Dream Psychology

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Dream Psychology

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Title: Dream Psychology Psychoanalysis for Beginners
Author: Sigmund Freud
Release Date: March 28, 2005 [EBook #15489]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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DREAM PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR BEGINNERS BY PROF. DR. SIGMUND FREUD
AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY M.D. EDER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDRÉ TRIDON Author of "Psychoanalysis, its
History, Theory and Practice." "Psychoanalysis and Behavior" and "Psychoanalysis,
Sleep and Dreams"
NEW YORK THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY 1920

THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION
The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the
proper material for wild experiments.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt
themselves to fast changing conditions.
Remember the scornful reception which first was accorded to Freud's discoveries in the
domain of the unconscious.
When after years of patient observations, he finally decided to appear before medical
bodies to tell them modestly of some facts which always recurred in his dream and his
patients' dreams, he was first laughed at and then avoided as a crank.
The words "dream interpretation" were and still are indeed fraught with unpleasant,
unscientific associations. They remind one of all sorts of childish, superstitious notions,
which make up the thread and woof of dream books, read by none but the ignorant and
the primitive.
The wealth of detail, the infinite care never to let anything pass unexplained, with which
he presented to the public the result of his investigations, are impressing more and more
serious-minded scientists, but the examination of his evidential data demands arduous
work and presupposes an absolutely open mind.
This is why we still encounter men, totally unfamiliar with Freud's writings, men who
were not even interested enough in the subject to attempt an interpretation of their dreams
or their patients' dreams, deriding Freud's theories and combatting them with the help of
statements which he never made.
Some of them, like Professor Boris Sidis, reach at times conclusions which are strangely
similar to Freud's, but in their ignorance of psychoanalytic literature, they fail to credit
Freud for observations antedating theirs.
Besides those who sneer at dream study, because they have never looked into the subject,
there are those who do not dare to face the facts revealed by dream study. Dreams tell us
many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive
on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of
dream investigation.
The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a
powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.

Freud's theories are anything but theoretical.
He was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a close connection between his
patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities, to collect thousands of dreams and to
compare them with the case histories in his possession.
He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to find evidence which might
support his views. He looked at facts a thousand times "until they began to tell him
something."
His attitude toward dream study was, in other words, that of a statistician who does not
know, and has no means of foreseeing, what conclusions will be forced on him by the
information he is gathering, but who is fully prepared to accept those unavoidable
conclusions.
This was indeed a novel way in psychology. Psychologists had always been wont to build,
in what Bleuler calls "autistic ways," that is through methods in no wise supported by
evidence, some attractive hypothesis, which sprung from their brain, like Minerva from
Jove's brain, fully armed.
After which, they would stretch upon that unyielding frame the hide of a reality which
they had previously killed.
It is only to minds suffering from the same distortions, to minds also autistically inclined,
that those empty, artificial structures appear acceptable molds for philosophic thinking.
The pragmatic view that "truth is what works" had not been as yet expressed when Freud
published his revolutionary views on the psychology of dreams.
Five facts of first magnitude were made obvious to the world by his interpretation of
dreams.
First of all, Freud pointed out a constant connection between some part of every