ITTOL - Lecture 12 - Reading: "Dream-work" by Freud
Lecture 12 focuses on "Freud and Fiction." One of the assigned readings is "Dream-work" extracted in The Critical Condition (500-509) from Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
The article discusses the way in which dreams are formed. Essentially, our dreams are condensed from a vast array of unconscious elements some of which are too highly charged for our conscious minds to deal with directly. So part of the dream-formation process is to create, through displacement, dream-thoughts, new elements formed from less intense elements associated with the high-intensity one the dream is really concerned with. This happens not just once, but many times; the underlying element of main concern is overdetermined and we end up with multiple dream-thoughts all built upon one underlying highly charged element.
Freud likens the way dreams are built and interpreted with the creation of poetry as "Words, since they are nodal points [like dream-thoughts] of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined for ambiguity." (509) but with a key difference: "[T]he productions of the dream-work...are not made with the intention of being understood." (509) Presumably poets want us to understand what they write.
The article discusses the way in which dreams are formed. Essentially, our dreams are condensed from a vast array of unconscious elements some of which are too highly charged for our conscious minds to deal with directly. So part of the dream-formation process is to create, through displacement, dream-thoughts, new elements formed from less intense elements associated with the high-intensity one the dream is really concerned with. This happens not just once, but many times; the underlying element of main concern is overdetermined and we end up with multiple dream-thoughts all built upon one underlying highly charged element.
During dream-formation, a psychic force operates to strip elements of high psychic value of their intensity and replace them, by means of overdetermination, with new values built from elements of low psychical intensity through a process of "transference" or "displacement." (504)All these dream-thoughts form the dream-content with the manifest content being what we remember of the dream and the latent-content being the elements underlying the dream-thoughts; the dream-wish (what the unconscious really wants to say) is distorted.
The consequence of displacement is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish which exists in the unconscious. (504)Another consequence of the dream-formation process is the loss of the logical connections between the dream-thoughts and the underlying element(s). "[R]estoration of the connections...is a task which has to be performed by the interpretation process." (506) Clues to connections can be given by "simultaneity in time" (507), by "introductory dreams" which may proceed or follow the main dream (508) or by examining the dream-thoughts antitheses (509).
Freud likens the way dreams are built and interpreted with the creation of poetry as "Words, since they are nodal points [like dream-thoughts] of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined for ambiguity." (509) but with a key difference: "[T]he productions of the dream-work...are not made with the intention of being understood." (509) Presumably poets want us to understand what they write.