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There has been a plethora of papers revisiting Freud's groundbreaking work, The Interpretation of Dreams, on the 100th anniversary of its publication. Freud was most proud of this book and kept it updated throughout his life. Two articles from Psychoanalytic Dialogues, ‘The interpretation of dreams: Freud and the Western tradition’ by Sand
and ‘The interpretation of dreams: a classic revisited’ by Greenberg and Pearlman, take on the task of updating it, the former by re-examining the usefulness of the manifest content and symbolic interpretation, and the latter through the lens of modern dream and sleep laboratory research.
Sand focuses on Freud's extensive review of the literature in The Interpretation of Dreams and points to significant lacunae in his coverage. Here she acts as the ‘good’ psychoanalyst by noting not only what is present but also what is missing. Significantly missing is Freud's mention and documentation of the age-old approach of symbolically interpreting the dream. Because Freud was espousing the technique of free association to uncover the latent dream thoughts as the key to understanding the dream, the manifest content of the dream, the dream as dreamt, became insignificant at best.
Sand goes on to explore the traditional western dream theories that Freud neglected. The two major approaches that she delineates are still with us today. One is the notion that dream process is creative through the faculty of the imagination; the other is that it is random and purely fortuitous, resulting from a disorganized sleeping brain. Freud's model reduced the creative imaginal to the ‘dream-work’, that process whereby the latent dream thoughts are transformed into the manifest content by condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The ‘associationist’ school thought the dream meaningless and the result of the idling cognitive apparatus.
Sand suggests several reasons for Freud's steadfast refusal to allow a symbolic a