The Dreams of the Traumatic Neuroses

As is well known, Freud considered the dream as an expression of a wish, a wish in the unconscious mind. Dream life was thus understood by him to be dominated by the pleasure principle. But in some cases of what is known as the traumatic neurosis, a curious change in the dream life may occur. The condition is described as “traumatic” because it usually follows the experience of some serious danger from which the patient has escaped virtually uninjured. The range of symptoms is fairly wide, from a persistent nervousness to a more serious disturbance, including an incapacity to function in work and in various other ways.

But the curious phenomenon that will concern us is the change in the dream life. It seems to be chiefly preoccupied with the disaster which appears to have been the precipitating cause of the illness and the disaster is repeated over and over again. Freud regarded this type of dream as possibly representing an exception to his wish theory concerning dreams. He further supposed that the traumatic experience had in some way produced so severe a dislocation in the individual's mental life as to have thrown him back into that more archaic form of mental mechanism which Freud named the repetition compulsion.

I should like to consider here the possibility that such dreams do not represent a violation of the pleasure principle. Rather, they appear as screens for one of man's oldest and most powerful wishes: the wish to escape death. The form that this wish takes in these dreams seems to have survived from primitive thought.

There is usually a wide variety of beliefs about death in almost any primitive community, but we are concerned with only one of these beliefs: that some people do not die. Certainly one would think that the savage must realize that old age will lead to death, but it is doubtful that he has anything approaching a conviction that this is an inevitable thing. Primitive people have many legends about people who do not die, and in most essentials