The Traumatic Situation in the Genesis of Dreams

Dreams are the gratification of unconscious wishes. This psycho-analytic concept does not conflict even with masochistic dreams, nor with dreams that produce anxiety or that represent punishment by the Super-ego.

Nevertheless, there is a kind of dream that seems to be an exception—the dreams of traumatic neurosis. When somebody has suffered a great psychic shock, which is relatively frequent in wartime, his dreams are a monotonous reproduction of the unpleasant sensations experienced at the moment of the trauma. In these dreams there is no wish gratified by the hallucinations in the reproduction of the traumatic situation.

There is also another exception. Very frequently the presence of forgotten disagreeable experiences can be discerned in dreams; experiences of the subject's childhood which had a traumatic influence on his psychic evolution. If dreams reproduce these infantile traumatic experiences with great frequency, we have another contradiction to the theory of wish gratification. Not altogether, however, since in these dreams the infantile traumatic situation is often modified and turned towards wish fulfilment.

Freud does not believe that the exception proves the rule. The most one can say, according to him, is that an exception does not nullify the rule. Bearing in mind the exceptions we have mentioned, where the supposed function of a dream fails, Freud made a slight modification in the psycho-analytic theory. Instead of saying that a dream is the gratification of wishes, he says that a dream is an attempt to gratify wishes.

In our opinion, the traumatic situation does not only contribute to the dreams of traumatic neurosis and those reproducing certain infantile traumatic situations. It contributes to all dreams. We believe that the existence of a traumatic situation is a very important factor in the genesis of dreams, possibly the most important factor of all. This opinion is a new point of view in the study of dream psychology. We shall attemp