Why do any therapists trust The Interpretation of Dreams?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I had the exact same reaction on reading “The Interpretation of Dreams” a few months ago. The leaps required to get from dream image A to conclusion Z made it seem (to me) a lot like numerology or some other pseudo-science where the answer is based on the perception of connections that aren’t really there.
Part of my decision to drop out of social work school was the heavy reliance in clinical settings on Freudian psychoanalytics. This isn’t to say that Freudian psychoanalytics are entirely useless. However, it’s pretty universally agreed upon at this point that Freud’s claims to Platonic universality of mental phenomena is bunk. I.e., we’re not all the same, basically, deep down, in some hidden psychic core. Though, in child sexual abuse situations, for example, where the parallels to Freud’s theories are relatively explicit, I think some therapists sucessfully apply analytics. An undergrad psych professor of mine, Bertram Cohler, has done a lot of work with at risk children applying Freudian analytics and claims such success. You can read a short article about his work on childhood adversity and resilience for a very general idea of how he does this.
I’ve seen quite a few shrinks in my day. Only one was ever interested in what I had dreamed about. And his interest was mostly in my interpretation of them — and then mostly just as a conversation-starter. I think the idea was that if I had something embarassing I wanted to talk about, “finding” it in a dream would be an easy face-saving way for me to bring it up. “It’s not that I want to talk about gay sex, doc! It’s just that it keeps showing up in my dreams!” But that’s a far cry from Freud’s take on the matter. I agree with the other posters who say that this aspect of Freud’s thought, at least, is no longer accepted as true.
