Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow.

  • Joseph Jastrow
Date:
1948,
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and hating, altruistic and self interested, the dream may express just that part of the contradictory state of feeling which the conscious censor inclines to disown. What Freud does not sufficiently recognize is that dreams do not all follow similar courses because dream¬ ers have different psychologies. That factor is the central goal of Pierce’s investigation. According to one’s temperament one may be rather decidedly the same person in one’s dreaming as in one’s waking life, or appear quite differently as the person one is not, but privately thinks oneself to be, or would like to be. Of eighteen dreamers, nine men and nine women, Pierce finds ten who are different waking and dreaming, and eight who are the same personalities in the two worlds. It may be suggestive that of the eight who are much the same personalities dreaming and waking, six are women and only two men. Whether this indicates a greater consistency in women, or a larger satisfaction with their actual lot, or a duller imagination, is an open question. At all events, dreams are highly individual¬ ized products of the entire personality. They represent under-cover escapes of the fear-wish-fantasy phase of the psychic life. There is hardly a statement or an inci¬ dent, an inference, a process that the Freudian dream interpreters employ to support their thesis, which is not readily substantiated here, there and elsewhere, frequently or occasionally, in a fair and sufficient sample of average dreams. So much is readily conceded. But when the principles thus suggested are generalized far beyond their warrant, are constricted and contorted into remote meanings, and summarized in formulae that are but prepossessions ingeniously twisted, and when the entire significance of dreams is exaggerated to an importance far beyond its worth, a sceptical atti¬ tude toward the entire construction is justified.
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