And The Beat Goes On

As an exemplar of the colossal ignorance of current-day thinking, both lay and scientific, whenever it concerns Freudian psychoanalytic theory, this article that appeared several days ago in the Brit Telegraph describing the findings of a Harvard Medical School Centre for Sleep and Cognition study on dreams sponsored by the Telegraph would be hard to beat. Reports the article’s author, the Telegraph’s science editor, Roger Highfield,

Freud called our dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". His seductive idea was that their content is shaped by experiences early in life, creating the hope that psychoanalysis could use our dreams to reveal our childhood miseries, and thereby cure our inner torment.

Today, however, a study of dreams conducted for The Daily Telegraph by Harvard University has come to the inescapable conclusion that Freud put too much emphasis on our formative years.

Although dreams are bizarre and otherworldly, they are as likely to be moulded by mundane, humdrum and everyday activities as by life-changing events.

[...]

As part of this [study], we invited visitors to our website, telegraph.co.uk, to provide details of dreams that were fresh in their mind, so that they could be analysed by Dr Erin Wamsley, a colleague of Dr Stickgold.

Almost 300 people were prepared to fill in a detailed online questionnaire and the responses were described as "of good quality" she says. The overall findings, she reveals, "do not fit neatly with the psychoanalytic/Freudian presumption that early life experiences are a primary source of dream content".

In fact, they are much more likely to be shaped by events of the past week than a childhood trauma. "Overall, mundane, unimportant events were as likely to be identified as more significant life events – a TV commercial they had seen, or something boring that a friend said to them," says Dr Wamsley.

Indeed, even among these recent events, we failed to dwell on the most interesting in our dreams. "Contrary to the folk-psychological belief that we dream only of the most important events in our lives, the memory sources identified by participants were not necessarily events of any significance to the dreamer," explains Dr Wamsley.

"One fifth of all memory sources were described as 'not at all important' to the dreamer, while approximately half, 47 per cent, were described as being less important than an average waking event."

A classic example of a hundrum experience invading our sleep was the participant who dreamt of being at a school music lesson in which Art Garfunkel was a guest teacher, addressing his class with an Irish accent.

"He asked the class (who were all females whom I remember from years ago) to each individually sing Sound of Silence, but to make it as original and individual as possible. Though nervous, I also felt very giggly, too, mainly owing to the fact that Art Garfunkel was wearing loose white shorts (which he had borrowed from his wife), and every time he bent over, or uncrossed his legs, he exposed a mass of pubic hair."

While Freud would not doubt have seized on this as signalling a repressed childhood memory, the more prosaic explanation was that the dreamer had, earlier in the day, watched a Simon and Garfunkel video.

But this is precisely what Freud established in his landmark seminal work; viz., that the material of the manifest dream content — i.e., that part of a dream that makes itself immediately perceptible to our consciousness — is always presented in terms of an innocuous experience or experiences of the past 24-48 hours, but that that material is itself never the psychologically significant content of the dream which is contained in what Freud termed the latent dream content, but is always the product of what Freud called the "dream work", the complex and intricate cloaking (distorting) mechanism that prevents the dream’s raw, “dangerous” latent content from reaching our conscious mind directly.

Neither Mr. Highfield nor, apparently, Harvard’s researcher, Dr. Wamsley, made any distinction whatsoever between a dream’s manifest and latent content which is tantamount to a fundamental rewriting of what Freud wrote — a rewriting that ignores entirely a central pillar of Freud’s argument — and then proceeded to disagree with and criticize the substance of that rewriting as if that rewriting was what Freud himself actually wrote.

Why are we not surprised.