Although Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams was originally received by the world with freezing silence, time, working a familiar revolution, has rendered it both conversationally and professionally de rigueur. Adler and Jung formulated alternative theories of dream interpretation and analysis, but neither was worked out with the patient thoroughness Freud lavished on his first major work. And then, too, Freud had a way of making concessions here and there which stole much of Adler’s and Jung’s thunder, by a process that Harold Lasswell has called “restriction by partial incorporation.” Nevertheless, Freud was fax from satisfied with his dream theory, and in later life he found much in it to trouble him.
It also has much to trouble J. A. Hadfield, a British psychiatrist associated with the renowned Tavistock Clinic. At first glance, his Dreams and Nightmares seems to be a potpourri of Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory, Adlerian power interpretations, Jung’s emphasis on the constructive aspect of dreams, and the more recent innovations of Franz Alexander in this country. The end-product is what the author calls a “biological” theory of dreams-why, it is not apparent, since the biology involved is hardly more than verbal. (It is one’s impression that anything “biological” has had a strange power to comfort British social scientists.)
Actually, Dr. Hadfield’s theory might more appropriately be called a “problem-solving” one—and he does use this term at various points. It certainly comes closest to an accurate characterization of what turns out to be one of the most inventive, reasonable, and useful of all sets of ideas about the very complex subject of human fantasy. Moreover, Dr. Hadfield’s theory contains some profound implications for the general study of fantasy—whether through the projective tests which elicit the private fantasies of people, or through research into popular culture. In this book he confines himself largely to dreams, throwing out only a suggestive paragraph here and there on o children’s play, or cultural myths, in which the more general application of his ideas begins to be visible.
_____________
At first, Dr. Hadfield’s central notion strikes one as deceptively simple. We dream not so much to fulfill wishes as to meet problems we do not wish to face during our waking hours. A dream is a sort of example of a “Zeigarnik effect”1—i.e., of the tendency to go back and try to redeem personal “failures,” trivial or profound, which we have temporarily put at the back of our minds but which continue nonetheless to press for attention. In short, dreaming is a kind of “perseverance in worrying.” Such worrying need not be about deeply repressed problems, but may concern workaday ones that the lack of time or the press of other activities, as well as laziness or unreasonableness, has kept from being adequately resolved. Thus dreams deal with reality, but largely with that part of it we ordinarily want, or are forced, to push away and not think about. Sometimes, indeed, a dream does present us with a problem created by wishes; and dreams can, of course, be sexual; but they can also be about problems of power in human relations; and they can suggest better, more adequate ways of acting in the future. However, they can do, and be, a lot of other things too, and the real intellectual adventures in this book have to do with these “other things.”
Wish-fulfillment, according to Dr. Hadfield, can be defined as the attempt to solve a problem by imagining it solved, and is rarely seen except among young children, and then almost exactly as acted out in their play. Most dreams, however, bring to our attention those “bad” and unnoticed consequences of our acts, or those false perceptions and distorted attitudes toward ourselves and others, which are responsible for our recurrent social difficulties as well as for endless self-torture. In adults, the childlike practice of wish-fulfillment in dreaming usually involves the appearance in some way or another of the overlooked reality factors that gave rise to the worry or problem in the first place. Furthermore, dreams frequently encourage and suggest actions in real life rather than “substitute” for waking behavior.
Freud’s well-known dream about a recalcitrant patient, Irma, is re-analyzed along these lines by Dr. Hadfield in a way that allows for the Freudian view, but demonstrates how much remains unexplained by it. Freud interpreted his dream as reflecting the wish to put the blame on Irma for his failure in treating her, since she had not accepted his sexual diagnosis. But Dr. Hadfield shows that this is correct only for the beginning of Freud’s dream; the rest is made up of uneasy reminders to the dreamer himself of many of his previous failures with patients; and in these Freud should have seen a sort of inner condemnation of his wish to put the blame on others. Hence Dr. Hadfield finds Freud’s interpretation of his dream to be more wish-fulfilling than the dream itself, which was actually intended to correct Freud’s wishful thinking and give expression to the “voice of the discarded self,” to the counterarguments that, left unheeded, lead to faulty decisions.
The reason dreams allow us to go on sleeping is precisely that they work toward some solution of a problem, and thus operate to remove persistent conflicts about it. On the other hand, the anxiety dream, and particularly the nightmare, are distinguished by the fact that they present such terrifying problems, and are so devoid of suggested solutions, that “we waken in order to escape the unresolved problems of the night rather than sleep to escape the problems of the day.” Nightmares and anxiety dreams are, therefore, likely to offer the best clue to which of our problems are the most difficult and perplexing.
_____________
Freud introduced the concepts of “symbol” and “dream-work” into his wish-fulfillment theory in order to show the “disguised” nature of dream wishes, and that what they disguised was almost always sexual. The dream symbol was conceived of as a kind of rough analogy—e.g., flying or rising “symbolizes” sexual excitement, drowning or bathing a return to the womb with its pre-natal fluids, etc., etc. The dream-work becomes the informal grammar of the dream, the makeshift rules by which the symbols are joined together into a picture-making language. Thus a person appearing in a dream may remind us of three different people we know, each of whom we loathe. The image of the person condenses several discrete dislikes into one, and thus acts as a substitute for an abstract word; the general idea of “loathesomeness” is expressed by a simultaneous presentation of many examples superimposed on one another.
Dr. Hadfield takes cognizance of the notions of symbolism and dream-work in his problem-solving approach, investing them with a freshness they had seemed to be in danger of losing from reiteration. But he argues strongly against any symbolic interpretation of a dream that is not elicited directly from the patient, and backs away from, while reinterpreting, Jung’s notions about the “racial unconscious” (the inherited capacity to employ, without awareness, symbols in the same ways our ancestors did) as well as from any such thing as a dictionary of fixed meanings for sexual symbols. Dream-work is seen to be hard work done in the effort to solve real problems rather than constituting a curious set of nocturnal habits in which thought suddenly goes logically primitive and wild.
Dr. Hadfield tries to show how a novel “insight” can sometimes initially be expressed only in terms of an analogy or an iconic synthesis of analogies. Again, dream symbolism can be a kind of tactful and indirect way in which “facts of life” that we do not want to think about are suggested to us without too severely jarring our self-esteem; in other words, dreams are usually governed by a delicacy like that which we show towards people whom we criticize but do not want to hurt. In all this there is a suggestion of how to re-state psychoanalysis in ways less cumbersome than those involved by such terms as “super-ego,” “ego,” and “id” (which are never used by the author). Here Dr. Hadfield comes close to social scientists like Harry Stack Sullivan and David Riesman, who want to put Freud in a context that is more completely social and conceived less dogmatically. Some ideas along these lines have also been advocated by the “Chicago school” of psychoanalysis.
Throughout Dr. Hadfield’s book, the unspoken assumption is that the science of dream interpretation is better furthered by combining partial insights than by putting complete faith in any single one of them. The assets and debits of any single factor are coolly examined, but never with impatience or arrogance. Dr. Hadfield is willing to entertain certain ambiguities and intellectual tensions rather than settle for a new dogmatism. Nor are his ideas over-systematized or cast in pat, huckstering phrases. He seems constantly on the look-out for evidence against his own ideas and chooses examples of dreams that put him most at a disadvantage. But his ideas do beg for further elaboration—and at the same time for simpler and more abstract and economical formulation. One feels that this book is only the first step on a path that promises to carry us far.
_____________
It is becoming increasingly clear that the theories of fantasy emerging from psychoanalysis cannot adequately explain why, for instance, aggressive responses on a fantasy test can sometimes be gotten from people who are overtly aggressive, with a readiness equal to that with which such responses are obtained from individuals who inhibit aggression in real life. Dr. Hadfield’s theory could explain this by being extended to say that it is not what we do, or do not do, in real life that determines what goes on in our fantasies; rather it is whether what we do in real life makes us worry and gives rise to persistent social conflicts.
So, too, it has long been a common-sense observation that popular (or, for that matter, esoteric) art, which has so much to do with fantasy, can give us insight into ourselves and others, and knowledge about the emotional fabric and structure of our social relationships; and that our experience of art is not a matter exclusively of escapism or the fulfillment of wishes whose satisfaction we have had to relinquish in real life. Art often acts as a protest agency and moves people to ask back from real life what they have allowed it to take away from them. There is good reason why the Soviet leaders so carefully winnow the art fantasies available to the Soviet public. To approach fantasy as a cousin to other forms of symbolic activity by perceiving the problem-solving character it has in common with them, its capacity to serve as a “rehearsal” for future events, might lead to altogether new and productive ways of examining projective responses and the subtler audience effects of the mass media.
In a provocative essay, David Riesman has tried to depict the way in which classical psychoanalysis divorced play from work and fantasy from reality, and he has suggested that the boundaries between the two may be more blurred than Freud’s time and place liked to think them. Dr. Hadfield not only demonstrates the ambiguities and blurredness of these boundaries with a wealth of empirical detail, but suggests a positive way to deal with and clarify them. All this he presents with the excitement a scientist feels who, having learned how recalcitrant materials can be re-arranged to fit new categories and, having as a consequence seen some part of reality with a fresh eye, now wants others to share his experience with him. If Dr. Hadfield is right, the social effects and expressions of our fantasy life can tell us much we do not yet know about the way we work and solve our problems. Fantasy in all its myriad forms then becomes something more than just sheer pleasure and play.
_____________
1 Bluma Zeigarnik, a European psychologist closely associated with the tradition out of which Kurt Lewin came, demonstrated that we tend to recall interrupted activities better than completed ones.
_____________