“Yes, that’s a much more likely explanation. And it presupposes that he
experienced his wish as an embarrassment.”
“In a way, our dreams make a lot of detours?”
“Yes. Freud believed that the dream was a ‘disguised fulfillment of a
repressed wish.’ But exactly what we have repressed can have changed
considerably since Freud was a doctor in Vienna. However, the mechanism of
disguised dream content can still be intact.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Freud’s psychoanalysis was extremely important in the 1920s,
especially for the treatment of certain psychiatric patients. His theory of the
unconscious was also very significant for art and literature.”
“Artists became interested in people’s unconscious mental life?”
“Exactly so, although this had already become a predominant aspect of
literature in the last decade of the nineteenth century—before Freud’s
psychoanalysis was known. It merely shows that the appearance of Freud’s
psychoanalysis at that particular time, the 1890s, was no coincidence.”
“You mean it was in the spirit of the times?”
“Freud himself did not claim to have discovered phenomena such as
repression, defense mechanisms, or rationalizing. He was simply the first to
apply these human experiences to psychiatry. He was also a master at illus-
trating his theories with literary examples. But as I mentioned, from the 1920s,
Freud’s psychoanalysis had a more direct influence on art and literature “
“In what sense?”
“Poets and painters, especially the surrealists, attempted to exploit the
power of the unconscious in their work.”
“What are surrealists?”
“The word surrealism comes from the French, and means ‘super
realism.’ In 1924 Andre Breton published a ‘surrealistic manifesto,’ claiming
that art should come from the unconscious. The artist should thus derive the
freest possible inspiration from his dream images and strive toward a ‘super
realism,’ in which the boundaries between dream and reality were dissolved.
For an artist too it can be necessary to break the censorship of the conscious
and let words and images have free play.”
“I can see that.”
“In a sense, Freud demonstrated that there is an artist in everyone. A
dream is, after all, a little work of art, and there are new dreams every night. In
order to interpret his patients’ dreams, Freud often had to work his way
through a dense language of symbols—rather in the way we interpret a
picture or a literary text.”
“And we dream every single night?”
“Recent research shows that we dream for about twenty percent of our
sleeping hours, that is, between one and two hours each- night. If we are
disturbed during our dream phases we become nervous and irritable. This
means nothing less than that everybody has an innate need to give artistic
expression to his or her existential situation. After all, it is ourselves that our
dreams are about We are the directors, we set up the scenario and play all
the roles. A person who says he doesn’t understand art doesn’t know himself
very well.”
“I see that.”
“Freud also delivered impressive evidence of the wonders of the human