This paper documents the relationship between Freud's dream theory and that of an ancient interpreter of dreams cited several times by Freud: Artemidorus of Daldis. It shows how the method of interpretation of using each scene in a dream, finding associations and symbolism in each, and taking into account the context of the dreamer's life situation that is used by both. It also shows how Freud differed from Artemidorus by investigating the past to find the meaning of the dream while Artemidorus was employed to predict the future. It contends that Freud's interest in the past was directed towards understanding the present and, in particular, to the dream wish. As the wish was a wish for future gratification, Freud's dream interpretation is seen as a more complete, more scientific, more sophisticated version of what Artemidorus did. A theoretical note at the end of the paper attempts to integrate Freud's theory of dreams with modern clinical practice of psychoanalysis.
As a housewife, mother, and part-time college teacher in Topeka, Kansas in the late 1950s, I met Howard Shevrin at a party. He was recruiting for an experiment he was running with a colleague. They were investigating subliminal perception in using as a model an investigation by Potzl. I volunteered. Shown two slides so quickly that I did not register the pictures, I was told to go home and report back the next day to talk about my dreams of that night. I told a story about my how my brother, when he was a tiny boy, used to love to go naked in the woods in New Hampshire where we had a tiny house like a hut out in the woods near a tiny town called Bethlehem. I remember being embarrassed as I told the dream, which felt somehow inauthentic, especially because everything was so tiny.
Later Howie showed me the rebus I had seen but not registered the day before. One was of a man's shirt with collar and tie. The other was a leg,
bent at the knee. Tie+knee=tiny. Years later I was a psychologist becoming a psychoanalyst and reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams when I came across this footnote:
“An important contribution to the part played by recent material in the construction of dreams has been made by Potzl in a paper which carries a wealth of implications”(Loc.15987).
The footnote explains the same experimental method to which I had been subjected. It stirred my own interest in dreams. A few months ago, I came across a book review that critiqued a new translation of the Interpretation of Dreams of Appolidorus and a book describing the place of this book in modern scholarship. The review mentioned that Freud had referred to this book in his Interpretation of Dreams. I bought both online within minutes and decided to investigate the influence of Appolidorus on Freud. This paper is an homage to Howie for his work on dreams.
Asked why he wrote of blood and violence in his early stories, the Chinese author Wu Hua (2001), responded that:
“It is your experience while growing up, I believe, that shapes the direction of your life. A basic image of the world is planted deep in your mind, and then, like a document in a copy machine, it keeps being reprinted again and again throughout your formative years. Once you reach adulthood, whether you are successful or not, whatever you accomplish can only partially revise that basic image, it will never be entirely transformed” (p. 88).
He went on to say that his father was a surgeon and performed body operations that he saw during his childhood. His school years coincided with the Cultural Revolution; his experience then was full of denunciations, public trials, and subsequent trips to the beach for bloody executions. As an adult he dreamt bloody nightmares. He wrote bloody stories by day and had more nightmares. The cycle was broken when he had a nightmare in which he himself was executed as a murderer. The dream ended with his objecting “Hell, we're not at the beach yet.” It was only after that that he recalled the bloody scenes of his childhood and
was able to stop dreaming of them and writing of violence with bloody consequences. Yu Hua's reaction to this dream was different from his reaction to all the previous nightmares. The earlier nightmares had fueled his bloody stories. But this dream stopped both the nightmares and the bloody stories.
What was different this time? Could it have been his awareness that all the terrible dreams were about seeing other people die, but in this dream he confronted a fear that he himself could be executed like the people he had witnessed being executed on the beach? Or was it that he spoke up in this last dream and objected to the execution? Did he absolve himself of the guilt of not objecting when others were executed? Or even of guilt at enjoying the dramas? Or was he able to retrieve what he had repressed, retrieve the memories of seeing these horrible scenes, recalling them, and thus laying them to rest? Wu Hua himself believed it was the latter.
If we believe that it was facing the fear that he himself could be executed, we could see the last dream as undoing the displacement of this fear onto others. If it was the objection to being executed, we could see the dream as marking his gaining enough ego strength to defend himself from a death of the mind. If we think that he felt helplessness at seeing the executions, his shame at not being able to stop what was going on was relieved when he dreamt of objecting to the persecution and execution of the victims of this violence. If we thought that he could undo the repression of these early scenes by experiencing the trauma of seeing them, we would be dealing with the return of the repressed. The critic who had first noticed and written to him about the violence of his early stories and the abrupt change in his subject matter was witness to his traumatic past. But so were his earliest readers. In creating the stories, he was writing for the witnesses. We could see this as an unburdening, a sharing, a catharsis. And maybe that was enough to allow him the final dream, the final objection, and the final relief from guilt, shame, and fear.
The great champion and promoter of dream interpretation in modern times was Sigmund Freud. How did he come to believe that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious? And what led him to believe that the unconscious was what drives human behavior? And what had this to do with fate?
One of Freud's great influences was a Greek necromancer, Artemidorus of Daldis who lived in Asia minor in the late second century C.E. His book, Oneirocritica (2020 edition), was intended as a handbook for his son to convey all the knowledge and skill the father had accumulated through his career as a dream interpreter who could predict the future from a person's dreams.
He goes about this by dividing dreams into five categories. The first book is about the human body; the second is about the world outside the body including culture, nature, and religion. The last three books add commentary on miscellaneous themes and objects in dreams.
In this way Artemidorus focused on what psychoanalysis has consistently investigated: the influence of the body and the culture on the contents of the mind. I believe that this was a profound influence on Freud's thinking.
Freud followed Artemidorus in agreeing with Aristotle that contrary to popular belief, dreams do not come from the gods but from the physiological process. In other words, they come from the body, including the brain, which is, in turn, modified by culture.
Artemidorus used another principle that Freud followed; “Even if a legend is more or less fictitious, our presumption that it is true means that our unconscious mind brings that legend into play whenever it wants to warn us that something analogous to the context of the legend is about happen” (2.66. 1–2).
This influence of the unconscious mind is what all analysts agree on. Brenner (1982) called it the first principle of psychoanalytic thinking. Another principle of Artemidorus is that some dreams simply reflect the dreamer's immediate experiences and/or feelings. Such dreams are the result of what Freud named “day residue.”
Another way Freud followed Artemidorus is in setting aside analogy for more specific clues to meaning. Rather than use set symbols, the interpreter uses possible meanings. For Artemidorus these are to be derived from the interpreter's experience. Freud used the patient's experience, rather than the interpreter's, to understand the meaning of a dream element. In Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, dreamer and analyst are the
same person, so the distinction between the patient's experience and that of the analyst is lost. But in his work with other patients, it is significant. And it has become a standard of analytic practice to inquire about what comes to the patient's mind.
Thonemann (2020) notes that Artemidorus did not follow up his belief that dreams come from the unconscious with an interest in exploring that unconscious. In that way, Freud went beyond his predecessor. Thonemann also points out that while Artemidorus believed that what a dream meant depended on the person who dreamed it. But he looked only at the person insofar as his social status as determined by age, sex, family and occupation. A dream meant one thing if it was dreamed by a slave, something else if it was dreamed by an artisan, and yet something else if it was dreamed by a patrician. Similarly, it had different meanings for a man or woman, and different for a shoemaker than a farmer or a senator. And the age of the dreamer as well as the political conditions at the time affected the meaning of the dream. Was the city at war? Was there a famine? Was the dreamer ambitious, fearful, seeking revenge, looking for love, escaping something or someone? All these status markers, and historical and contextual events, were present and conscious.
But for Freud the dream was determined by personal history. He went beyond Artemidorus in using the analysand's memories of childhood and adolescence as well as current life to understand dreams. Above all, he saw dreams as being driven by unconscious affects, wishes, fears, moral judgements, defenses, and compromises between these.
For both Artemidorus and Freud, word-play, puns, and reversals were part of interpretation. An important technique in interpretation for both Artemidorus and Freud is the use of puns and similar word play. Freud quotes this from Artemidorus.:
“Alexander dreamed he saw a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander happened to be in the neighborhood of Tyre, in attendance on the king during his Syrian campaign. By dividing the word satyr into óá and rúpaç he encouraged the to press home the siege so that he became master of the city. óá Túpoç = Tyre is thine.” (Loc. tk)
Reversals figure in Artemidorus's work as well. Here Freud is in direct agreement with Artemidorus. He refers to Artemidorus way of understanding dreams:
“In interpreting the images seen in dreams, one must sometimes follow them from the beginning to the end, and sometimes from the end to the beginning…” (Loc. 19284). This is in a footnote added in 1914. By using this reference Freud shows that he was still reading and consulting Artemidorus even years after the first publication of his own dream book.
But all interpretations either one makes are interpretations of what is in the mind of the dreamer. For Artemidorus they predict the future; for Freud they express the past.
But for Freud they also affect the future because those affects, wishes, fears, defenses, and moral judgements not only determine dreams, but they also determine thoughts and behavior. Freud asserts that they also determine daydreams and hysterical symptoms:
“Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of the basis of memories.” (Loc. 22952).
These fantasies are attempts to solve a current problem by reconciling wishes, fears, defenses, and moral judgements. For Freud the mind is working at night just as in the day, but using a different processing system that depends on visual images, puns, condensation, and reversals rather than the verbal logic of daily thought.
For Artemidorus it is important to know that dreams are the product of the dreamer's mind, not communications from the gods (Loc. 4.59.3–4). He proves this by noting that uneducated people do not use literary quotations or allusions in their dreams, but educated people do use such allusions. But why he be so concerned with this? Predictions in dreams are no less believable if they came from the gods. If he is just claiming to predict the future from dreams he need not make the point that they are creations of the mind of the dreamer. But this is a key point in his thinking. It explains why it is so necessary for the interpreter to know the dreamers' gender, social class, age, profession, and family position.
This way of thinking about dreams becomes key for Freud when he chooses dreams as the surest way into the mind of the dreamer. But he differs from Artemidorus when he thinks about whether dreams are divisible into two categories. Artemidorus separated dreams into
those that are instigated by bodily functions and those that were not. He regarded the first category as uninterpretable, while the second had meaning hidden in the symbols in the dream. Freud agreed with him about the second category, but he insisted that all dreams are constructed of wishes and day residues even if they were apparently prompted by physical stimuli like thirst or the need to urinate.
He wrote:
“To put it another way, stimuli arising during sleep are worked-up into a wish fulfillment, the other constituents of which are the familiar psychical day residues” (Loc. 17045).
Artemidorus was interpreting dreams of people who were anxious. Employing a dream interpreter meant the client was worried about the future. The interpreter understood that his forecast would affect the client's state of mind. While Artemidorus records many dreams that predict disasters, he never tells his readers whether he told the client of impending doom. He did not seem interested in averting the disasters that some of his interpretations warned dreamers would happen.
Similarly, Freud interpreted dreams for people who were anxious. His patients came to him worried about their futures. But he read the future from the past in much greater detail than did Artemidorus. Freud's method differs from that of Artemidorus in two ways. First, Freud expected the dreamer to provide associations linking elements of the dream to her conscious thoughts while Artemidorus associated to the elements of the dream himself without asking the dreamer what the elements called up to the dreamer. He went directly from the dream to his view of what it meant. Second, Freud looked to the dream as an outcome of the dreamer's past and clue to current troubles while Artemidorus went straight to the future.
Some classical scholars (Price, S. 2004; Thonemann, P., 2020) believe that Freud's method was more different from Artemidorus than Freud claimed, and that Freud was citing Artemidorus to give his ideas the elevating appearance of classical scholarship. On the contrary, Freud used dreams to uncover hidden wishes. And Artemidorus had shown the way for this. For example, here is Artemidorus on envy, narcissistic over-valuation and fear:
“To dream of enlarging one's estate and possessing a more expansive or even luxurious property, as long as it is more expensive or moderately better than one's existing property, is a good thing. But to dream of riches far beyond any possibility is ominous, and an indication of financial loss. A wealthy man has expenses to meet, and is necessarily exposed to criminal designs and envy—all the rich are plotted against and envied” (Loc. 4–17).
And here he writes of jealousy and aggression:
“Anything that is always the result of happenings in real life must also be the result of happenings in dreams. An example is the painter who dreamt that he had intercourse with his stepmother. After that dream he fell out with his father. That was because any act of adultery results in jealousy and hostility. Accept this principle with all other dreams of well, and you will not go wrong” (Loc. 4–20).
But the most important part of Artemidorus' work is his consideration of sex and gender. For Foucault (tk) the crucial part of Artemidorus's view of sexuality is who penetrates and who is penetrated. According to Thonemann's understanding of Artemidorus: “Sex is ‘good’ if the relationship penetrator/penetrated corresponds to a relationship of domination/submission outside the bedroom, if not, it is not” (Loc. 1533).
Oral sex is classified as contrary to law which Thonemann interprets as contrary to social custom. Artemidorus's view is that mutual willingness is what makes sex good for both penetrator and penetrated. If is not consensual, it is not good. Sex acts other than penetration by a penis are considered either impossible or uninteresting. And oral sex is not somehow considered penetration, nor is the tongue or the fingers considered capable of penetration. We cannot know whether this view of sex was personal to Artemidorus or was common in his culture, but it seems to have influenced Freud, whose phallocentric views led him to his least realistic theories: his theories about women.
And the subject of sex is where Freud's most important and controversial ideas cluster as well. Dreams for him are, like conflicts, most often about forbidden sexual wishes. In Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams he says:
“It is fair to say that there is no group of ideas that is incapable of representing sexual facts and wishes” (Loc. 20228). “Thus, this substance led me to sexuality, the factor to which I attributed the greatest importance in the origin of nervous disorders which it was my aim to cure” (Loc. 14584). He says that dream wishes that are mysterious are so because they are constructed in order to hide these sexual wishes.
How to draw the curtains that conceal these sexual wishes and find what is hidden behind them? Freud gives us a variety of methods. For example, he says:
“A dream caused by stimuli arising the male sex organs may cause the dreamer to find the top part of a clarinet in the street, or the mouth-piece of a tobacco pipe, or, again, a piece of fur. Here the clarinet and the tobacco pipe represent the approximate shape of the male organ, while the fur stands for the pubic hair. In the case of a sexual dream in a woman, the narrow space where the thighs come together may be represented by a narrow courtyard surrounded by houses, while the vagina may be symbolized by a soft, slippery and very narrow footpath leading across the yard along which the dreamer has to pass, in order, perhaps, to take a gentleman a letter” (Loc.14937).
The specificity of these images suggests that they are references to actual dreams the interpreter has been told. This mirrors Artemidorus' emphasis on the experience of the interpreter as the key to symbolism and interpretation. The idea that the male dreams show the male organ, and the female dreams give images of the female organ, is similar to Artemidorus's idea that the sex or status of the dreamer determines the meaning of the symbols in the dream. These principles are to be found in all of the dream interpretations Freud uses in his Interpretation of Dreams.
The most important assumption in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is the idea that dreams are products of the mind. He bolsters the credibility of this idea and links it to the notion of dreams as predictors of the future when he says:
“The fact that dreams concern themselves with attempts at solving the problems by which our mental life is faced is no more strange than that our conscious waking life should do so, beyond this, it merely tells us
that that activity can also be carried on in the preconscious and this we already knew” (Loc. 23296).
Finding the meaning of a dream is thus dependent on finding the problem the dreamer is attempting to solve: the hidden problem.
In his Interpretation of Dreams Freud devotes a whole chapter to symbols in dreams. He cites Artemidorus Book 11, Chapter 10: “Thus for instance, a bedchamber stands for a wife, if such there be in the house.” (Loc. 19992). He uses this as evidence for the rooms in a house symbolizing women. In this, Artemidorus and Freud both use symbols as common references but limit their use by choosing the context in which they occur. Furthermore, Freud uses the experience of psychoanalysts of using dream symbols in interpretations. This is a direct mirroring of Artemidorus is key to understanding dreams. Both Artemidorus and Freud constantly caution readers to rely on experience derived from interpreting dreams to understand the dream at hand.
He relates dream symbols to an ancient belief. He says:
“For with the help of a knowledge of dream symbolism, it is possible to understand the meaning of separate elements of the content of a dream or separate pieces of a dream, or in some cases, even whole dreams, without having to ask the dreamer for his associations. Here we are approaching the popular ideal of translating dreams and on the other hand are returning to the technique of interpretation used by the ancients, to whom dream interpretation was identical with interpretation by means of symbols.” (Loc. 26735).
From Artemidorus Freud could infer that interest in dreams was universal, concur that dreams come from the mind, and infer that there was meaning hidden in the symbolic mechanisms of dream construction that could lead an interpreter of dreams to find the hidden meaning. He cites Artemidorus's method of interpreting the dream by examining each image in it separately, rather than trying to understand it as a whole. In addition, the interpreter could know that the meaning was expressed by the mind of the dreamer so the more one knew about the dreamer's life, experiences, hopes, fears, and moral standards, the better one could interpret dreams. And, on the other hand, the more one understood a dream, the better one could understand the mind of the dreamer. All of
this led Freud to give dreams the extraordinary place he gave them in the technique of psychoanalysis.
Although he used this method for interpreting dreams, Freud chose to use the same method to understand jokes, psychoses, and neurotic symptoms. He says: “Ideas in dreams and in psychoses have in common the characteristic of being fulfillments of wishes. My own researches have taught me that in this fact lies the key to psychological theory of both dreams and psychoses” (Loc. 14050).
A crucial part of the interpretation, both for Artemidorus and Freud, is the separation between manifest and latent content of a dream. Thus, for Freud, a dream of seeing her younger nephew dead as his elder brother turns out to mean that the dreamer wants to see the young man who came to mourn the older brother again. It is not a dream of malice towards the younger nephew.
In the end Freud apologists for not giving more attention to manifestly sexual dreams:
“Moreover, the moral judgement by which the Translator of The Oneirocritica of Artemidorus of Daldis allowed himself to be led into withholding the chapter on sexual dreams from the knowledge of his readers strikes me as laughable. What governed my decision was simply my seeing that an explanation of sexual dreams would involve me deeply in the still unsolved problems of perversion and bisexuality; and I accordingly reserved this material for another occasion” (Loc. 25377).
Here we get a glimpse of the extent to which Freud valued Artemidorus's discussion of sexual dreams and wishes and yet lived in a social setting in which such things were not to be investigated or discussed even by scholars. Freud never actually made good on his promise to discuss dreams involving perverse or bisexual wishes. We can only speculate that using sexual dreams of his own would be too revealing or embarrassing in that social climate. Artemidorus was not using his own dreams, or, at least, not stating that any of the dreams he wrote about were his own. And he lived in a time and place where sexuality was not so severely repressed. He frankly discussed dreams of sexual positions, adultery, same sex sexual partners, incest, and sex with animals.
Freud's apology suggests that he regarded such dreams as worthy of attention, but not at that moment. Since he begins this footnote by condemning the Translator for eliminating the chapter on dreams with manifest sexual content, he seems to be defending himself from his own accusation of himself for writing like the Translator rather than like Artemidorus. And it is possible that he did not believe he could get any farther than Artemidorus in understanding that those dreams were manifestly sexual, but based on a wish for power.
Yet Freud does describe dreams as concealing sexual wishes so that even if sex is not evident in the manifest dream, it is the latent dream wish. And he considers the study of dreams to be central to his entire psychoanalytic project. He says:
“Thus, I would look for the theoretical value of the study of dreams in the contributions it makes to psychological knowledge and in the preliminary light it throws on the problems of the psychoneuroses. Who can guess the importance of the results which might be obtained from a thorough understanding of the structure and functions of the mental apparatus since even the present stage of our knowledge allows us to exert a therapeutic influence on the curable forms of psychoneurosis?” (Loc. 25636).
The things Freud found in Artemidorus work meshed nicely with the method of using associations that he had used with neurotic patients in order to understand their symptoms. Did he get them initially from Artemidorus? I cannot say. I do not know when he first read his work. What is clear is that he agreed with much of it. I think modern psychoanalysts think of associations not as a linear series, but as part of a complex webbing the brain, closer to the spiderweb than to the line from which she suspends that web. The first association that comes to mind may or may not be the key to the meaning of the scene in the dream, much less the key to the whole dream. So that while Freud's idea of interpreting the dream was to find the wish that fueled the dream, modern psychoanalysts also understand dreams as communications to the person to whom they are told, or consolidations of daily experience, or using current experience to modify understandings derived from infantile experience, we
also understand the dream as a multidetermined, and multifunctional activity of the mind driven by emotion.
As a practicing analyst, I do know that I think of the person's past as prelude to the present and the present as prelude to the future. I do not go in for backward fortune telling. I aim to influence the person's future satisfaction with life by helping them to understand and therefore modify those behaviors that bring them grief. As Freud saw it then, and as I see it now, past pushes feelings and thought, feelings and thought push fantasy, dreams, and daydreams. Fantasy shapes future behavior because fantasy is the wish embodied in a story and that story can become reality. Once we know our wishes, we can work on making them come true.