events. The easiest and best-known example is Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, described in Genesis. Pharaoh dreams the following Genesis 41:17-24:

“Behold, in my dream I was standing on the bank of the river, And, behold, seven cows, fat and fleshy and beautiful to look, came up out of the river and were grazing in the meadow. And behold, seven other cows came up after these, very ugly to look at and lean in flesh; I have not seen any such, as to ugliness, in all the land of Egypt. And the lean and ugly cows ate the first seven fat cows; And they entered his bowels, but it was not known that they had entered; because their appearance was ugly as at the beginning. Then I woke up. Then I saw in my dream, and, behold, seven ears of corn, full and good, were rising from the same stalk. And behold, seven dry ears, small and scorched by the east wind, sprouted after them. And the seven small ears devoured the seven good ears. And I told this to the wise men, but there was no one who could interpret it for me.”

Joseph then, as we know, interprets the seven fat waves as a symbol of the abundance of the next seven years and the seven lean waves as a symbol of the famine that would come soon after.

This type of dream interpretation, symbolic interpretation, has always been much admired and praised. The only problem is that a particularly capable, intuitive, mystical, or spiritual subject would be necessary for the interpretation to take place. Otherwise, the dream remains uninterpreted.

Freud’s dream interpretation

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduces a hitherto unpublished element for interpretation, that is, he is the first author to consider one more element to analyze our dream life. In addition to the manifest content of the dream – what we tell you about what we just dreamed – Freud also takes into account the associations of the dreamer himself.

We therefore have two elements now:

1) the manifest content – ​​what the dreamer tells, the narrative of the dream as the dream is remembered when waking up or in the following days;

2) the latent content – ​​which is the meaning of the dream, after being analyzed.

To arrive at the latent content, the analyst starts from the dreamer’s individual associations of each part of what he dreamed. In Chapter II, Analysis of a Model Dream, Freud writes:

“Our first step in employing this method teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole, but separate parts of its content. When I say to a patient who is still a novice: “What is happening to you about this dream?”, his mental horizon tends to become empty. However, if I place the fractional dream before him, he will give me a series of associations for each fraction, which could be described as the “background thoughts” of that particular part of the dream.

Thus, each element of the dream must be separated from the others and for each element we must look for the individual associations for the elements, for the parts of the dream. Therefore, what we tell when we wake up, the manifest content, will practically never bring out the underlying meaning of the dream right from the start. There are dreams that are clear and even easy to understand, but most will need individual associations in order to discover the real meaning behind the manifest content.

For example, Freud reports a patient’s dream. In the dream, she saw her nephew dead, in a coffin. At first, we cannot say anything about the meaning of the dream, without the dreamer’s associations.

Thus, Freud begins to ask her to associate, to say what each element of the dream made her remember and think. And they soon arrived at the meaning of the dream: indeed, not long ago, another of her nephews had died and on that occasion a person she was in love with appeared at the funeral. With this, what the dream showed is that she wanted to see again the person she was in love with and who, for reasons beyond her control, had not been able to establish a loving relationship.

Therefore, between manifest content and latent content we have the associations:

Manifest Content: Dead Nephew in a Coffin

Associations:

Nephew: dead nephew (not long ago). At her nephew’s funeral: the presence of the man she was in love with.

Latent content: desire to find the man she was in love with.

Important: from the perspective of Freud’s psychoanalysis, therefore, interpretation is always individual. Each person will associate other representations with the elements of the dream.

This Freud patient dreamed of a coffin and could associate the presence of a suitor. Another person could dream of a coffin and remember his grandfather, another person could dream of a coffin and remember the time when he worked in a funeral home, I mean, the association of each element of a dream will always belong to each one, it will always be individual.

Conclusion

Anyone wishing to learn more about dreams and the method of interpretation of psychoanalysis can enroll in our Course – Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams – Click on the link and see the 1st Lesson totally Free! As I said at the beginning, the fantastic thing about reading Freud is not only having more knowledge about the psyche, about dreams, symptoms, slips, jokes (jokes), but also having the impression that the phenomena of the psyche can be explained, because as Fernando Pessoa would say – “what seems to mean nothing always means something”…

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