To a psychiatrist, the joke goes, any object that appears in a dream must represent a phallus. But it looks the same Sigmund Freud didn’t really think all our sleep fantasies were repressed erotica. It was simply a basic misunderstanding of the pioneering psychoanalyst’s work, according to a leading new account of his influential theories.
A revised English edition of Freud’s key work, The interpretation of dreamsby scholar Mark Solms will correct several translation errors and attempt to definitively challenge the common misconception that Freud believed the erotic drive behind much of human behavior.
“Freud had a very broad understanding of sexuality,” said Solms, a well-known South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist. “To him, any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right – anything one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes – was ‘sexual’.”
In this way, behaviors such as a baby sucking a doll, or a child kicking a football, or swinging on a swing were described by Freud as “sexual”, meaning they were pure sources of pleasure.
“This has extended the word so far into common usage that it has led to significant misunderstandings of his theories. Late in his life, Freud recognized as much,” Solms said.
James Strachey’s standard English translation of Freud was printed in the 1950s and 60s. Now Solms, a German speaker who grew up in Namibia, where an older form of the language is still spoken, has cleared up mistakes and put the word “sexual” in context. “I corrected a few mistakes: Strachey was elderly, and his eyesight was poor. I also changed some technical terms that are now obsolete, and I added some essays, lectures and other writings that were not in Strachey’s version,” explained Solms.
A hundred years ago, Freud’s theories about sexual urges, the meaning of dreams and the struggle for emotional freedom gave rise to the birth of surrealism, the disturbing art of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico and the writings of the founder of the movement, André Breton, who the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. But these artists also got Freud’s theories wrong: “None of them understood that Freud was a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social tendencies,” Solms said at the weekend. “His taste in art was also really very conservative. Freud described Dalí as a fanatic.”
While visions of our unconscious desires fueled an explosion of disruptive art, Freud’s technical terms were mistakenly used to support the radical ideas of surrealism, Solms argues. Far from promoting anarchy or sexual liberation, Freud was a socially conservative thinker who wanted to restore order, not challenge convention.
“The surrealist movement was expressly based on Freud’s discoveries,” Solms said. “Some of them, like Dalí and de Chirico, directly depicted the inner world of the mind as revealed in dreams, with incredible juxtapositions and the like, while others, like Breton, were influenced by deeper aspects of his work and employed is. automatic writing and automatic drawing on the model of Freud’s free-association method. Magritte also understood Freud on a more intellectual level.”
Solms’ entire revised standard edition, an epic of 24 volumes, was commissioned by the British Psychoanalytic Association to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the last segment of Freud’s works, and is released in Britain at the Freud Museum in London on September 19, two days before a special conference at University College London.
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Solms did not replace Strachey’s earlier translation, seeing him as “master of the English language”, who knew Freud personally. So in the updated works “subtle underlining” shows revisions and additions. Solms hopes to put the great Viennese thinker back into our conversation about dreams, although, “there are some people who would rather see Freud forgotten than retranslated. They would prefer it if he were brushed out of history.”
Freud originally proposed that since sleep is biologically essential, dreams serve the function of keeping us asleep. The hallucinatory experience of gratification in a dream, he argued, prevents us from waking, since “a dream which shows that a wish has been fulfilled is believed during sleep, it does away with the wish and makes sleep possible” .
Discoveries about the rapid eye movement period of sleep in the early 1950s prompted attacks on Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory. Instead, it has been argued that REM dreams are prompted by brainstem activation, which produces bizarre content as our organizing powers are bypassed, not because our hidden desires suddenly emerge. But more recent research has revealed that we can dream both in and out of REM states, so there is no such neat explanation for the strange creativity of the sleeping mind.
