The interpretation of dreams freud and the western dream tradition

Abstract

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 siècle 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.