Freud returns? Like a bad dream.

Abstract

The article comments on Sigmund Freud's views on the meaning of dreams and their impact on mental functioning. Mark Solms and others assert that brain imaging and lesion studies are now validating Freud's conception of the mind. But similar scientific investigations show that major aspects of Freud's thinking are probably erroneous. For Freud, the bizarre nature of dreams resulted from an elaborate effort of the mind to conceal, by symbolic disguise and censorship, the unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep, But most neurobiological evidence supports the alternative view that dream bizarreness stems from normal changes in brain state. Many studies have indicated that the chemical changes determine the quality and quantity of dream visions, emotions and thoughts. Freud's disguise-and-censorship notion must be discarded; no one believes that the ego-id struggle, if it exists, controls brain chemistry. Most psychoanalysts no longer hold that the disguise-censorship theory is valid.