Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Chapter 8 Preliminary Research and Its Difficulties (1)
One day we will recognize that some of the symptoms of neurotic patients make sense.This discovery is the basis of psychoanalytic therapy.During treatment, patients talk about their symptoms and sometimes their dreams.So we thought maybe dreams had meaning too.

Of course, our lectures cannot follow this historical order, but must reverse this order, and talk about dreams first.The study of dreams is the best preparation for the study of mental illness, and the dream itself constitutes a symptom of mental illness; at the same time, healthy people also have dreams, so it provides a lot of convenience for our research.Frankly, if everyone was healthy and dreamed, we would gain almost as much knowledge from the analysis of their dreams as from the study of psychiatry.

Therefore, dreams are regarded as the research objects of psychoanalysis.Dreams are the same as mistakes, and healthy people also have them, but they are easy to be ignored by the public and considered to be of no practical value; while studying dreams is more likely to be ridiculed.Negligence is nothing more than being ignored by the public and scientists, and research negligence does not lose its status.Some people say that there are more important phenomena besides negligence, which is of course correct, and research on negligence is not nothing.The study of dreams, however, was not only likely to be futile, but was regarded as absolutely disgraceful; it was considered both unscientific and prone to mysticism.What's more, in the field of neurology and psychiatry, there are many more important problems to be solved, such as psychological swelling and ulcers, chronic bleeding and inflammation, etc. How can doctors be distracted from the study of dreams?For dreams are indeed too trivial and worthless to be objects of scientific study.

There is another factor which prevents dreams from being a practical study at all, namely, that in the study of dreams, its object is very difficult to ascertain.Even if the delusion still has a more distinct outline, the patient can still clearly declare: "I am the emperor of China!" But what about the dream?Most of them are impossible to describe.Who can guarantee whether a person's dream is correct or not?Are there deletions?Did you have to add something because your memory is blurred?Most of the dreams, excluding some small fragments, cannot be remembered.Can such material be used as a scientific basis for psychological or therapeutic methods?
Unfair criticism can lead to doubts.The denial of dreams as objects of scientific investigation is obviously extreme.We study negligence, some people think it is too inconspicuous, our explanation is "you can see the big from the small".If you say that dreams are vague, that is only a characteristic of them, and the peculiarities of things are beyond our control; besides, not all dreams are vague.Taking psychiatric research as an example, there are also some objects that are vague, just like dreams, such as the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which have also been discussed and studied by many scientists with reputation and status.I remember a case I treated.The patient was a woman, and she described her condition: "I feel as if I have hurt something before, or maybe I wanted to hurt something, maybe a child, no, maybe a dog, as if I pushed it off the bridge, Maybe it’s something similar.” We say that dreams are difficult to have exact memory, but in fact, we only need to regard the content spoken by the dreamer as the content of the dream, regardless of what he forgets or adapts when recalling the dream.Furthermore, it is very wrong for a person to ignore the value of dreams so arbitrarily.We know from experience that the emotions in dreams can be retained throughout the day; and according to doctors' observations, dreams may be one of the roots of insanity and paranoia, and some historical figures have also been inspired by dreams to want to do business.So why do scientists underestimate the value of dreams?This, I think, stems from the great importance given in antiquity to the opposite nature of dreams.You know, it's not easy to describe the past, but we can speculate.Forgive me for making a joke!More than 3000 years ago, ancient people dreamed just like we do now.As we know, ancient people looked for omens of the future from dreams, and they believed that dreams had great meaning and practical value.

In modern wars, scouts are indispensable to spy on the enemy, and the ancient Greeks or other oriental nations must have dream interpreters accompanying them when they go out to war.The most famous dream interpreters of all were gathered in the army of Alexander the Great.At that time, the city of Tire was still on the island, and the defense works were so strong that Alexander almost gave up the siege.One night, he had a dream. In the dream, a fairy with the head of a man and the body of a sheep danced happily.Subsequently, the dream interpreter believed that this was a good omen, heralding victory.Therefore, the emperor issued a siege order to forcefully conquer the city of Tyre.Although the Etruscans and the ancient Romans also used other methods of divination, in fact, dream interpretation was most popular and most respected in the Greek and Roman times.It is said that during the time of Emperor Hadrian, Artemidorus of Dardis wrote a book on interpretation of dreams which has been handed down.I have nothing to say about how the art of interpreting dreams degenerated later, or why the world despises dreams so much today.The degeneration of dream interpretation is certainly not caused by scientific progress. In the dark Middle Ages, things even more absurd than dream interpretation were carefully preserved.The fact is that the interest in dreams gradually relegated to the ranks of superstition and has long remained among the uneducated.Today, dream interpretation is increasingly degraded, reduced to winning lottery numbers only from dreams.On the other hand, today's high-end research often takes dreams as its research object, and its purpose is only to explain the physiological point.Doctors believe that dreams are just a psychological reflection of physical stimuli, and naturally they are not a psychological process. In 1876, Binz believed: "Dreams are a physical process, pathological, and worthless. It has nothing to do with theories such as the immortality of the soul." Morrie believes that dreams are like dancing fanatics' wild jumps, which are different from normal Human coordinated movement is the complete opposite.The ancients also had a dream metaphor: If a musically blind man moves his ten fingers on the keyboard of the piano, the sound it makes is like the content of a dream.

Uncovering the hidden meaning behind things is called "interpretation", but the ancients never talked about these in dream interpretation.Let's look at modern philosophical theories, such as the works of Wundt, Jodel, etc. They all stop at listing the differences between dreams and waking thoughts, thereby belittling the value of dreams, but the focus of their discussion is the lack of association and criticism. Loss of potency, decay of knowledge, and other features of functional decline.The influence of physical stimuli on the content of dreams during sleep is the only contribution that exact science has made to the knowledge of dreams.The recently deceased Norwegian writer Volde had two books in German published in 1910 and 1912 on studies of experiments discussing dreams.However, it turns out that almost all of its content is about the result of changing the position of hands and feet.Such a content may be regarded as a model for our experiments with dreams.It is hardly conceivable that what should pure science say when we learn that we are going to study the meaning of dreams?Criticism is there, although we will not back down from it.If there is a latent meaning to the fault, so does the dream: pure science has not had time to study the multiple meanings of the fault in every situation.So let us follow in the footsteps of the dream interpreters of old, with the theories of the ancients and the common people as our guide.

We must first give an overview of the scope of dreams, and clarify the direction of this research.What exactly are dreams?It's really not easy to define it in one sentence.Dreams are familiar to everyone, so there is no need to delve into the definition.It is necessary, however, to point out the gist of the dream.How to discover these characteristics?The scope of dreams is too large, and there is a huge difference between dreams.Therefore, if we find a common feature of all dreams, perhaps this is the point of dreams.

This being the case, the first commonality of all dreams is sleep.Dreams are, of course, psychic processes during sleep, which are similar to, but at the same time very different from, waking life.This is Aristotle's definition of dreams.Perhaps dreams are more closely related to sleep.We often dream, we can be awakened by dreams, we can wake up naturally, or we can barely wake up from sleep.A dream is like a situation connecting sleep and waking.So, we can focus on sleep, so how to define sleep?
Whether it is a physiological problem or a biological problem is still very controversial.We cannot hope for a definite answer, but I think we can point to a psychological feature of sleep.Sleep is neither willing to communicate with the outside world nor to be interested in the outside world.Wanting to isolate myself from those outside stimuli, I go to sleep.Likewise, if I get tired of the outside world, I can go to sleep.Before going to sleep, I can say to the outside world: "Be quiet, I'm going to sleep!" Children often say the opposite: "I don't want to sleep, I'm not tired, I want to see again." So hibernation seems to be The biological purpose of sleep, while the psychological purpose seems to be limited to the interest in the outside world.Joining the WTO is not what we want, therefore, the relationship with the WTO can only be tolerated when there is a separation from time to time.So, we return in time to the pre-birth days, or "life in the womb", trying to find similar situations again: warmth, darkness and isolation from stimulation.Some of us are curled up in a spherical shape, so similar to the position in the womb.Therefore, it seems that only two-thirds of adults belong to the world, and one-third is not yet in the world.Every morning you wake up feels like a new life.When we talk about "awakening", we often say this sentence: "I seem to be born again." In this regard, our usual ideas about newborns may be all wrong; so comfortable.When we talk about birth, we say "first seen the light of day."

Assuming this is the peculiarity of sleep, dreams must not belong to sleep, but rather seem to be an unwelcome supplement to sleep.In fact, we believe dream-free sleep is the best and most restful sleep.Mental activities must be withdrawn during sleep. If these activities still exist, the real situation of complete tranquility before sleep cannot be achieved, and there will inevitably be remnants of mental activities, and the representatives of these remnants of mental activities are dreams.Dreams, then, do not seem to have to be meaningful.On the other hand, a fault is different, at least a fault is an activity manifested during waking hours, whereas if I were asleep, except for some remnants that are beyond our control, mental activity is completely stopped, so dreams need not have meaning.In fact, even if the dream has meaning, it is impossible for us to make use of it when the rest of the mind is at rest.In fact, dreams are just a product of irregular reactions, or psychological phenomena caused by physical stimuli.Dreams are necessarily remnants of psychic activity during waking which disturb sleep.As this question is insufficient to further the purposes of psychoanalysis, we have made up our minds to discard it.

In spite of the uselessness of dreams, it is undeniable that they do exist, so we may as well give an explanation for their existence.Why don't mental activities stop completely with falling asleep?Perhaps some thought does not want to quiet the mind, these stimuli still act on the mind, and the mind has to respond to these stimuli.The dream is thus a reaction of the mind to the stimuli of sleep.From this it follows that we may be able to interpret dreams.We can study various dreams to find out which stimuli affect sleep and form the dream response.In this way we may perhaps acquire the first commonality of all dreams.

Do dreams have anything else in common?Yes, it also has an unquestionable quality, but it is more difficult to describe and understand.The nature of the mental processes during sleep is quite different from that during waking.In dreams we experience many things, and we fully believe that what we actually experience may be just a disturbing stimulus.Most dream experiences are visions, and although thoughts, feelings, or other sensations are also present, visions are always a major part.The transformation of these images into words is the difficulty of dream-telling.Dreamers often say that they can draw their dreams, but they have no way of speaking them.The difference between dream life and waking life is not in the level of mental ability, just like mental retardation and genius.There is actually a qualitative difference, but we don't have to say exactly what that difference is.According to Fechner, the stage in which dreams play out in the mind is different from the life of ideas in waking life.We can't understand what meaning he wants to express, but it can indeed express the fantastic impression given to us by many dreams.It is almost impossible to compare the movements of a dream with the performance of someone who does not know music.Because even if it is a keyboard movement, the piano always responds with the same tone, but it is difficult to make a tune.Although we cannot be sure of the secondary nature of dreams, care must still be taken.

(End of this chapter)