(1999).

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9(6):725-747

The Interpretation of Dreams: Freud and the Western Dream
Tradition
Rosemarie Sand
Freud's characterization and dismissal of the “symbolic dream
interpreting” of his time—his idiosyncratic distinction between
that metaphoric form of interpretation and what he called the
“scientific” mode, and his subsequent asymmetrical focusing on
the latter—seriously skewed his presentation of the nature and
history of the Western dream tradition. It obscured the facts that
an old theory regarded the dream as the unmasker of the hidden
psychic life and that a venerable hypothesis that it could bring to
light licit and illicit unconscious desires had not been forgotten by
Freud's fin de siécle contemporaries. For many years, his
injunction against the use of symbolism, except in the case of the
sexual, had an inhibiting effect on psychoanalysts' free use of
manifest dream interpretation.
As Freud's Famous Book on Dreams Approached its Centennial, many,
perhaps most, psychoanalysts were quietly supplementing his analytic
technique with another, considerably older method of interpretation—the
reading of the manifest dream, or part of it, as symbolic. Relying on metaphor
but also using other poetical devices, they were turning to one of humankind's
most ancient practices—a practice probably antedating the pyramids. Having
survived the millennia, it was very much alive in Freud's day; he called it
symbolic dream interpreting, described it as popular, and rejected it as
useless to science (1900, p. 97).
As a result, for many decades interpretation of the manifest dream was a
“stepchild” of psychoanalysis (Spanjaard, 1969), used on many occasions
but granted little theoretical respect.

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 Freud's dismissal of the symbolic interpretation of his day, together with
his generally negative appraisal of the theories of the time—forcefully
expressed in the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)—
resulted in a serious skewing of dream history. Because of the imbalance of
his assessment, it has been widely assumed that Freud's contemporaries were
unaware of the concept that dreams, including symbolic dreams, might be
used to explore the dreamer's psyche. Because he had passed over it in
silence, the centuries-old tradition that the dream could reveal the hidden
depths of the soul dropped from sight.
The great acclaim accorded The Interpretation of Dreams, the adoption of
Freud's method by an international following, and the enthusiasm for all things
Freudian that accompanied the rapid transformation of a small group in
Vienna into a flourishing worldwide movement obscured the Western dream
tradition to such an extent that for a long time it was believed that the very
idea of dream meaning had been unsuspected before Freud arrived on the
scene.
Freud devoted only a few sentences in his book to symbolic dream
interpreting, but his disapproval of it was categorical: Two methods were
being employed to discover the meaning of dreams, he maintained, but neither
lent itself to scientific use. One was the “decoding” method featured by the
dream books sold in the marketplace; the other, symbolic dream interpreting,
was a technique that “considers the content of the dream as a whole and seeks
to replace it by another content which is intelligible and in certain respects
analogous to the original one” (1900, p. 96). Illustrating this procedure with
an example taken from the Bible, he noted that “most of the artificial dreams
constructed by imaginative writers are designed for a symbolic interpretation
of this sort. They reproduce the writer's thoughts under a disguise which is
regarded as harmonizing with the recognized characteristics of dreams” (p.
97). Freud linked symbolic dream interpreting with prognostication; after a
symbolic interpretation had been reached, it was transposed into the future
tense in line with the ancient idea that dreams were “chiefly concerned with
the future” and “able to foretell it” (p. 97).
Freud emphasized the tie between symbolic interpretation and
superstitious prediction on more than one occasion. In 1907, he wrote, “It is
far from being generally believed that dreams have a meaning and can be
interpreted” (p. 7). “Science and the majority of educated people smile if they
are set the task of interpreting a dream. Only the common people, who cling to
superstitions and who on this point are

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 carrying on the convictions of antiquity, continue to insist that dreams can be
interpreted” (p. 7).
Now, doubtless, most educated people at the beginning of the 20th century
derogated the use of dreams for peering into the future. But, then as now,
rejection of superstition does not signify that the selfsame people could not
take seriously the suggestion that dreams revealed aspects of character or
motive. Freud regularly ignored this possibility but it is probably safe to say
that “the majority” of the educated people in Freud's milieu were in fact
familiar with the proposition that the dream had such a revelatory capacity.
It is true that in ancient times dreams generally had been used to foretell
the future. Soothsayers hawked dream interpretations throughout the Western
world; they were to be found in every marketplace. As their business
depended heavily on their ability to furnish customers with satisfying
predictions, they had, over the centuries, ensured their survival by developing
an elaborate symbolism as well as other ingenious techniques that enabled
them to wrest any desired meaning from a dream. Those of their manuals that
have come down to us inform us that, in addition to the “decoding” or
“cookbook” method of interpreting dreams, metaphors, analogies, allusions,
and the like were put to idiosyncratic, sometimes clever, use, but always in
the service of the attempt to catch a glimpse of things to come.
As Freud pointed out, this endeavor had not ceased; even in our own time
it has been entirely abandoned. Yet, when primitive superstition began to lose
its strength with the advance of civilization, when stories about the gods and
their involvement in human affairs began to seem dubious, the belief that these
divinities routinely sent dream messages to earthlings was destined to
crumble. It then became apparent, at least to educated people, that the creator
of the dream had to be the dreamer. In the Western world, this insight had
been achieved in the fourth century before Christ, as Aristotle's essays on
dreaming attest. From that time on the idea existed that, the dream being a
product of the mind of the dreamer, it was likely to reveal something of that
mind.
19th–century Symbolic Dream Interpreting
Insufficient attention has as yet been paid to the fact that Freud's ideas took
shape during a time when literature and the arts were under

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 the influence of the Symbolist movement. Fin de siécle paintings, poems, and
dramas took a symbolic form, challenging the interpretative skills of their
admirers. To take just one example, consider the demands made upon
theatergoers by the highly acclaimed plays of Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-
1949). When, in 1891, the curtain rose on The Blind, the audience was
immediately faced with an enigma. The stage was quite dark; the scene was a
seashore at night; and a group of travelers, all of whom were blind, were
sitting clustered around a sighted guide who, unbeknownst to them, had just
died. The only creature that could see was a dog that had accompanied them.
Was this play really about blind people, a dead guide, and a dog? Surely
not. The viewer had to understand that this mysterious, haunting scene was as
symbolic as a dream image and had to be approached as such. Its content had
to be replaced by other content “in certain respects analogous to the original,”
as Freud put it. Did the dead guide represent God, whose demise Nietzsche
had announced? God had been killed, but people did not know it yet,
according to this philosopher. But then what did it mean that the dog, a simple
creature, could still see? No hint was given; the audience had to solve the
puzzle of the scene for itself. Given the favorable reception of these plays, we
may suppose that theatergoers enjoyed these challenges. It may be that Freud,
living in the midst of this allpervading fashion, was influenced against
symbolic interpretation precisely because it was so stylish.
In spite of their sophistication, some educated people were still afflicted
with vestiges of superstition. In general, this does not seem to have been
serious; people toyed with a sort of half-belief that dreams might predict the
future, playing with the conjecture that “perhaps there is something to it after
all!” The young Freud was one of these people. Having dreamed about
traveling to Spain, he wrote to his fiancée, “I am a little superstitious about
such dreams, since hitherto every traveling dream has soon been followed by
a journey. Where will it be this time, and how long will it last?” (Jones,
1953, p. 352).
Freud was in illustrious company, for another such quasi-believer was
Prussia's King Wilhelm I, father of Kaiser Wilhelm of World War I fame.
Wilhelm was sometimes troubled by his dreams and embarrassed by the fact
that he was superstitious enough to be troubled. He was therefore somewhat
apologetic when, after a nightmare about his problems with parliament, he
turned to his chief minister for solace. The minister, Otto von Bismarck,
responded by

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 reminding the king of one of his own dreams, an encouraging dream that had
come to him years earlier in the midst of a desperate crisis the two had
weathered together. This dream, inserted by Freud into his book, is a nice
example of the informal symbolic dream interpreting of the time.
Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” who brought about the unification of
Germany against great odds, had a knack for snatching victory from what
seemed like the jaws of certain defeat. Daring, intuitive, and ruthless, he often
surprised Europe with his unexpected and successful stratagems. His
considerable confidence in his own talents was buttressed by his belief that
he was carrying out the will of God.
Defeat was staring him in the face when, in 1863, he was called to office
just as a struggle between king and parliament had arrived at a complete
impasse. The king demanded funds for the army; the lower house, supported
by a large party at court, refused to grant the money. Both sides were adamant,
and the king was threatening to abdicate. What could Bismarck do? The wily
chancellor studied the constitution, which was quite new, found a loophole,
and came to the outrageous but legal conclusion that, in the case of a
stalemate, the king could collect taxes without the approval of parliament. In
spite of an uproar in the house, this is what the king proceeded to do for the
next four years. Shortly thereafter, the refurbished Prussian army won a war
with Austria, Bismarck became a national hero, and the premier and the house
were reconciled.
The dream the chancellor reported to the king had come to him during the
crisis, “in the hardest days of the conflict, from which no human eye could see
any possible way out”:
I dreamt … that I was riding on a narrow Alpine path, precipice on
the right, rocks on the left. The path grew narrower, so that the
horse refused to proceed, and it was impossible to turn round or
dismount, owing to lack of space. Then, with my whip in my left
hand, I struck the smooth rock and called on God. The whip grew to
an endless length, the rocky wall dropped like a piece of stage
scenery and opened out a broad path, with a view over hills and
forests, like a landscape in Bohemia; there were Prussian troops
with banners, and even in my dream the thought came to me at once
that I must report it to your Majesty. This dream was fulfilled, and I
woke up rejoiced and strengthened [Bismarck, 1898p. 487; Freud,
1900p. 378].

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 The analyst who discussed this dream, Hanns Sachs, noting that it
symbolically fulfilled a wish, commented on some of the imagery (e.g., the
trapped horse and rider representing a political impasse) and remarked that
“the meaning of the dream-picture must … have been obvious” (Freud, 1900,
p. 378) to Bismarck. Certainly it must have been obvious, or Bismarck would
have had no reason to forward it to the king. Moreover, it must also have been
apparent to the many readers of Bismarck's memoirs in which the dream was
reported; this autobiographical account was widely and eagerly read in
Germany and abroad because of the high-level, behind-the-scenes political
maneuvering that it described. Notably, both Sachs and Freud accepted with
equanimity the fact that the dream had already been interpreted by the popular
method before being subjected to psychoanalytic analysis involving the use of
sexual symbols.
Freud sometimes admired writers for what seemed to him to be superior
insights into the nature of the human psyche, but, in fact, such insights must
always have been widely shared by the general populace. Poets, novelists,
and playwrights who used dreams to shed light on hidden components of
character or motive must have assumed that these dreams, as well as their
symbolism, would be understood by those for whom they crafted their works.
Traditional Dream Theories
In the 18th and 19th centuries, theories about dreaming generally tended to
fall into one of two categories—those constructed on the principle that the
process that produced the dream is creative and those founded on the
proposition that it is not. In the first case, the agency responsible for dreams is
the imagination, the same faculty from which spring poetry, myth, art, and all
invention. In the second, the dream comes into being as the result of purely
fortuitous events that take place in the sleeping and therefore disorganized
mind.
The creative hypothesis treated dream imagery as a representation that
could be read metaphorically or that could be deciphered by way of some
other device of poetic expression: allusion, metonymy, synecdoche, and so
forth. This principle was a component of an ancient mental model that
postulated that two different thought processes are active in the mind: reason
and imagination. As formulated by Aristotle, the imagination is a primordial
capacity that is responsible

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 for both the dreams of the sane and the hallucinations and delusional beliefs
of the insane (Aristotle, n.d.). Tradition thereafter was based on the idea that
normal and pathological cognition can be accounted for in terms of the
relative strength and weakness of the two modes of thought as well as the
existence of cooperation or conflict between them. In normal waking
cognition, the imagination is governed by reason. In creative thought, the
imagination is allowed more freedom than usual so that it can furnish the artist
or inventor with inspiration. When reason is enfeebled, the imagination
challenges it disruptively; when its dominion is lost altogether, dreams and
psychotic thinking result.
In Freud's time, when a branch of philosophy was breaking off to become
psychology, some of the philosophers who were functioning as proto-
psychologists shared this view of dreaming and believed that dreams are
meaningful and can be symbolically interpreted. These “symbolists” held that,
for some unknown but entirely natural reason, the sleeping brain is creative;
the unusual heights of its inventiveness were often remarked upon, and
astonishment was expressed at the brilliant construction of the dream world
and at the fabulous adventures of the dream ego that wandered about within it.
Another group of symbolists, noisier if not larger, consisted of spiritualists
—participants in an occult movement that, originating in the United States,
spread rapidly through Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century. Spirits of
the departed, they believed, attempt to communicate with the living in various
ways, one of which is by means of the dream. Spiritualist's supposedly
successful contact with the world beyond at séances—in which tables turned,
ouija boards delivered messages, and the dead themselves appeared in the
form of ectoplasm—titillated the public. Participation of some esteemed
scientists and savants in these performances—or their approval of the
mystical hypotheses that purported to explain the supposed effects—endowed
spiritualism with an aura of respectability for a time. One such intellectual
was the philosopher Carl Du Prel (1839-1899). Although convinced of the
transcendental properties of the dream, he was a serious symbolist who
subjected it to a searching analysis. In a footnote added to The Interpretation
of Dreams in 1914, Freud referred to Du Prel as “that brilliant mystic” and
expressed regret for having neglected to mention him earlier. However,
because of the fantastic use spiritualists generally made of symbolism, the
very word ‘symbol’ took on a paranormal significance for many and became
distasteful to those repelled by the movement.

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 Freud's conceptualization of the dream, particularly at its first appearance,
when symbolism was omitted, had little in common with the view described
here; both theory and interpretative mode were quite distinct. In Freud's
model, the creative imagination was replaced by the more limited “dream-
work,” the restrictions of which Freud (1916-1917) emphasized: “We must
not overestimate the dream-work and attribute too much to it. The
achievements I have enumerated exhaust its activity: it can do no more than
condense, displace, represent in plastic form and subject the whole to a
secondary revision” (p. 182). On more than one occasion, Freud insisted that
“the dream-work is not creative” (1900, pp. 667-668; see also 1900, pp. 146,
490-492, 667-668; 1923, p. 241). Was this emphasis on noncreativity—
which Freud maintained for a long period of time—perhaps part of an attempt
to keep a clear distinction between his theory and the popular symbolic? Such
an attempt, if in fact he engaged in it, would shed light on his slow, apparently
reluctant and circumscribed acceptance of symbolism over the years. His
limiting symbolism primarily to the sexual might be attributed to the same
motive.
As far as the causation of dreams is concerned, Freud held that, with some
exceptions, dreams are stirred by repressed sexual wishes. Symbolists,
typically supposing that the dream is the product of the liberated imagination,
assumed that its content can reflect any mental state or situation whatever; it
can picture fears as readily as wishes. Freud (1900) noted the great
drawback of symbolist theory—that it “inevitably breaks down when faced by
dreams which are not merely unintelligible but also confused” (p. 97). Those
dependent solely on the symbolic technique would therefore be unable to
discover a meaning in many, perhaps in a majority, of dreams.
The school of thought that challenged the creative view of the dream was
the “associationist.” Associationist philosophers rejected the hypothesis that
the dream is the product of a marvelously heightened imagination and
suggested instead that it is the natural result of the unregulated flow of
thoughts during sleep. No matter how beautiful or ingenious the phenomena
seemed to be, they were fashioned fortuitously by the idling cognitive
apparatus. Above all, associationists took pains to deny that an explanation of
the construction of dreams demands the assumption of a theoretical
homunculus, a supervisory “agent” or “author,” the hidden “dream poet” of
the Romantic imagination.
The basic associationist premise had cropped up in ancient times—
formulated by opponents of the fortune-telling soothsayers.

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 Enlightened people in Greco-Roman days were embarrassed by these vendors
of predictions; angry at the survival of crude superstition, they denounced
them as frauds. Dreams are not messages from the gods, they declared; they
are natural products of the relaxed soul. They are made up of memories and
fragments of memories that drifted through the mind in sleep and that
accidentally come together in loose aggregates. Later associationists made
use of the “laws of association” to clarify the nature of this drift and of the
combinations that are formed.
Some 2,000 years later, the same positions could still be identified. The
spiritualists were promoting the supernatural view of the dream—maintaining
that it can predict the future. Adversaries of superstition, annoyed as ever at
this conception, offered as substitute an explanation they believed did not
conflict with science: the associative theory of dreaming. One such theory
was held by Freud's contemporary, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the “father”
of experimental psychology who, even as he was struggling to establish his
laboratory, felt that he had to take time out to counter the claims of
spiritualism in a long essay. Theorists like Wundt, who based their dream
models on memory and association, did not categorically rule out all dream
meaning, however defined, but their interests lay elsewhere. They wanted to
know how the dream is put together; their focus was on the dream-producing
process (Wundt, 1880, Vol. 2pp. 359-371).
Associationist and symbolic theories were alike in that both postulated the
existence of two modes of thought that cooperated and conflicted. Like the
symbolist, the associationist assumed that in waking hours reason is in
control. What it governs, however, is not the creative imagination but the flow
of involuntary thought. In dreams, reason is dormant, and thoughts stream
haphazardly, concatenated irrationally as they are in Freud's somewhat
comparable “displacement.” In madness, the irrational stream dominates; both
symbolists and associationists believed, therefore, that the madman is a
waking dreamer.
Some dream phenomena were recognized by both schools. For instance,
both schools perceived the merged images that Freud called condensations.
The schools differed, however, on the explanations they offered for these
fusions. Symbolists assumed that the blendings are meaningful compounds of
the kind created by poets; associationists thought that they are products of a
haphazard coming together of thoughts. Other dream features identified by the
two schools are the occurrence of early memories, the prevalence of what
Freud was to

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 call “the day residue,” problem solving, the incorporation of external stimuli,
and the heralding of impending physical ailments by inner stimuli.
One kind of dream event intrigued the psychologically oriented throughout
the 18th and 19th centuries—the apparent representation of the self by more
than one dream figure. In this scenario, the dream self, the “I” in the dream,
deals with seemingly independent other persons who, actually stand for
dissociated aspects of the self. The relationships can be friendly, but they can
also be hostile, and dreamers can find themselves arguing with opponents and
being bested, or fighting with adversaries and losing. This phenomenon,
called ego splitting (Ich Spaltung in German), is particularly interesting
because of what it suggests about the composition of the mind (Herbart,
1850p. 427).
In one of the first reviews of The Interpretation of Dreams that came to
Freud's attention—a review, he lamented, that “killed the book in Vienna”
(Masson, 1985p. 408)—he was taken to task for having ignored some
traditional views of the dream; ego splitting was one of these. The critic was
struck by the fact
that Dr. Freud passed over the theories of his colleagues in the
spiritualist discipline in total silence. It is precisely just in dream
life that we are most clearly confronted with the splitting of the
individual ego into two apparently entirely independently thinking
persons, one of whom is often much more clever than the other and I
cannot really understand how a dream theory … could entirely
ignore this phenomenon [Burckhard, 1900].
The reviewer apparently missed Freud's (1900) brief reference to the
situation in which the ego “is represented in a dream several times over” (p.
323).
As far as the dream-creating process is concerned, the critic expressed his
preference for the traditional hypothesis: “I would have to demand of a dream
theory that it fits all dreams and this, it seems, I can find only in Aristole's
older theory according to which dreams are the product of the continuing
activity of the imagination, nothing more and nothing less” (p. 276).
The dichotomy between symbolist and associationist conceptualizations of
the dream does not hold absolutely, of course. The many 18th- and 19th-
century speculations about the dream, its structure, and its formation represent
a wide variety of opinions;

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 theorists felt free to construct their own hypotheses. An example of such a
theorist is Friedrich August Carus (1770-1807), who challenged the
associationist belief that no intellectual function occurs in the dream. This is
one of the hypotheses about which Freud and associationists such as Wundt
were in agreement. Associationists contrasted reason, practically
indistinguishable from Freud's “secondary process,” and the dream-creating
operation supposedly devoid of reason. This absence of secondary process
was a feature of Freud's dream work as well.
Carus (1808) rejected this concept. “Dreaming,” he asserted, “is the
involuntary, uninterrupted, continued activity of mental forces during sleep”
(p. 181). It was not necessary to postulate two radically different processes to
explain the dream; on inspection, dreams reveal the activity of every power of
the mind, “including the higher cognitive faculties and serious reason” (p.
182). Because dreaming is simply a continuation of normal cogitation under
special circumstances, the individual's specific modes of thinking and feeling
appear in the dream. The dream is indeed a product primarily of the creative
imagination, but the imagination is merely the dominant power; reason is not
obliterated; it continues its work. In waking life, the imagination is the servant
of reason; in dreams, their positions are reversed.
The Dream as Psychic Probe
Typically, the hypothesis that the dream can be used to explore the
character, motives, and states of mind of the dreamer was emphasized by
those who assigned the production of the dream to the imagination. Carus
(1808), belonging to this group, explained that because “the individual
himself and all of his abilities are active” in dreams, there “must be some
truth, some reality in every dream” (p. 192). Every dream therefore reveals
“something … of the particular character of the individual” (p. 192).
This is true even of “frightening” dreams, Carus averred. Such dreams,
being nothing but “a continuation of our feelings, ought not to frighten us but
rather arouse us and bring us to full consciousness of ourselves, even if what
we should learn might be ugly” (p. 190). Such dreams “can warn us … about
ourselves and about a direction we have taken” (p. 190). The dream is “each
person's secret court” (p. 191); it “often betrays the waking man” (p. 190).
Consequently,

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 the dreamer “can learn a great deal about himself” (p. 191). However,
because “the sleeping person is under the control of instincts,” we “overlook
absurdities and indecencies in many dreams” (p. 207). The dream can also
have a liberating effect, serving a therapeutic purpose. It can “strengthen the
life forces or bring them into balance if they were faltering or if they were
faced with the threat of becoming too restricted or inhibited” (p. 190).
Carus agreed with the common opinion that external stimuli can trigger
dreams. However, much as Freud was to do later, Carus insisted that such
stimuli do not account for the content of the dream, although they might suggest
a direction. The stimulus always encounters an inner state that determines the
dream's development: the “inner creativity is always awake, always in
motion; it never slumbers” (p. 191).
Carus believed that dreams are never chaotic, although they often give the
impression that they are. Dreams seem to be disorganized with great,
apparently unmotivated leaps occurring between one theme and the next.
However, this discontinuity is only apparent; in reality, the mind always
“follows the law of causality and certainly there is always a thread which
connects everything although it may remain hidden from us” (p. 195).
Using dreams to explore the dreamer's mind—to which Carus made
reference—began in ancient times, but little information is available about
this early practice. Zeno of Citium (c. 336–265 B.C.), founder of Stoicism,
urged his followers to examine their dreams for evidence of the progress they
had made in the improvement of their souls. Centuries before Christ,
therefore, the assumption was already being made that dreams can furnish
insight not available to ordinary introspection; it would have been pointless to
recommend the study of dreams had it not been supposed that such
investigation could be more revealing than self-scrutiny.
The Dream and Evil Desires
In the Christian centuries, the dream was the great unmasker of
wickedness. The waking soul was expected to be ever vigilant—ever on
guard against impure thoughts and ready to banish them at their first
appearance in consciousness. Giving them full entry into the mind, once they
had been detected, was a sin that brought with it the threat

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 of eternal damnation. In sleep, however, the ability to ward off sinful desires
fell away, and then the essentially depraved nature of the soul emerged; the
“old Adam,” who could be precariously controlled but never eradicated, was
set free. Temptations avoided during the day were welcomed in dreams;
chastity gave way to carnality; every abomination was indulged.
This conception of the dream had been given vivid expression in pagan
times by Plato, who was just as sure as Freud that incestuous and murderous
wishes lurk in the depths of the soul. Reason, he taught, keeps bestial urges
out of sight during waking hours. When reason sleeps, however, these urges
escape and make their way into dreams: “There exists in every one of us,
even in some reputed most respectable, a terrible, fierce and lawless brood of
desires, which it seems are revealed in our sleep” (Plato, n.d., p. 527b).
Then,
the rest of the soul, the rational, gentle and dominant part slumbers,
but the beastly and savage part, replete with food and wine,
gambols and, repelling sleep, endeavours to sally forth and satisfy
its own instincts. You are aware that in such case there is nothing it
will not venture to undertake as being released from all sense of
shame and all reason. It does not shrink from attempting to lie with
a mother in fancy or with anyone else, man, god or brute. It is ready
for any foul deed of blood; it abstains from no food, and, in a word,
falls short of no extreme of folly and shamelessness [Plato, n.d., p.
571c].
Saint Augustine (n.d. pp. 354-430), who transmitted Platonic thought to the
church, discovered instinctual desires in his own dreams but did not blame
himself for these because, he explained, dreams were not created by himself
but by something outside of his self over which he had no control (Augustine,
1961, p. 172). The fathers of the church adopted his precepts and so,
fortunately, dreamers living during the following 1,500 years were not usually
held responsible for the wickedness of their dreams. The teaching, however,
was complicated by the need to account for the activity of demons, who were
active everywhere: “What do we talk of one devil?” asked one of
Shakespeare's contemporaries. “There is not a room in any man's house but is
pestered and close-packed with a camp royal of devils”; “in the quiet silence
of the night [the devil] will be sure to surprise us, when he infallibly knows
we shall be unarmed to resist, and that there will be full audience granted him
to undermine or persuade what he lists”

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 (Nashe, 1594, Vol. Ip. 345). The devil had the power to create and
manipulate dream imagery so as to induce sexual excitement and even
“pollution.” Church authority, however, ruled that a dreamer to whom this
happened was not to be blamed unless he or she had invited such a vision by
culpably ruminating about sex while awake.
But God also could engender dreams in the sleeping soul; not merely
wicked wishes but conscience also stirred in sleep. However suppressed it
might be, however unaware the waking person might be of moral scruples,
conscience could never be entirely eradicated. The divine spark of morality,
implanted in the soul by God, could be hidden but never extinguished. It could
flare up in nightmares to terrorize the soul and to inflict upon it dreadful
punishments. In later centuries, Shakespearean examples were called upon as
instances of conscience breaking out in dreams; Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking
vision and Richard III's nightmare were often cited.
The Enlightenment played down the roles of God and Satan, but it
continued to insist upon the need for ferreting out concealed inclinations to
depart from virtue. In the 18th century, philosopher David Hume reported that
“moralists” were recommending the study of dreams “as an excellent method
of becoming acquainted with our own hearts, and knowing our progress in
virtue, to recollect our dreams in a morning, and examine them with the same
rigour, that we wou'd our most serious and most deliberate actions” (Hume,
1739-1740p. 268). The dream, according to Hume, was considered to be a
superior source of information about the soul because it was not hypocritical:
Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best
where artifice, fear and policy have no place, and men can neither
be hypocrites with themselves nor others. The generosity, or
baseness of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or
pusillanimity, influence the fictions of the imagination with the most
unbounded liberty, and discover themselves in the most glaring
colours [p. 268].
A moralist of this kind was Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740-1826), an
Alsatian clergyman who kept close watch on his dreams to monitor the day-
to-day state of his soul, hoping to find that he was making progress but almost
always disappointed. Oberlin was described as a robust man with a proud,
almost military bearing. The demands he made upon himself in the way of
humility and forbearance, however, were excessive, at least by the standards
of today. With respect to his

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 parishioners particularly, he wanted to be unfailingly charitable, but this was
often difficult, and one day he lost his temper. He recorded the event and the
dream of the following night in his diary: “The old painter B … put me into
such a rage” (p. 307). The dream featured a rooster “whose comb had been
swelled so high by wrath that it had erupted in a painful, ulcerous growth”
(cited in Schubert, 1840p. 307). Oberlin assumed that the image was a
symbolic, unflattering self-portrait that signified that his temper was as yet
insufficiently curbed.
Disappearance of the Tradition
It has often been remarked that Freud, in spite of his rejection of
“symbolic” dream interpretation, frequently slipped into such constructions
himself. When he dreamed that he was accused of trying to make off with an
overcoat that did not belong to him, he concluded that the dream was charging
him with doing, or contemplating doing, something wrong: “I was treated as
though I were the thief who had for some time carried on his business of
stealing overcoats in the lecture rooms” (Freud, 1900, p. 205). He did this on
numerous occasions, and some of his most convincing interpretations are
based at least in part on metaphors. Yet he never rescinded the theoretical ban
on the use of this general symbolism, and he steadfastly refused to
countenance its legitimacy.
So, in 1899, when he came across a book that had appeared a few months
before his, he dismissed it in a footnote with the remark that, although it
“agrees with my views in seeking to prove that dreams have a meaning and
can be interpreted,” the author “effects his interpretations … by means of a
symbolism of an allegorical character without any guarantee of the general
validity of his procedure” (1900, p. 100).
Some 20 years later, he warned against the interpretation of the manifest
dream as a “functional phenomenon” of the kind described by Silberer—a
practice that entailed the use of “threshold symbolism.” Some of Freud's
followers, apparently taking his acceptance of Silberer's phenomenon as
permission to treat the whole of the dream content as consisting of “threshold
imagery,” thereby slipped back into symbolic dream interpreting. Sachs, for
instance, called Bismarck's dream a “fine example of Silberer's ‘functional
phenomenon”’ (Freud, 1900p. 378).

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 Freud (1900) finally found it necessary to issue a reprimand: The
phenomenon “has … led to many abuses; for it has been regarded as lending
support to the old inclination to give abstract and symbolic interpretations to
dreams” (p. 505). However, the imagery in question, Freud declared, pictured
nothing but the dreamer's mental state at the waking—sleeping threshold,
occurred only at that threshold, and was merely a contribution on the part of
waking thought (p. 505).
The picture that Freud gave, in his book and elsewhere, of contemporary
attitudes toward dreams created the impression that he had worked in a sort of
vacuum so far as dream meaning and interpretation were concerned. The
ancients had indeed been interested in the significance of the dream, and
simple people still insisted on it, but their concern was only with the future,
he maintained; they labored under the delusion that the dream could give them
glimpses of things to come. On the other hand, the scientists scoffed at dreams
and “condemned” them as “random and senseless twitchings of the organ of
the mind” (Freud, 1932p. 220). Educated people, agreeing with the scientists
that dreams were beneath serious consideration, were amused at the
superstitions of the simple. This splitting up of the territory into the meaning-
affirming superstitious and the meaning-denying sophisticates left Freud alone
in the field—the only scientist or educated person objectively curious about
the significance of the dream.
Another such partitioning supports this image of the solitary explorer. In
the introductory chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
distinguished between symbolic dream interpreting and the “scientific” view
of dreams, discarded the former, and discussed only some aspects of the
latter. Explaining that he could not cover the entire “scientific literature”
about dreams and that he had therefore chosen to consider only a few central
themes, he promised that “no fundamental fact and no important point of
view” would be overlooked (1900, p. 5). But, because he eliminated
symbolic dream interpreting at the outset, crucial facts and critical points of
view about the status of dream theory and practice in his time are missing.
Overlooked in its entirety is the venerable tradition that dreams can illuminate
hidden crannies of the soul as well as the belief that dream images can
symbolically represent the inner life of the dreamer.
In time, Freud apparently came to believe that he had discovered the very
concept of dream significance all by himself. According to his recall, no
“outside influence” had inspired him “with any helpful expectations” that
dreams might be interpreted (1914p. 19). Yet such

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 contemporary evidence as is available indicates that at one time he must at
least have been aware of the use being made of dreams by his scientific
contemporaries. For instance, he could hardly have failed to notice that Jean-
Martin Charcot, his mentor in Paris, was intrigued by dreams, frequently
questioned his hysterical patients about their dreams, and reported these in his
lectures. We can be quite sure that Charcot's practice registered with Freud
because Freud's first professional reference to a dream appeared in a paper
he wrote in 1886, after his return from France (1886p. 27). Before he left
Vienna, he was still engaging in what were probably light-hearted attempts to
use dreams for prognostication (Jones, 1953pp. 75-76); when he came back,
he for the first time mentioned the dreams of a patient in a case history, and he
did this exactly in the manner of Charcot (Sand, 1992).
Freud would also have been aware that his colleague, Richard von Krafft-
Ebing, used dreams to ascertain the unconscious sexual inclinations of his
patients. Krafft-Ebing described this practice in his Psychopathia Sexualis
(1894). Freud owned the 1894 edition, and his numerous marks in the margins
of this book suggest that he read it carefully (Sulloway, 1979p. 297).
His repute as the sole discoverer that dreams have meaning endowed
Freud with such prestige in this area that for some decades psychoanalysts
were loath to break his ban on interpretation of the manifest dream. In 1954,
Erik Erikson remarked:
Unofficially, we often interpret dreams entirely or in part on the
basis of their manifest appearance. Officially, we hurry at every
confrontation with a dream to crack its manifest appearance as if it
were a useless shell and to hasten to discard this shell in favor of
what seems to be the more worthwhile core [p. 17].
As late as 1987, Pulver reported that “perhaps most” analysts were still
ambivalent about the use of the manifest dream but that they were following
“the example of Freud” by decrying the interpretation of the manifest dream
while “belying that position” in “clinical behavior.” Pulver thought then that a
“controversy” was still smoldering, but perhaps the embers have by now
grown cold.
The belief in Freud's uniqueness as dream explorer took deep root in
American society. The conviction that no one before Freud had suspected that
dreams could illuminate the inner life of the dreamer—let alone the dreamer's
unconscious inner life—was so profound that,

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 when an individual came across what might have been considered evidence to
the contrary, he assumed instead that he had found a solitary “precursor” who
had established the same facts and arrived at the same theories. This
conclusion was drawn by Frederick Beharriell, who in the early 1960s found
that the Austrian writer, Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), had “duplicated”
discoveries that had until then been attributed solely to Freud; these included
the fulfillment of unconscious wishes in dreams. Beharriell (1962) thus
apparently chanced upon an almost incredible coincidence: The mystery of
dreams, puzzling for many centuries, had been solved almost simultaneously
but independently by two Viennese who lived within walking distance of each
other. In fact, Beharriell pointed out, Schnitzler made the discovery first.
Making a case for Schnitzler's precedence over Freud, Beharriell (1962)
conscientiously disallowed evidence that was in any way dubious. For
instance, a passage in a Schnitzler play, The Veil of Beatrice, points to the
writer's “apparent anticipation” of Freud's dream theory. The protagonist in
this drama, having admired the handsome duke riding by, has a thinly
disguised sexual dream about him. Innocently, not understanding its meaning,
she tells this dream to her lover. He, recognizing the unconscious wish,
disgusted and furious with her, explains: “Dreams are but cowardly desires, /
Are shameless wishes which the light of day / Drives back into the corners of
the soul / Whence only in the night they venture forth.”
The problem with this passage as evidence for Schnitzler's independent
discovery of the concept of unconscious wish fulfillment in dreams is that the
play appeared in 1899, but Freud had created his theory and had even spoken
about it publicly earlier. Conceivably, Schnitzler could have heard of it.
However, Beharriell unearthed another of Schnitzler's documents—an
unpublished draft that conclusively established his priority. In 1880-1881,
long before Freud published anything on the subject, Schnitzler had written a
preliminary sketch for a short story built around the appearance of an
unconscious sexual wish in a dream. The fragment had never been developed
and had never appeared in print. Beharriell (1962) summed up the plot:
In this story, the narrator, a medical student, is going home from a
dance at three in the morning. Unexpectedly finding himself outside
the dissection laboratory, he is seized by a curious impulse to enter
and “devote the rest of the night to the service of

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 science.” In the presence of the corpses he sinks into a chair. Then
he dreams that “in the moonlight he sees the daughter of the
caretaker enter the room with one of his fellow students, Stephan
Kalman. Stephan and Christine proudly proclaim their love, dance
gaily around the room, and stand in a long embrace. Music is heard,
and a strange “wanderer” leaps through the window with a violin;
his fiery singing and playing sets [sic] their senses whirling and the
whole room to dancing. The lovers float and whirl through the
room, kiss and sigh, in the perfumed flower-sea of the music.
Suddenly there is a crash, the music stops, fiddle and bow drop,
and the lovers sink to the ground. In the morning the narrator is
awakened there in the chair by the girl's father and instantly screams
at him in unexplained alarm, “Your daughter!” The next day he
observes Stephan and the girl closely, but they show no special
interest in each other. Since that day the rumor has spread that he
—the narrator—is in love with the girl [p. 725]!
Beharriell pointed out that it is the dreamer himself who is in love with the
young woman; others had recognized it, but the dreameer does not. In the
dream, the friend Stephan stands for the dreamer or, “more accurately, for the
repressed sensuous side of his personality” (p. 726)—asceticism versus
sensuality being a favorite theme of Schnitzler. The significance of the wild
dance and its climax is sufficiently clear: “The dream thus plainly fulfills the
narrator's repressed wish to dance such a dance with Christine” (p. 726).
How was Schnitzler's “macabre choice of a dissection room” (p. 726)
chosen as the locale to be explained? Beharriell made no attempt to clarify
this but noted that Freud picked the “polarity of love and death” as one of the
points of “uncanny familiarity” he found in Schnitzler. The “polarity” was, in
fact, a popular neo-Romantic-Gothic theme at the Symbolist end of the
century.
Schnitzler's fictitious dreams clearly required symbolic dream interpreting.
They belonged to that category that Freud (1900) referred to as those
“artificial dreams constructed by imaginative writers” that were “designed
for a symbolic interpretation of this sort; they reproduce the writer's thoughts
under a disguise which is regarded as harmonizing with the recognized
characteristics of dreams” (p. 97). But the dreams had not been used to
predict the future but rather to reveal unconscious desires.

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 The traditional technique is not a lawless proceeding, and symbolizations
can be regarded as strong or weak depending on the degree of plausibility
they attain. Agreement about the meaning of a powerful metaphor may be
nearly unanimous. To pick the simplest of examples: No one seems ever to
have disputed the interpretation of the Biblical Joseph's dream about his
brothers' sheaves bowing down to his sheaf; this has seemed indisputably to
signify the brothers' subordination to Joseph. Similarly, there seems to have
been no question that his dream that the sun, moon, and 11 stars were making
obeisance to him referred to his father, mother, and 11 brothers.
Freud, however, undeterred by the possibility that at least some symbolic
interpretations might be quite solid, ruled against them. The popular symbolic
method, he asserted, was scientifically unusable because its application was
“restricted … and incapable of being laid down on general lines” (Freud,
1900pp. 99-100). It was
impossible to give instructions upon the method of arriving at a
symbolic interpretation. Success must be a question of hitting on a
clever idea, of direct intuition, and for that reason it was possible
for dream-interpretation by means of symbolism to be exalted into
an artistic activity dependent on the possession of peculiar gifts [p.
97].
Freud offered his own theory as a scientific instrument; its method, he
supposed, lent itself to scientific employment. The meaning of a dream was
held to emerge if the manifest dream was “cut up into pieces,” and the
“background thoughts” for each piece were obtained by way of the dreamer's
free association (1900, p. 103). From the very beginning, however, Freud
allowed for many exceptions to this rule, and, as time went by, he permitted
many more. One of the most important and surprising of these exceptions was
his incorporation in his own model of another theory every bit as old as the
symbolic—the hypothesis that dream interpretation could be based on
language, including such things as “jokes, quotations, songs and proverbs” (p.
345).
It seems quite astonishing that Freud should have regarded this technique, a
mainstay of ancient soothsaying, as superior to symbolic dream interpreting,
even after considering the reason he gave:
The distinction between dream-interpretation of this kind and
interpretation by means of symbolism can still be drawn quite

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 sharply. In the case of symbolic dream-interpretation the key to the
symbolization is arbitrarily chosen by the interpreter; whereas in
our cases of verbal disguise the keys are generally known and laid
down by firmly established linguistic usage. If one has the right idea
at one's disposal at the right moment, one can solve dreams of this
kind wholly or in part even independently of information from the
dreamer [1900, pp. 341-342].
It seems that Freud regarded metaphoric and other poetic representations
as almost completely arbitrary, or at least he so regarded them while
formulating his theory. In practice, he depended on them with considerable
assurance; indeed, a good solid symbol is hard to ignore. Why, then, the
theoretical rejection? It seems that Freud could have inserted the symbolic
hypothesis into his theory just as he did the language-based premise. Did he
turn away from it, perhaps unconsciously, precisely because of its
contemporary popularity? Or had he been influenced by the hostility to
symbolism eloquently expressed by its opponents, who pointed to its fantastic
use by spiritualists?
It may be that Freud, writing under pressure during his summer vacation, in
a hurry to present his own theory, and chafing at what seemed to him to be the
need to write a long introductory chapter about the “scientific literature,”
simply did not give the symbolic hypothesis his full attention. This would
explain how he came to choose the worst possible example to illustrate
symbolic dream interpreting—Pharaoh's dream, famous precisely because no
ordinary human being had been able to decipher it (its meaning had been clear
only to the divinely inspired Joseph).
Freud must have picked it without considering the circumstances of the
interpretation: Pharaoh had a worrisome dream that seven fat cows had come
out of the water only to be devoured by seven lean cows that emerged after
them. All the magicians and all the wise men of Egypt were unable to explain
the meaning of this imagery. Joseph, however, prophesied that the seven fat
cows represented years of plenty and the seven lean cows years of meager
crops, and so enabled Pharaoh to plan ahead and thereby avoid a famine in
the land.
The Biblical dreams have been studied by scholars over the centuries. One
scholar, Martin Luther (1483–1546), explained why this dream had been
uninterpretable: there was no humanly comprehensible “analogy.” The dream

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 was of such a kind that it easily appears that the fat cows had an
auspicious meaning, but that the lean ones betokened evil (p. 141)
…. This much Pharaoh himself and also the other wise men
undoubtedly divined with ease, but they could conclude nothing
definite in general or individually [p. 148].
The cows could have stood for many things; one might have guessed that
seven royal females would die and seven others would survive. The dream
might have been referring to rich and poor families. In the Bible, cows often
signified “nations, cities or magistrates” (p. 150). Luther commented that,
once it was learned that the cows stood for years, the interpretation followed
easily. However, this knowledge was lacking and therefore “no one would
have understood by means of his own ability or wisdom that the vision of the
seven cows was to be taken as referring to domestic economy. This was the
work of the Holy Spirit alone” (Luther, n.d., Vol. 7, pp. 149-150).
Perhaps if simple, powerful metaphors, such as those of Joseph's own
dreams, in which the sheaves represented brothers and celestial bodies the
whole family, had occurred to Freud, he might have had second thoughts about
the utility of symbolic dream interpreting; perhaps he might then have found
room for it in his theoretical edifice. In that case, psychoanalysts could all
along have interpreted the manifest dream symbolically without being
burdened by the uneasy feeling that they were engaging in an “unofficial”
practice.
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 Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Sand, R. (1999). The Interpretation of Dreams. Psychoanal. Dial., 9(6):725-
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