The Interpretation of Dreams Literary Elements

Psychology non-fiction

An isolated house named Bellevue on the hills adjoining Kahlenberg and an office in Vienna as the sitse of dream interpretation and writing. The abstractions of the conscious and subconscious mind as the setting of the dreams and the interpretation of their symbolism.

The book is narrated by Freud in the first-person as an accounting of the dreams related by patients and his working through analysis to penetrate the coded messaging of their symbols.

Professorial in tone, but the mood throughout is often one of stimulated excitement over discovery and revelation.

Protagonist: Freud. Antagonist: The hidden meanings behind the symbolism of dream imagery.

The major conflict is, of course, that existing between the direct relation of dream imagery from the patient and the subconscious drives creating this imagery as a symbolism intended to prevent the dreamer from recognizing the true nature of anxieties.

The book climaxes upon two very specific assertions which come to dominate Freudian psychoanalysis for the next century: all dreams are wish-fulfilments, and every dream is initially stimulated by events which occurred during the entirety of the waking period immediately preceding sleep in which the dream manifested.

The opening section in which Freud describes the processes of his literature review before setting down to compose his own thoughts is fraught with foreshadowing as he comments upon previous theoretical constructions which he will eventually go on to reject or offer alternative opinions.

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The Biblical legend of Moses being saved from murder as an infant by being cast upon the waters of the Nile is alluded to in reference to the commonality of imagery of a children struggling against the waves as encoded symbols of birthing fantasies: “the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly represented, by way of distortion, as the entry of the child into water.”

Well, the entire book is about dream imagery and the symbolic meaning behind its literal projection: “Small animals and vermin are substitutes for little children, e.g., undesired sisters or brothers. To be infected with vermin is often the equivalent for pregnancy.”

One notable example is a woman describing a dream with the insistent purpose that it actually denies Freud’s claim that all dreams are wish-fulfilments because the obvious meaning (to her) is exactly the opposite: “I want to give a supper, but I have nothing available except some smoked salmon. I think I will go shopping, but I remember that it is Sunday afternoon, when all the shops are closed. I then try to ring up a few caterers, but the telephone is out of order. Accordingly I have to renounce my desire to give a supper." Freud then goes on to provide a lengthy and detailed explanation of what makes this dream, too, an example of wish fulfilment.

In his insistence that contrary to historical assumption, all dreams have meaning, Freud engages parallel construction: “the dream is not meaningless, not absurd, does not presuppose that one part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part begins to awake.”

Throughout, Freud refers to the “mind” as the locus of all thought. Anatomically speaking, the mind is not something that tangibly exists, but is instead a form of metonymy and synecdoche referencing the abstract quality of the perceptual processes of the brain itself.

The concept of personification is at the heart of dream interpretation to the point that Freud complains of knowing some patients for whom it becomes everything, who see humanity in every aspect of architecture: “for whom posts and pillars signify legs (as in the Song of Songs), to whom every door suggests a bodily aperture (hole), and every water-pipe the urinary system”