You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is almost 100 years since Freud urged us to look into dreams if we would understand what lies behind our patients' crippling behaviors. Today very few persons practicing psychotherapy heed this advice. Was he wrong? Has his advice been superseded? Or are these therapists missing something valuable, and if so why did they give up on this source of information that Freud thought so crucial?
Even Freud had a hard time selling the idea that dreams are important. At the time when he was first invited to this country to lecture at Clark University, 9 years after the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) was originally published, the total worldwide sales of the book reached only 351 copies. Not exactly a big hit, yet this book probably represents the theory of dreams everyone knows best, and certainly is the one that has had the most influence on theories of personality and on popular culture.
According to Erik Erikson (1954), dreams went out of fashion in psychiatry in the 1930s because concern about them did not fit well the American cultural emphasis on speed and practicality. To work with dreams took both the patient and the therapist too far afield from everyday life and its problems and too long a time to unravel all the many associations any one dream may produce. There are other reasons why the mental health field turned away from dreams in the effort to help patients manage their lives more successfully. One of these was the medication revolution, and another was our love affair with science and mistrust of the subjective. As we got more control of abnormal behaviors through pharmacological agents and behavioral contingency management programs, dreams went out of the psychotherapy training programs as an archaic, unsystematic, unverifiable data source.