The Wish at the Heart of Every Dream
Freud's wish-fulfilment thesis begins with the clearest cases: convenience dreams, thirst dreams, and the unambiguously satisfied wishes of children. A child denied a boat trip dreams of sailing; a man who ate anchovies before sleep dreams of drinking cool water. These dreams carry their meaning on their face — they are simple, direct wish-fulfilments that disguise nothing.
It is easy to show that the character of wish-fulfilment in dreams is often undisguised and recognisable, so that one may wonder why the language of dreams has not long since been understood.
Disguised Wishes in Adult Dreams
Adult dreams are more complicated because the wishes they fulfil are unacceptable to the waking ego: they are aggressive, erotic, or infantile in character. The dream cannot present them directly without arousing the anxiety that would wake the dreamer. Instead, the dream-work transforms the latent wish into the bizarre, innocuous, or frightening manifest content the dreamer consciously recalls. What appears as a nightmare may be a censored fulfilment — the anxiety being the signal that the disguise has partially failed.
The claim that anxiety dreams and punishment dreams are also wish-fulfilments is one of Freud's most provocative moves. Even here, he argues, a wish is being satisfied — not the wish of the dreamer's ego, but a wish from the censoring agency itself (what would later become the superego), which wishes to punish. The dreamwork's ingenuity is inexhaustible: every dream satisfies something.
The wish-fulfilment thesis is the core of Chapter III of The Interpretation of Dreams, extended to cover anxiety dreams and punishment dreams in Chapter IV.
Related Concepts
