FREUD’S WISH FULFILLMENT THEORY
Freud initially interpreted dreams by likening them to daydreams and psychotic hallucinations and had no theory. The daydreams of mentally healthy persons are wish fulfillments as any healthy person knows from personal experience. Psychotic hallucinations are either external attributions of failures or imaginary successes that are unrealistic and even irrational and can be considered such wish fulfillments. But there is no basis for assuming that dreams too mean wish fulfillments.
In order to make the meaning of a dream fit the wish fulfillment hypothesis, Freud used the idea of disguising through the operations of inversion and displacement. For example, when a dream said “closed,” he was able to interpret it as meaning “open.” He also assumed basely that all past events that the dreamer could remember in the waking state through associations of ideas with the dream images were part of the dream thoughts. Evidently, using arbitrarily such a wealth of material and the operations of inversion and displacement any event can be interpreted in any way one wishes. These facts alone make Freud’s theory of dreams untenable.
Freud spent five years to write his book on dreams because in the first four years he could not find a theoretical basis for his wish fulfillment hypothesis and his idea of disguising. The following events took place in Freud’s life during those five years.
Freud was unable to cure his hysterical patient Emma, as usual. With his permission, his friend Fliess performed a surgical operation on Emma's nose on February 20, 1895 to terminate her hysterical symptoms (?!). Excessive bleeding that nearly killed her occurred after the operation, a second operation was performed by another surgeon, and meter-long gauze was removed from her nose, which was accidentally left there by Fliess. But her bleeding continued. On April 21, 1896, Freud delivered his lecture The Etiology of Hysteria, according to which this disorder is caused by being seduced and abused in childhood.
On April 26 the same year he wrote to Fliess. “Her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing.” On May 4: “She became restless during the night because of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there, and since I did not come, she renewed the bleeding, as an unfailing means of rearousing my affection.” June 4: “Her hemorrhages were due to wishes.” They were undoubtedly caused by the faulty surgical operation since they began after the operation. She may have consciously or semi-consciously welcomed the bleeding if she really longed to see Freud, but there is no reason for assuming that her unconscious caused the self-harming behavior just to see Freud. His thinking was wishful: it served to feed his ego and to hide his failure to cure her.
Freud’s father died in October 1896, and he began his self-analysis in the summer of 1897. He discovered that he had been sexually abused in his childhood; thereupon he developed hysterical symptoms and wrote about them to Fliess. Consequently, he switched from the seduction theory of hysteria to its fantasy theory, according to which this disorder is caused by repressed unacceptable sexual wishes. In his famous letter to Fliess dated September 1, 1897, he explained why he made this change. None of the reasons that he mentioned in that letter has any scientific value; they are rather related to his personal psychological and professional needs. He also thought that lying to hysterical patients about the cause of their illness was the only means of helping them.
It appears that Freud conceived the fantasy theory of hysteria and based the whole psychoanalytic theory on it by integrating his baseless and wishful interpretation of Emma’s hemorrhages with his baseless wish fulfillment theory of dreams, for he wrote to Fliess on January 3, 1899: “The key to hysteria really lies in dreams. I understand now why, in spite of all my efforts, I was unable to finish the dream book.” On February 19, 1899 he wrote: “It is not only dreams that are fulfillments of wishes, but hysterical attacks as well. This is true of hysterical symptoms, but it probably applies to every product of neurosis.” He published The Interpretation of Dreams in September 1899. This is how Freud’s theories of dreams and neurosis were born out of baseless assumptions and wishful thinking.
One of the arguments Freud used in his dream book in support of his wish fulfillment theory is that the mind can do nothing but fulfilling wishes. Consequently, he continued to interpreted everything in a dream as meaning wish fulfillment. What he failed to see is that although the function of the mind can be said to fulfill wishes, i.e., to satisfy needs, it produces plenty of preparatory thoughts that serve to fulfill wishes but are not wish fulfillments themselves, and that such thoughts can be found in dreams. For example, to fulfill a wish consciously in the waking state one has to think why it is not fulfilled and how it can be fulfilled. This second thought can look like imaginary wish fulfillment but not the first one. Jung called Freud’s theory the "imaginary wish fulfillment theory."
JUNG’S COMPENSATION THEORY
According to Jung, dreams compensate the lopsidedness in the conscious attitude. His dream interpretations show that what he meant by lopsidedness was a harmful mistake, or a harmful cognitive-behavioral failure, and the compensation of it meant the correction, or termination, of it. It is not clear how exactly he arrived at this conclusion, but we can guess from some of his dream interpretations how he may have conceived of the idea of compensation, as exemplified below.
A young man had a dream that pictured his father as an unreliable man. Jung found out that this young man was in reality admiring his father and was relying too much on him. Jung therefore interpreted the dream as taking the father down and elevating the son, and he considered this the compensation of the real situation. He remarked that this looked like “an immoral business” but added that “compensation is entirely to the point.” Similarly, he interpreted all dreams that he could fit into the compensation theory as presenting the compensation or termination of a mistake in the conscious attitude. It is obvious that the above dream about father presented not the compensation of lopsidedness but the lopsidedness itself, because it said only and explicitly that the father was unreliable and implied that the son was wrong in relying on him so much. Moreover, the anxiety that the dreamer experienced meant that his father’s unreliability was harmful for the dreamer. The dream did not picture the compensated state of the lopsidedness, as Jung thought, in which case the dream would carry positive affect. It just warned the son about the state of his father. Thus, like Freud interpreted everything in a dream as the fulfillment of a wish, Jung interpreted everything as the termination of a mistake. Consequently, he and his followers read in many dreams the exact opposite of the dream’s true meaning, although they also interpreted some dreams correctly or nearly correctly. They also failed to fit many dreams into the frame of the compensation theory and therefore used obscure and mystic ideas such as mandala, archetype, and collective unconscious.
CONCLUSION
Freud’s wish fulfillment theory has no theoretical basis, and his interpretations are arbitrary, as explained above. Also, he belatedly explained anxiety dreams by saying that consciousness experienced anxiety when an unacceptable wish was fulfilled without being sufficiently disguised - the unconscious being happy, presumably. He completely failed to interpret incest dreams, because if (a) a dream showed the disguised fulfillment of a repressed unacceptable wish, and (b) anxiety was caused as explained by him, incest dreams would be anxiety dreams, which they are not. Freud’s wish fulfillment theory is baseless and absolutely useless and is even misleading.
Jung’s compensation theory is essentially correct but is not correctly used, because all types of thought that the mind produces for terminating mistakes are not considered. Also, it is not possible to interpret every dream on the basis of the compensation theory presented by Jung, and often the exact opposite of the real message of a dream is read in it.
The correct meaning and function of dreams can be understood only by taking into consideration (a) the types of thought that are produced consciously and rationally in the waking state when trying to terminate failures, or fulfilling wishes; (b) the cerebral lateralization and the development of mental functions, including the production of dreams; and (c) the fact that dream cognition and language is not symbolic but concrete analogic, or pictorial metaphoric.
When this is done, it is found that a complete dream contains the following three types of thought: (a) the presentation of the failure, frustration, mistake, or lopsidedness that needs to be terminated; (b) the explanation of the cause or causes of the failure, which is in the form of its external attribution; and (c) the proposed means of terminating the failure. One or two of these types of thought may be missing in a dream for various reasons or may be implicit in another type of thought; but the failure that is treated is always present in explicit or implicit form. Anxiety means that the images show something that is bad for the dreamer, something that needs to be avoided or terminated, i.e., they represent the failure treated by the dream. A dream that contains only an event that is accompanied by anxiety serves as a warning. In opposition to this, positive feelings mean that the images show something good for the dreamer, i.e., the termination of the failure, frustration, mistake, or lopsidedness.
This is the only understanding of dreams that can explain the existence of incest dreams. The fact that dream language is concrete analogic means that an object or event is represented in a dream by a well known other object or event that has some common features with it. In other words, a concrete-analogic representation does not mean that what the images show is identical with what they mean, but that they have some common features. This mode of representation is necessitated by the mode of cognition of the part of the brain which produces the dreams, and it also serves to convey meanings in a very condensed way. Dream interpretation consists of discovering these common features between what the images show and what they mean.
Dream analogies acquire meaning in the context created by failures and frustrations experienced by the dreamer in real life and the three types of thought than are found in dreams. Because everyone has incest dreams, those dreams must be related to a frustration related to sex that everyone experiences. In fact, nobody is perfectly satisfied with every instance of sexual intercourse, and when this happens, negative feelings are produced. So, the incest dreams may be related to those negative feelings. Incest dreams are pleasurable dreams which look revolting only in the waking state, evidently because the meaning of dreams is not yet known. It appears that incest dreams are interpreted as wish fulfillment or compensation dreams like daydreams, baselessly as explained above.
According to the concrete-analogic language of dreams, the sex partner in an incest dream does not represent that real person; it represents only some real features of that person. It thus appears that an incest dream means that the sexual act can be perfectly satisfactory only if the partners intimately know, respect, and love each other, because this is the kind of partner that appears in those dreams. Therefore “incest dream” is a misnomer.
Loker, A. (2007). New Facts about Dreams and Psychotherapy Deduced from Jung’s Compensation Theory. Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Vol. 9, Nr. 2.
Loker, A. (2002). Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics of Symptoms, Dreams, Lateralization: Theory, Interpretation, Therapy.
Loker, A. (1987). Dreams and Psychosynthesis.
Masson, J. M. (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
Topic: Freud and Jung (Read 1887 times)
January 26, 2010, 03:19:38 PM