Constructive Forces in Dreams

The dream is a “royal road to the unconscious.”1 Where this road leads will necessarily depend on what we expect to find at its end—on our concept of the character of unconscious emotions. If the unconscious is considered to contain only irrational wishes for libidinous, aggressive, or destructive satisfaction, then dreams can express no more. An unconscious which harbors no rational, constructive forces cannot be expected to express constructive forces in dreams.

Horney emphasizes in her recent work2 the existence and unconscious activity of constructive forces also in the neurotic. These forces, which move the patient toward emotional health and genuine growth, are strengthened and mobilized in the process of analysis.

Poul Bjerre, a Swedish psychoanalyst who followed Freud on his way from hypnosis to psychoanalysis, gives a pertinent description of the impact produced by an exclusively irrational and destructive concept of unconscious motivation:3

“… It means that the more we succeed in penetrating all surface phenomena and reaching the essentials of psychic life, that is those of life as a whole, the oftener we come across powers inimical to ourselves; and finally we fall, a helpless prey, into their hands. During the Middle Ages these powers were called demons. We call them instincts. The difference in terms is of little moment…. True, we can rear the structure of consciousness on the volcanic ground of the unconscious. We can live and act in this structure, but we can never feel secure. And what is worse, we can never feel free and content. In a thousand circuitous ways the repressed instincts influence our conduct, disturbing, arresting, and producing disease …”

Bjerre rejects this pessimistic view of psychic life. Analytic experience as well as life experience shows that there are “useful, creative, life-affirmative forces at work in the unconscious. Dreams are one of their most important expressions.”

In his book Dreaming as a Curative Process of the Mind, 4 Bje