Psychoanalytic Dream Interpretation: The Lay View

Psychoanalytic thinking has had a deep influence on psychiatry and psychology since the early twentieth century, but this has been by no means decisive and its increasingly fragmented theories have been subjected to continuous criticism. Its influence on Western culture, however, has been pervasive, particularly in literature, theatre and the cinema. Its historical importance to the development of modern ideology has come from its unique claim to explain experience, however eccentrically. That is to say, there was - or at least in the first quarter of the twentieth century - no well developed rationalist alternative to theology or a simplistic materialism to explain mental life. Rejection of official religion drove people to magical or spiritualistic fringe cults and rationalism. While psychoanalysis itself probably had little to do with the decline in accepted religious belief, its early popularizers only benefited from it. As Geoffrey Gorer (1966) has remarked, their books for the lay public implied that psychoanalytic theory offered an insight into matters of general concern of a depth and quality simply not available to the uninitiated, to people without qualifications. The authority of medicine finally ousted Artemidorus's invocations of antiquity, and the increasingly muted references to the supernatural by the clergy, to explain life's ordinary ecstasies and tribulations.

The early splintering of the psychoanalytic movement and independent developments by neo-Freudians such as Alfred Adler in the US undermined the coherence of Freud's original formulations. To the outsider psychoanalysis appears a pretty broad church, at least as far as dream interpretation is concerned. One idea from the psychoanalytic approach that can be said to have made a firm impression is that dreams come from within the mind, rather than from outside (although in the case of Jung's psychology even this is not clear). Many dreams are so bizarre that they seem inexplicable and it follows that only a medically qualified expert could penetrate the machinations of the subconscious mind that produced them. The second psychoanalytic preoccupation that has come through to the public is sex. The idea that dream objects have sexual symbolism, however, can degenerate into a sort of post-Artemidorian dream-book formula, where anything elongated is a phallic symbol, and anything with a hole is a vaginal symbol. This is the layperson's view of psychoanalytic dream interpretation - how any more subtle understanding is achieved is obscure. This obscurity has not detracted from the approach's popularity, and many widely held notions about psychology have originated in the cinema, magazines or novels, based on interpretations of psychoanalytic thought.

To sum up this survey, of what people believe about sleep and dreaming - what seem to be self-evident truths - it appears there is very little consensus. Most people would probably agree that sleep is necessary and provides rest from exertion, and perhaps has some restorative function as well. As far as dreaming is concerned, it seems that the most striking difference between modern Western culture and pre-scientific cultures is not any decrease in mysticism or informal supernatural beliefs, but an explosion in the number of alternative explanations of dreaming. The scientific explanation (to be developed in the rest of this book) seems to be just one, along with religious, medical or psychoanalytic and superstitious ones. While recent scientific findings on sleep patterns receive regular exposure in popular TV science program and magazines, there is little evidence from the results of the Hull survey that they have made any impression on the public mind.