The Adaptive Function of Dreams

The process of dreaming brings to light repressed unconscious wishes of childhood that are ordinarily inaccessible to the dreamer's consciousness. For the practicing psychoanalyst, this great discovery of Freud's overshadows all other aspects of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams. Accordingly, analysts have tended to ignore the likelihood that dreaming serves an adaptive function quite distinct from that of providing a source of substitute gratification for these repressed wishes.

Although he did not emphasize it in his major writings on dreams, Freud was clearly aware of this possibility. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), he offered some tentative suggestions about the nature of such a function:

… it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during psychoanalyses which bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is supported by the wish (which is encouraged by ‘suggestion’) to conjure up what has been forgotten

Teaching Analyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

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and repressed. Thus it would seem that the function of dreams, which consists in setting aside any motives that might interrupt sleep, by fulfilling the wishes of the disturbing impulses, is not their original function. It would not be possible for them to perform that function until the whole of mental life had accepted the dominance of the pleasure principle. If there is a ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ it is only consistent to grant that there was also a time before1 the purpose of dreams was the fulfilment of wishes. This would imply no denial of their later function [pp. 32-33].

In this passage Freud appears to have been making a distinction between two stages of development. At the beginning the discrepancy between wishes and the gratifications available to them has not yet become th