Anatomy of Dreams

Sigmund Freud was not the first to explore the unconscious, or to analyze the origin and nature of dreams. Before him, Homer imagined gods sending men to deliver messages into the minds of unwitting sleepers. Sophocles and Shakespeare both examined unconscious motivation in their plays. Among the most popular pre-modern tracts on dreams was Macrobius’s (ca. 360) Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. In the eighteenth century, Kant asserted that humans structure their world in the unconscious realm, and in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer’s disciple, Eduard von Hartmann, wrote an influential treatise on the subject, known as The Philosophy of the Unconscious. But despite these inquiries and investigations, the human psyche remained a source of mystery, more amenable to philosophical speculation than to empirical observation.

When Freud began to study the structure of the mind, he reclaimed its properties for man. Although most modern thinkers were already doing this, Freud was committed to a medico-scientific understanding of the psyche. A rational explanation, therefore, must be free of romantic or providential assumptions, in which the mind is a medium for external forces, divine or demonic, and instead, find its basis in human psychology. By establishing a link between cognition and the operations of the body, Freud showed that the mind is distinctly human. And in one other respect, the mind is distinctly modern. “For Freud, human reason was not master in its own house but a precarious defense mechanism struggling against, and often motivated by, unconscious desires and forces.” As such, Freudian theory is consistent with the prevailing themes of modernism: apparent incoherence and meaninglessness, ambiguity, the absence of a deity. All are ingredients for an existential crisis, and yet the predicament posed by an unconscious falls short of absurdity. Though its activity is obscure, and perhaps even irrational, it is nevertheless comprehensible, particularly through dreams. Freud, taking his cue from the ancients, demonstrated the narrative value and figurative significance of dreams, thereby enabling us to uncover truths not visible to empirical observation.