Given the focus that I've had so far on the Dr. Jekyll aspect of Freud's writing, I want to ask you likewise, can you think of cases in your own experience in which you have engaged in or have committed a kind of Freudian slip or (what used to be called a) parapraxis in which you keep on forgetting something that you need to do in a way that�s odd or funny. It seems like it's happened so many times, it's not an accident or a slip of the tongue, a mislaying, things of that kind that don't seem like they can be explained by sheer chance or distraction or exhaustion, if so what are those cases like and can you give an explanation in for example emotional terms that involve positing something at the unconscious level. Is that plausible? Then what would it be like to come up with an experiment that is rigorous according to contemporary standards that would justify claims of that sort. That for example people on certain situations tend to have an emotion that is not conscious, that nevertheless has a way of affecting their behavior. Is there a way of validating that empirically in such way as to be convinced that yes there is such a thing as parapraxis. That seems to me an open question even today. Freud moves on from his discussion of parapraxis to a discussion of dreams. A long part of the book is about dreams and he's got a fascinating hypothesis there which is that just like the unconscious phenomena that allegedly bring about slips of various kinds, so too dreams are source of information about our unconscious minds. Starting out with in order to give an account of how this goes, Freud says the purpose of sleep is essentially a matter of bodily rejuvenation. We sleep in such way as to rejuvenate our bodies and the ideal kind of sleep would be the dreamless kind. I'm not having any dreams, I am in a state of sleeping in which there is nothing going on so to speak experientially. Freud's next idea is, nevertheless we do dream, but why? His answer to that question is, well because somatically at the bodily level, we find ourselves having urges and those urges if they are to be satisfied will generally require us being woken up. What dreams do is give us experiences that prevent us from having to wake up if at all possible. So he writes, �Dreams or processes that rid us of psychic stimuli disturbing to sleep by the process of hallucinatory satisfaction.� It seems to me he sometimes talks about psychic stimuli but also has in mind somatic stimuli that is things of more bodily kind. So even that's not a perfect definition but it gets closer to what he has in mind. Well let's unpack that a little bit more though. The idea is that by this process of hallucinatory satisfaction, what he means is, I have a dream in which some aspect or some dimension or some analog of what my real desire is gets satisfied at least virtually if not actually. So to take a simple example. Suppose there is a little boy who has to go to the bathroom late one night while I was asleep and instead of getting up and going to the bathroom which will require waking up at least partially, has a dream in which he is urinating into a body of water for example. Now, that might give him what Freud would refer to as a hallucinatory satisfaction and might keep him from having to get up for a little while; all too often it results in a wet bed but for a little while it could allow him to preserve his sleep and of course he might wake up in a wet bed but at least having slept the night through. Another example is if you're very hungry. People who've been deprived of food will often report they have dreams of feasting and this is not too much of a surprise because if one has dreams of feasting, what they're doing is getting a imaginative vicarious hallucinatory satisfaction of the desire for food. Now notice that for Descartes dreams are just a potential challenge to our claims to knowledge. Dreams are things that raise skeptical doubts. Whereas for Freud, they might do that but there are also sources of knowledge of ourselves because if you investigate your dreams for his ideas you can learn about those desires that have resulted in the dreams that you've experienced in sleep. Freud gives a number of other examples having to do with the way in which we try to sleep through our alarm clocks. So for example, you're fast asleep and you have a dream in which church bells are going off or there's a burglar alarm that's been activated and you continue to dream something happening as you are still asleep but in both cases you're experiencing a ringing. Freud suggests that what's happening there is that you have an external experience namely the alarm clock and your mind is reinterpreting it in such a way as to allow you to treat it as just part of your dream and therefore not something that needs to wake you up. So it allows you to preserve your sleep. Perhaps, if we had an example in which you've taken something that you wanted, you for example you broke into a car dealership and stole a sports car or you broke into a friend's home and took something of theirs that you've always coveted. That's something that happens in your dream and Freud will say there are too you've got a hallucinatory satisfaction of desire. That desire if you were to act on it which require that I should wake up, get out of bed in your pajamas or whatever and break into the car dealership or your friend's house and steal what you want with the ensuing trouble that would come from that as well. Whereas if you just have a dream, things won't be so bad. So the idea is that the role of dreams for Freud is to be as it were imaginary scenarios that keep us from having to wake up thereby preserve the bodily regeneration that sleep provides and they keep us from having to wake up because they give us partial satisfaction of desires that are occurring at the unconscious level. You can see some support for this by thinking about what happens in daydreams. So you're there in a business meeting and it's very boring and dry and you find yourself looking out the window and then the far distance there is a mountain with snow on it and behold you're now daydreaming that you'd skiing down a nice slope and having a great time as you make your way down the side of the mountain. These daydreams are perfectly common and the idea is that for Freud, they are examples forms a wish fulfillment, hallucinatory satisfaction the desires that don't require your getting out from, you stopping what you're doing. In fact they can just let you pretend as if you're doing so and get partial satisfaction as a result. Now dreams that involve arousal of a sexual kind or more complicated, because for Freud whereas the day dreamer has no problem accepting that yes it sure would be nice to be snow skiing or swimming or scuba diving or something instead of having to be at this meeting, that's not so difficult to accept. It might be more difficult to accept that you've got desires of a violent or sexual kind and as a result Freud suggests that there is a mechanism that happens at the unconscious level that he refers to as dream work. Dream work is a process that takes what he refers to as latent content, that unconscious reservoir of desires. Dream work is the process by means of which that content gets transformed into something that you actually experience but experience in a way that's not so shocking. So in a famous case, Freud hypothesizes what he considers the Oedipal Complex that is to say each of us has an unconscious desire to have sex with their opposite sex parent and murder the same sex parents in the process or beforehand in order to make that possible. Freud will say, "That is no less a very shocking thing, " it will be very shocking to most of us to accept that. So that, if you could have a dream in which you get some partial satisfaction or that desire but that desire is not represented in a way that is explicit, you get some satisfaction and nevertheless you will not have to acknowledge to yourself that you have that highly socially inappropriate desire. Here again Freud rolls out the idea of resistance. That is Freud will come back and say okay, "You've now told me about your dreams, I can tell you what the latent content is that they actually represent, and that will be shocking to you." He will predict, "You will resist, " he'll predict, and that will still be consistent with this theory. So, dream interpretation starts with manifest content. What actually happens in your dream, the thing which you can recall having dreamt last night and interprets its way down to the latent level, what must have been happening at the unconscious level.
