The Interpretation of Dreams

 

Freud, apparently homosexual without knowing it, fingers somebody's penis.

It is unwise to listen to the psychologists about dreams. Most of what we think we know from psychology is from Freud. Freudianism has no scientific basis. He just made stuff up. 

Are his notions right? All we can do, since we have no evidence for them, is, first, to decide whether they make sense; whether they are at least internally consistent. Second, we can ask whether they conform to previous beliefs about dreams, which, while we equally may not know what evidence or reasoning they are based on, at least reflect the wisdom of the ages.  

On both counts, the answer has to be no. Freud is nonsense.

To begin with, Freud’s concept of a “subconscious” of repressed memories or urges has been debunked. Troubling memories are not repressed; if troubling or alarming, they are far more likely to be conscious. We have known this at least since Aristotle. Everybody remembers where they were on 9/11, for example, precisely because the experience was traumatic. Repression of urges, in turn, is not subconscious. It requires a conscious effort to fight urges. We have known this at least since Moses. That’s why we have the Ten Commandments.

One common idea about dreams is that all the characters in a dream are aspects of oneself. That is from Jung more than Freud, but Jung too has no scientific basis. When it is not based on Freud, Jung’s ideas come from old gnostic texts, which he apparently misunderstood. Even if he did not, there is a reason why Gnosticism is not a living school of thought—it did not survive the test of time.

You could say the same of the characters in Shakespeare—that they are all aspects of Shakespeare’s own mind. True, but only trivially true; Shakespeare is not trying to explain or understand himself, but the world. It makes more sense to see dreams as the working out in symbolic and narrative form of the problems we face during the day. Some of our problems may be with our selves; but some with other people, or God, or nature, or fate, or the post office. Think of the seven conflicts: man vs. man, man vs, self, etc. Dreams are stories, and all stories are based on these seven conflicts.

Perhaps the craziest idea about dream interpretation that we inherit from Freud is that things in dreams mean the opposite of what they say. This notion, absurd on its face, has become “common knowledge.” Freud seems to have invented the principle so that he could make anything mean anything he wished. For example, there is no trace of Freud’s “Oedipus complex” in the actual legend of Oedipus. Oedipus has no desire to kill his father or have sex with his mother. His father, on the other hand, wants to kill him, and his mother wants to have sex with him. Yet Freud cites this as his main literary evidence for the “Oedipus complex.” A cigar can be a cigar, if Freud wants it to be a cigar; or if he prefers, it can mean anything else.

Unfortunately, Freud has poisoned pretty much everything we think of as psychology, even if real psychology has mostly disavowed him, or thinks it has.

Best to assume that whatever you have heard from “psychology” is wrong.