Chapter 1 The Royal Road

In the New Introductory Lectures Freud says of his theory of dreams:

It occupies a special place in the history of psycho-analysis and marks the turning point; it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being a depth-psychology.

This is not surprising. Freud’s studies of neuroses revealed to him the significance and psychic meaning of symptoms. It is the study of dreams—a universal phenomenon— which opened up the understanding of the universal domain of dream thought and dream language which goes far beyond the understanding of the actual night dream. Freud came to see the analysis of dreams as the royal road to the unconscious.

Unlike many of his other theories, Freud altered but little his theory of dreams, first fully formulated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the book which, according to Jones, he considered his most important work.

Freud regards dreams as guardians of sleep. As we know, sleep can be disturbed by external stimuli such as a loud noise. To protect sleep, the sleeper can produce a dream in which the noise is taken up by the dream and, as it were, explained away. These are rare occasions. More regularly our sleep is disturbed by internal stimuli. Unfulfilled desires and wishes, unresolved conflicts, give rise to inner tensions which could trouble our sleep. In sleep our relation to reality is temporarily suspended. Repression is partly relaxed and regression occurs so that archaic unconscious wishes strive for expression. Motility and action are suspended and repressed desires seek expression ‘in a harmless hallucinatory experience’ (Freud 1933:16). Common speech recognizes the wishfulfilling aspect of dreams by using the same term ‘dream’ both for the day-dream (a wish-fulfilment fantasy) and the dream we have whilst asleep. But there is a fundamental difference between the two. The day-dream expresses conscious wishes— organized, rationalized, acceptable to our waking consciousness. I