More Wishes

Freud's section on wish fulfillment is rather long. Apparently, he's got a lot to say about them. This time instead of talking about a patient of his, Freud draws upon children's wishes, which are much simpler and easier to analyze (no offense to kids). Freud writes about a five year old boy who he brought on a hike with his daughter to an area near Aussee, his current residence at the time. He says that there was a wonderful mountain nearby called "Dachstein". And so, they hike in Dachstein's direction. The boy obviously wanted to get to Dachstein. Freud writes, "As often as a mountain came into view, he would ask: 'Is that the Dachstein?' whereupon I had to reply: 'No, only a foot-hill.'" And the boy was rather dissapointed when he realized they were only hiking to a waterfall along the trail to Dachstein. And so, they never made it to Dachstein. However, the next day, the boy told Freud: "Last night I dreamt that we went to the Simony hut." Simony hut was a hut on Dachstein. So, the boy was unable to fulfill his wish of reaching Dachstein in real life. So, his dreams drew upon his wish and fulfilled it there. This example is much, much simpler than the patient one. Freud includes a few other children's dreams which were unfortunately of the same manner (i.e.: they were about kids who didn't get to a specific landmark on an excursion, and consequently dreamt about reaching those landmarks). I was a bit disappointed with the lack of variety there, but it proves his point.

Of course, as a reader, you are probably skeptical. How can every dream be about a wish? Freud's own patients questioned him multiple times and even came to him with dreams in which wishes seemingly weren't fulfilled, or in extreme cases, fears were fulfilled instead. So, Freud includes several more scenarios where his patients did not have fulfilled wishes. And obviously, there aren't any wishes within the dream. But, Freud is rather tricky...and do you know how he explains that lack of a fulfilled wish, in these cases with his patients? He says that the patients did not have any expected wishes (like those of the children, or his own wish concerning his patient). However, because they did not want to believe Freud was right about dreams being about wish fulfillment, they wanted to prove Freud wrong by having a dream in which no wish was fulfilled inside of it. Freud says that those dreams did not fulfill a wish inside itself, but they did fulfill their wish in the grand scheme of things. They wanted to disprove his wish-fulfillment theory and therefore dreamt a dream in which no immediate wish was fulfilled. So, Freud basically concludes that wish-fulfillment doesn't have to be in the dream, but there always is a dream fulfilled, one way or another. Sometimes these wishes are hidden, or as Freud calls them, "repressed" or "suppressed".

Personally, I don't know how Freud can back that up with real evidence. I mean, it begs the question, how do we know that he's not making that up? I mean, who would really think that people dream dreams in which dreams aren't fulfilled simply so that they can prove him wrong? Can our subconscious mind go that deeply into a mental process as to concoct a dream with an external wish-fulfillment like those mentioned? I don't know. I mean it makes sense, but it's so farfetched...and outside the box... It's a little difficult to believe.