 | The Journal of Abnormal Psychology |  |
SUMMARY
The question here considered is whether dream interpretations shall represent the state of the dreamer's mind or the mere fancy of the interpreter. Criticism is directed at the aprioristic and oftentimes hit-or-miss practices of the Vienna and Zurich schools of Psycho-analysis.
For illustration, a simple dream is interpreted by the current methods of Psycho-analysis: first, according to the "reductive method" of Freud, it is made out as symbolizing an infantile and sexual wish-fulfilment, expressing a "voyeur" component of the Libido. Secondly, the dream is re-interpreted by Jung's "constructive method" so as to gloss over the gross Freudian phallicism. It is now made to mean that the dreamer is impelled to higher biological duties, namely marriage and professional success.
The plausibility of these interpretations once shown, they are next proved to be wide of the mark, by the fact that the dream can be more adequately accounted for in another way, i. e., by a proposed "reconstitutive method." This method aims to "reconstitute" the dream-thought (both imaged and imageless) by tracing the wave of nervous excitation from its origin in primary stimulus-ideas (sensory or psychic) through a specific apperception-mass into a consequently derived system of secondary images, which form the manifest dream content. The derivation of the secondary images must be concretely followed through the authenticated channels of association—not assumed on the basis of "fixed symbolism," or any other a priori conception.
The reconstitution of this particular dream illustrates the reductio ad absurdum of the two previous psycho-analytic "solutions." The fact that either of them would apparently have satisfied the demands of the problem, is characterized as an artifact evolved through the interpreter's deliberate confabulation and forcing of analogy; thus causing the scant data of the dream to fall into artificial agreement with the preconceived notions of the Vienna and Zurich schools, respectively. As a guarantee of scientific accuracy, it is urged that the interpreter trace the process of imageless thought (Woodworth) back of the dream, and, in particular, seek the meaning in the Unconscious Settings-of-Ideas (Prince). The reconstitutive method is the extension of these two formulations from normal and abnormal psychology into the field of dream analysis, through the study of Individual Differences (Cattell) and the Application of Logic (Alfred Sidgwick).
It is not denied that Freud's dream theories serve very well to interpret a considerable proportion of common dreams; but the psycho-analytic technique embodies a fallacious assumption that there is a transcendental symbolizing activity in the Unconscious, as it were a language of dreams. This gives rise to a biased "will to interpret." The alleged meaning may thus often be the work of the interpreter's mind although not that in the dreamer's mind.
The reconstitutive method brings into relief the trial-and-error character of the dreaming process: the organism
In certain cases, the erroneous apperceptions are observed to form a series of approximations to the correct apprehension of one of the stimulus-ideas at a time. In other cases, the apperceptive errors may take the form of a blended reaction to two or more cues, more or less perfectly achieved.
These mechanisms, when they go wrong, as they often do, produce the incoherency and bizarrerie of the dream; but they do not preclude a significant reconstitution of the process of which the dream is a by-product. Such reconstitutions require to be validated by specific tests and inferences, of such logical character as to bear comparison with the methodology of other sciences. The psychoanalytic arguments from analogy, from precedent and from authority are alike to be rejected.
| The Journal of Abnormal Psychology | |