Association of Ideas with Dreams
Tony Crisp
Early in his work, Freud found that if he allowed his patients to talk freely, one idea led to another and they would uncover the origin of their neurosis. Freud himself suffered bouts of deep anxiety, and it was partly this that led him to explore the connection between association of ideas and dreams. In 1897 he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess:-
‘No matter what I start with, I always find myself back again with the neuroses and the psychical apparatus. Inside me there is a seething ferment, and I am only waiting for the next surge forward. I have felt impelled to start writing about dreams, with which I feel on firm ground.’
This move toward dreams may have come about because in allowing his patients freedom to talk and explore the associations that arose - free association - Freud noticed that patients would often find a connection between the direction of their associations and a dream they had experienced. The more he allowed his patients to go in their own direction, the more frequently they mentioned their dreams. Also, talking about the dream often enabled the patient to discover a new and productive chain of associations and memories.
Freud began to take note of his own dreams and explore the associations they aroused. In doing so he was the first person to consciously and consistently explore a dream into its depths through uncovering and following obvious and hidden associations and emotions connected with the dream imagery and drama. He did this to deal with his own neurosis, and says of this period, ‘I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness, cloudy thoughts and veiled doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.’
Using dreams for his self analysis, Freud discovered that previously unremembered details from his childhood were recaptured, along with feelings and states of mind which he had never met before. He wrote of this period, ‘Some sad secrets of life are being traced back to their first roots, the humble origins of much pride and precedence are being laid bare. ...... I am now experiencing myself all the things that, as a third party, I have witnessed going on in my patients, days when I slink about depressed because I have understood nothing of the day’s dreams, fantasies, or moods.’
Norman MacKenzie believes that without this powerful and personal experience of working with his dreams, meeting emotions and fantasies welling up from the unconscious, Freud would not have so passionately believed in his theories regarding dreams and the unconscious.
Freud was not of course the first to recognise the connection between dream imagery and associated ideas. Artemidorus in the first century AD had already written about this. But even prior to this Aristotle (384-322) had written on how the mind uses association. He had listed four ways this happened - through similarity, difference and contiguity.
Prior to the publication of Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams David Hartley had written his work on psychology titled Observations On Man - 1749, and James Mill had written Analysis Of The Mind - 1829, both of which examined association and set the foundations for modern psychology in the Associationist movement.
In 1899, Edouard Von Hartmann published Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) in which he stated that there were three layers to the unconscious discoverable by the observation of association of ideas, of the use of language, wit and ones emotions. In the same period the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys - a French professor of ethnography who taught Chinese and Tartar-Manchu - anonymously published a book titled Les Reves et les Moyens & Les Diriger - Dreams and How to Guide Them - in 1867. Saint-Denys had observed and recorded his dreams from the age of thirteen. From his observations he argued that ‘The moving panorama of our visions corresponds exactly with the train of ideas arising in our mind.’ In connection with the association of ideas he gives the example of a dream from his childhood in which he was dining with his family. But also at the table was the bishop of his diocese and two mythological divinities. The association of ideas Saint-Denys discovered between his dream and his experience was that while he was translating a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which divinities appeared, he was asked to change the dirty jacket he had on for a cleaner one as the bishop of the diocese had arrived and was going to dine with the family.
Many thinkers and observers of dreams felt that it was not enough to say dreams could be understood through the association of ideas. This could mean that association explains the whole phenomena of dreaming. Through their work Freud and Jung showed the wealth of information and experience that can be uncovered within a dream’s imagery and drama. Henry Maudsley, the British doctor after whom the Maudsley Day Hospital and school of psychiatry in London was named, wrote - "We are dealing with ... an actual constructive agency’ in dreams ‘whereby ideas are not merely brought together only, but new products are formed out of them." He says elsewhere that he is struck by "the extraordinary creations of dreams," and that a study of dreams would be "full of promise of abundant fruit."
If we are going to use association in exploring dreams, it is helpful to recognise the difference between free association, and looking for associations with a dream’s contents. Jung points out that with free association the starting point can be anywhere - dreams, ink-blots, clouds, shapes of landscape, a prayer wheel or rosary. He gives the example of a colleague who described to him a long train journey in Russia. Not knowing the language he found himself wondering what the strange shapes of the Cyrillic characters meant. Relaxing he began to imagine all sorts of meanings for them. One image and feeling led to another until, to his annoyance he found that long buried memories and difficult emotions had become stirred up.
The point Jung makes in connection with dreams is that if one took a dream image and ‘free associated’ with it, this could certainly lead to an uncovering of ones complexes or neuroses, but what one arrived at might have little or nothing to do with integral links with the dream. For instance the dream of the divinities and the bishop mentioned above, might, in free association, lead to a remembrance of a traumatic bullying at school, which had nothing to do with the feelings and links invested in the dream.
Finding ones memories and feelings associated with the dream however, leads to a clear realisation of how our own mental and emotional experience and structure have formed the dream. In one of my own dreams in which I was in my father’s shop attending to a man who had been shot in the arm, exploring the associations led me to uncover massive feelings to do with my relationship with my father. I felt for the first time in my life, how his lack of praise and support had led to an injury to my self confidence. In just the way my left arm supports the action of my creative right arm, and its injury would mean I could not be so effective with my right arm, so this lack of confidence had undermined my outward expression, something I was trying to attend to at that time. Working in this way, where the dream is honoured as something important instead of simply a starting point to lead elsewhere was a turning point for Jung. He says he came to believe the dream ‘expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.’ Therefore, after each excursion into associations, Jung would return to the dream and continue checking against its structure and content.