Classical Analysis

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 | by Nicola Sater

A new translation of a modern classic attempts to capture the original's `resonance.'

Sigmund Freud was disappointed by the lukewarm reception afforded The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899. The book was his seminal work, and it introduced, for all practical purposes, the entirety of psychoanalytic theory. The European psychiatric community never fully accepted his ideas.

But by 1938, the year of his death, Freud must have been pleased -- surrounded as he was by disciples and revering fans. American psychiatrists were beginning to practice psychoanalysis, something they would do single-mindedly for much of the mid-20th century. His work would be assimilated by literary critics, historians and scholars in virtually every branch of the humanities.

It is not at all surprising that a book this important lends itself to reinterpretation, or retranslation -- as German scholar Joyce Crick has attempted in her new version published by Oxford University Press ($27.50, 400 pp). Crick has produced a more literal version than the familiar one offered by James Strachey in 1953, returning to Freud's earliest renderings and excluding his "repertoire of symbols" and other editorial changes added during the years. She also has tried to capture "the literary and cultural resonances of Freud's German."

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud began to modify our understanding of ourselves as thinking creatures capable of action. He focused our attention on human desire, or more aptly, human drive -- our experience of a need that demands satisfaction. Everyone in Austrian society knew that civil society depended on self-control. But Freud proposed that restraint, too, could lead to its own form of disaster. Restraint might cause the submersion of desire into the unconscious. Once repressed, desire could undermine the individual's capacity to exercise free will, operating as it did in the part of the mind over which there was little control. The individual would be left behaving in harmful, inexplicable ways.

Freud's main theme, however, was dreams -- dreams as messages sent by the unconscious. Freud was convinced that there were "no innocuous dreams." Each dream always (and he meant always) represented a desire -- in his words, a wish and its fulfillment.

This wasn't immediately obvious at the turn of the century. People had dreams that weren't satisfying in any clear way. Freud agreed that the wishes were not always easily discerned, for some desires were too forbidden, too powerful, to be allowed into consciousness. Instead, they presented themselves in disguise -- suddenly, we required interpretation. Thus, Freud developed the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, offering help in the form of specialists who could guide us through our dreams.

So we went to the psychoanalyst, although Freud warned us that understanding was elusive -- we never could be certain "of having interpreted a dream in its entirety." Was it possible that any single meaning became inconsequential in the shifting sands of all possible meanings? Herein lay the birth of postmodernism.

Like it or not, Freud's ideas deeply affected society at every level, from the literary critic who argued that words ultimately gave no information to the alcoholic who toasted the hidden demons responsible for his nightly oblivion. We took our self-consciousness as a matter of course, as we did our occasional failures of self-control. Blindly pursuing the holy grail of personal meaning, we only occasionally gave a nod to the profound narcissism this form of study begot.

Is The Interpretation of Dreams a fun and profitable read 100 years after its publication? To some it will be. Others may find it dense, boring and difficult. Still others will be appalled by Freud's assumptions and his manipulation of the information he presents. One cannot neglect that Freud had ideas that were both rather peculiar and virtually impossible to verify. In the end, though, The Interpretation of Dreams is impossible to ignore if one is to understand the 20th century.

Nicola Sater is a resident psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.