On Freud's Concept of Dream-Action

Twelve years after the publication of his Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud wrote about a new concept, “dream-action” (Traumhandlung), in “Dreams in Folklore” by Freud and Oppenheim. (6) The only copy of the paper, handwritten by Freud, disappeared for 45 years!

That such a paper had been written was not known until 1956, when Oppenheim's daughter, who was then living in Australia, brought it to the notice of a New York bookseller. Strachey (18) states that the disappearance of the paper—“is no doubt accounted for by the fact that soon afterwards Oppenheim became an adherent of Adler's and, along with five other members, resigned from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, October 11, 1911.”

Strachey (18) points out that in the 1911 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud announced in a footnote that a paper on dreams in folklore would soon appear, but in subsequent editions the footnote was deleted. Strachey (19) believes that “the concept of dream-action, or at all events the term, vanished with the paper and does not reappear anywhere in Freud's writings.”

I believe Freud's concept of dream-action to be a valuable addition to our present understanding of dream psychology, more than a half century after it disappeared.

In the paper, Freud described examples of dreams in folklore in which the dreamer awakened to find himself actually doing things similar to what he had been dreaming about, e.g. defecating on the spouse, manipulating the sexual organs of the spouse, etc. Freud states “… that the dream-action with which they end must have a meaning and must be the one intended by the latent thoughts of the dreamer. If the dreamer defecates over his wife at the end of it, then the whole dream must have this as its aim and provide the reason for this outcome.”(6)

I wish to report a clinical example illustrating Freud's theory in the dream of a physician. The dream-action, a medical discovery, seemed to “be one intended by the latent thoughts of the dreamer.” And th