The Interpretation of Dreams and the Freudian legacy in contemporary psychoanalysis: from latent content to the work of construction
Keywords:
Freud, dream interpretation, dream-work, wish fulfilment, psychoanalytic methodAbstract
This article re-examines The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and discusses the scope of the Freudian legacy on dreams within contemporary psychoanalysis. It argues that the endurance of this work stems not from the survival of its substantive theses but from the invention of a procedure: the dream ceases to be a sign to be read within a code and becomes a text produced through the analysand's associative work. Three conceptual operations organise the argument. The first recovers the distinction between manifest and latent content, often reduced to an opposition between appearance and hidden meaning, and shows that the latent does not pre-exist analysis as an encrypted message. The second reconstitutes the four operations of the dream-work — condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision — examining the specific effect of each upon manifest material and upon the conditions of interpretation. The third isolates the 1900 thesis that every dream fulfils a wish and follows its revision in 1920, when traumatic dreams compel Freud to acknowledge a repetition irreducible to disguised satisfaction. It concludes that the operative legacy of the work lies in its method, and that dialogue with neuropsychoanalysis illuminates the motivational anchoring of dreaming without restoring the theory of latent content.
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