The Interpretation of Dreams

Rating:
Summary: Easy to Read, Hard to Finish
Review: *Yaaaawn* I decided to read this book because it is the foundational text of the psychoanalytic school of literary criticism. T.S. Eliot, among others, lists it as an inspiration. Since lit crit is my bag, I thought I might as well read it. Yes, it is an important book about the reason why we dream and the processes that take place. It's ideas of displacement, condensation, wish-fulfillment, etc. are all important to literature, but this is the driest book I've ever read. Despite the clear, easy writing, it was a very difficult book to get through.

Rating:
Summary: Classic contribution to psychoanalytic theory
Review: Although Freud's ideas and psychoanalytic theory haven't fared that well in recent decades (Jung's views and reputation have actually done much better), there is no doubt that Freud's ideas were a major contribution to the understanding of human behavior and the mind and remain at least historically important today. Although perhaps superceded by the cognitive and neurobiological approaches that have developed in the last few decades, Freud was still a brilliant thinker who changed our undestanding of the mind for the better.

For example, although his idea of the ego, super-ego, and id are now being supplanted by more physiological explanations (the limbic system of the brain being a very good analog to the id), nevertheless, basically what Freud was saying was that a shaping process goes on during early childhood that results in the formation of relatively enduring personality characteristics. There is no doubt that this developmental idea still has validity to this very day.

However, while I certainly respect and admire many of the early psychologists, and they were great pioneers in many ways, and some of their ideas are still important, nevertheless, a lot of what they said has to be taken now with a considerable grain of salt, and the area of dream interpretation is one them. It doesn't mean that dreams are completely valueless, but they're of much less significance than has been claimed in the past. The most serious critique of the psycholanalytic (and others) view of dreams comes from recent research into the brain and neurobiology. The problem is that dreams are really not what people think at all most of the time--which is some sort of cyptic but profound message from the unconscious mind.

For example, consider the question of why most dreams seem to consist of collections or sequences of difficult to interpret images, thoughts, and memories that seem to be combined or strung together in a not very logical and difficult to interpret fashion. The reason why, contrary to the popular belief that this reflects some profound and not easily discernible meaning, is that the order really is almost random, or is governed by very weak associational processes. The reason why this is, and why most dreams seem so puzzling and difficult to understand is that when you go to sleep, the memory areas of the brain located in the temporal cortex become more active through a process known as corticocipedal disinhibition, allowing memories, images, and thoughts to flood into consciousness willy-nilly. This is prevented or inhibited during normal waking, otherwise the flood of thoughts and images would interfere with normal memory retrieval and thinking processes.

This is a little off the subject, but one area of pseudo or quasi-scientific theory and speculation that has been getting a lot of attention lately (and shows how much more sophisticated the more fantastically oriented or perhaps "mystically" oriented types in psychology are getting) is the idea that the brain is a "quantum computer" and uses quantum mechanical and even multi-dimensional spatial capabilities to do its work. At least one world-famous physicist and mathematician, Roger Penrose, has suggested it himself. (I critique Penrose's proposal on this in my Amazon review of his book, The Large, The Small, and the Human Brain).

However, although a fascinating idea, there is still no real evidence that this is in fact the case. Neurobiologists have drawn analogies between devices like SQIDs (super-conducting quantum interference devices) and nerve cells, but this is reaching a bit.

One main problem for me would be the noise factor. There is already a huge amount of random noise in the firings of nerves in the human brain and quantum mechanisms are far below the level of this noise. The brain seems to ignore the high noise level just fine and to operate pretty well despite it and so I don't see how quantum effects which would be far more subtle would have much of an effect.

The other main problem is that the brain typically shows a huge amount of integration and convergence in its mechanisms, and phenomena at the level of quantum effects would probably just get lost in the overall convergence process or even the resting level of noise. Another way to think about it is how likely quantum effects are to manifest themselves at the molecular level, let alone the cellular level or the level of a neural circuit or the entire brain.

So until there's some real evidence, I remain sceptical, and this is probably another "mystical" idea that will probably go the way of all the others.

But anyway, getting back to the present book, that little digression was really by way of pointing out that unscientific speculation has been rife in psychology from its birth in the mid-19th century with thinkers such as Rudolph Lotze, Paul Brentano, Wilhelm Wundt, Johann Fechner, Hartmann and the Scottish faculty psychologists, Janet, Freud and the other psychoanalytic theorists, and many others. It's just getting harder for the layman to recognize this sort of thing when he sees it since their ideas are more and more taking on the language of physics and engineering and neurobiology. But that doesn't mean it's not the same old unfounded speculation and mystical nonsense.

Rating:
Summary: A HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENT'S POINT OF VIEW
Review: ALTHOUGH THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK THAT I HAVE READ THAT WAS WRITTEN BY SIGMUND FREUD, I FEEL THAT THIS BOOK WAS REALLY GOOD. HIS THEORY ABOUT THE ED, EGO AND THE SUPER EGO WAS VERY INTERESTING. OVER ALL I FEEL THAT THIS BOOK WAS REALLY GOOD, AND I WOULD TRULY RECOMMEND IT TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN DREAMS.

Rating:
Summary: a classic ponderously translated....
Review: by the ever-turgid Strachey, who loves medical metaphors and Latinized phrasings more than Freud loved literary clarity; but aside from that, THE classic of psychoanalysis, and the first (and, for Freud, the favorite) of Freud's great works.

One can imagine that modern dream research would have interested Freud as much as its reductionist speculations would have amused him. Certainly he'd never have argued that because a patient's stomach hurt during a painful recital of an early memory, this indigestible piece of emotional trauma was "caused" by the gastronomic rejection of a burnt piece of toast eaten just before the session. OF COURSE psychical activity has a physical substrate. And, perhaps, vice versa. What he'd have wanted to know was: in what psychological situation was all this embedded?

One can't help but admire the boldness and honesty with which Freud presented his own dreams and associations. We might speculate in hindsight that Irma, the partially cured patient whom Freud tried to talk out of her hysteria, showed up in his dream with throat and stomach symptoms and an illness caused by a bad injection to protest the way he injected women with his sex-etiology theories, thereby in effect silencing their true voice; and smile at Freud's dream of an orator named Lecher, a dream he had shortly after accepting a position in which he did a lot of public speaking about psychology.

But that we can speculate thus we owe largely to the techniques inspired by Freud himself. He was often wrong, but the spirit of his endeavor lives on.

Rating:
Summary: Authoritative and full of Insight
Review: Dreams are some of the most mysterious, most enchanting, and most sacred experiences in all of human existence--and yet they are also some of the most elusive, and so their meaning has been scrutinized by every culture of the human race, for thousands and thousands of years.

In all of these inquiries, perhaps none has been more thorough, more scientific, and more systematic than Dr. Sigmund Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" (1900). In his book, Freud surveys the scientific research on dreams put forth so far (a remarkable achievement of scholarship in itself), and then puts forth his own theory of dreams.

Dreams, Freud claims, are nothing more than a fulfillment of an unconscious wish. He supports his theory with analysis from a selection of actual dreams from his patients and from his own experience.

Much of this book is entertaining and enlightening. Freud's good taste in literature is reflected in his own engaging style, and his sense of scholarly adventure is catching. Plus, he doesn't shy away from the big questions. How can we interpret dreams? How does a dream come about? What is the purpose of dreams? Why are all dreams wish fulfillments? What are the meaning of typical dreams, like losing teeth?--all these questions are tackled here. This is the book where Freud first puts forth his Oedipal theory.

Freud's theory is always insightful, if not totally accurate. He seems to try too hard to make all the data jive with his "wish-fulfillment" theory, and when it doesn't, he resorts to ludicrous arguments reminiscent of Anselm's ontological catastrophe. For example, when a dream is clearly not a wish fulfillment, Freud asserts that it has actually fulfilled a wish--a wish that his theory is wrong. Poppycock.

Despite these occasional stretches of reasonability, you'll come away from this book with a much greater understanding of the nature of dreams and the mental processes that bring dreams about. Highly recommended.

This is a good intro to Freud; consider also "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanaylsis."

Rating:
Summary: The book of our dreams
Review: Easy to read and perfectly inteligible for the average
non-professional reader like me. This is the most important book written by Sigmund Freud and is in the Freudian tradition of writting some books which focus on difficult issues with a rather simple to understand language and fine style. The purpose of the author, in his own words, was to disturb the sleep of mankind.

This is the kind of book that will help you a lot in understand the mechanisms behind one's dreams and all the relationship between what Freud calls your "waking life" and your "dream-life". Before going on interpreting a lot of his and his patients dreams, something that took a lot of personal sacrifice to someone so jealous of his private life as Freud, the author introduces us to the then (1899) accepted theories of dreams, which basically took the dreams as irrational and confuse manifstations that didn't have nothing to do with our real or waking life.

The rationale Freud uses to demolish the anti-Freudian myths is powerful and convincing and he even suggests that reading the book will have some effect on our immediate dream life (it happened to me). Despite quite voluminous (700 pages) it deservs the attention and the effort of all of us who want to understand what dreams are all about. Here also, one reads the first paragraphs Freuds devotes to the Oedipus complex, and one has the opportunity to explore along with Freud the mechanisms of the UCS (unconscious) and of our Conscious activities, which some decades latter would lead to the concepts of Ego, Super-Ego and Id.

As a trademark the text is always polemical, remembering this same quality one faces in Marxists texts.

Rating:
Summary: Pseudoscience
Review: For all those who need to get their baloney straight from the horse's mouth, this book is all the Freud you need to decide: visionary or fraud. I find it incredible that thousands, even millions, of seemingly intelligent people have fallen for something with so little objective evidence in its favor.

Although Freud had little, if any, sense of humor, he is unintentionally funny in this book. For that reason, if for no other, it deserves at least an attempted reading.

Rating:
Summary: excellent literary piece, but based on mere introspection
Review: Freud based his ideas from no scientific facts. There is no way to measure somthing as subjective as dreams. I enjoyed the the book as entertainment, but would not derive any factual information from it.

Rating:
Summary: Barely Unbeatable Theory
Review: Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" is a unique book. His treatise on human dreams is truly a product of a brilliant mind. But neither the process of creation itself nor not the results and findings it brought out are the true wonders of this book. The great achievement of Freud's theory is its immunity to criticism. In other words, it is virtually impossible to criticize the results and propositions inserted in this book. His main tenet - a dream is a fulfillment of a desire - cannot be attacked in any intelligible way. If one says for instance that an unpleasant dream or a bloody nightmare is clearly not the fulfillment of a desire, Freud would promptly mention masochism or self punishment. Or, if one finally brings forth a dream that is surely not a desire fulfilled, he might nonetheless say there is at least a desire accomplished, viz: the desire to destroy Freud's dream theory.

Rating:
Summary: Barely Unbeatable Theory
Review: Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" is a unique book. His treatise on human dreams is truly a product of a brilliant mind. But neither the process of creation itself nor not the results and findings it brought out are the true wonders of this book. The great achievement of Freud's theory is its immunity to criticism. In other words, it is virtually impossible to criticize the results and propositions inserted in this book. His main tenet - a dream is a fulfillment of a desire - cannot be attacked in any intelligible way. If one says for instance that an unpleasant dream or a bloody nightmare is clearly not the fulfillment of a desire, Freud would promptly mention masochism or self punishment. Or, if one finally brings forth a dream that is surely not a desire fulfilled, he might nonetheless say there is at least a desire accomplished, viz: the desire to destroy Freud's dream theory.