Freud's theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments

[Photograph of Freud's desk in Vienna, on which he had lined up statues of gods, demi-gods and mythical beings, staring back at him as he worked. Taken in 1938 by Edmund Engelman.]

As Freud explained to his patients, and writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, all dreams have meaning, and are motivated by the wishes of the unconscious mind. The contents of dreams are the fulfillment of that wish within a safe place, in which the unconscious cannot set in motion anything that would modify the external world—for the gates of the citadel are guarded in sleep. Yet it seems that not all the dreamers that Freud treated in his psychoanalytic practice wished that their dreams be wishes—in Chapter Four, Freud relates how one of his female patients, “the cleverest of all my dreamers,” produced a contradiction to his theory that dreams are wish-fulfillments. She described a dream in which she was travelling to the country with her mother-in-law to spend the holidays together. Yet, in her daytime life, she had rebelled against this very idea—her dream had undone the solution she had wished, instead expressing the frustration of a wish. In response, Freud writes, “The dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled.” For the non-fulfillment of one wish means the fulfillment of another. Freud explains that such “counter-wish dreams” tend to happen to his patients after he explains his theory to them, and, indeed, “it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.” In the passage, Freud springs off the page to implicate us all—having read Freud, we can never falsify his theory that dreams are wish-fulfillments using one of our own dreams, because we could just be wishing Freud is wrong. Indeed, Freud himself uses his own dreams to demonstrate how every dream is motivated by a wish—and yet it is his wish that his theory be correct. Moreover, making the theory doubly-unfalsifiable, Freud argues that the dream as wish-fulfillment is the operation of the wish to continue sleeping. So if we are a human who sleeps and dreams and has read Freud or had a conversation with him, it seems we cannot disprove Freud’s theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments. The Interpretation of Dreams emerges as a self-consciously charged text, which inevitably must transform the way we dream and interpret our dreams, perhaps transporting us inside a Fun House of Mirrors where we stand next to Freud. Inside, everything held up to the lens of his theory will inevitably reflect the theory itself to infinity. Caught in this position, we might be likely to say, “It is all only a dream.”

And yet not just a single, flat image of “wish-fulfillment” would be reflected, as there are various levels within the dream of what is wished for, and what is doing the wishing. Freud argues that throughout sleep, “we know just as certainly that we are dreaming as we know that we are sleeping.” When a dream takes things too far—perhaps invoking a scene too terrifying to bear—the preconscious tells the consciousness not to worry and to continue sleeping, for “it is only a dream.” When the dreamer is threatened from within by something—when the censorship, which is never fully asleep, has let some material slip through—it leads it to suppress the anxiety produced by passing a dismissive, critical judgment on it. This judgment in turn gives the impression that rational, common sense-thought has been operating all along during the dream-work. And yet, it seems we are lying to ourselves when we say “it is only a dream”—for what has been dreamt in the inner dream is, according to Freud, the truest expression of reality. Paradoxically, the purpose of this “dream within a dream,” from which one wakes up into the second dream-frame, is to at once rob the dream of its reality yet to express it as the “truest recollection of reality.” As he argues, “If a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation of it.” What we say is “only a dream,” is the truest part of the dream—the representation of which expresses the desire that the thing described had never happened. In this way, the inner layer expresses the deepest wish of the unconscious being censored, while the outer frame of the dream expresses the wish of the censoring ego.

What is doing the wishing, the unconscious, is, as Freud writes, “the true psychical reality.” And yet ultimately, it is unknown to us—we cannot know reality as it is. As Freud writes, “in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.” In exploring what a dream is, Freud reveals that we cannot truly know the external world either, for our senses are imperfect and tend to trick us, just as the censoring ego tries to trick the dreamer into thinking that the manifest content of the dream is the only meaning the dream has. In daytime, do we ignore something latent in the external world just as we ignore the latent content of the dream? Ultimately, in exploring dreams in which we dream that we are dreaming, Freud comes up against the problem that it is simply not possible to be sure at any given moment whether one is dreaming or awake. Our only validation of whether we are dreaming or awake occurs when we actually do wake up—in retrospect. Yet if the reality of the external world is incompletely presented to us through our senses, we cannot truly be sure whether we are awake, or to be certain we are not in another “dream within a dream.”

Caught within a dream within a dream of the dream as a wish-fulfillment, surely no wishes are ever really being “fulfilled,” leading to a satisfaction. Ultimately, a portrait of the human condition emerges as one of unending, striving desire. What is a wish? It means we want something we do not have, yet the attainment of which would mean we would no longer wish to have it. Since we can never stop wishing, we will never stop dreaming.