Freud claims our dreams are structured according to four grammatical rules, what are they, and how does he apply them to the wolf man’s famous dream?

Freud claims our dreams are structured according to four grammatical rules, what are they, and how does he apply them to the wolf man’s famous dream?

 

“Dreams play an important and often underestimated role in cultural transmission because they provide personal experiential verification of incoming information” – (Kilborne 1981, pp. 165-185)

Four Grammatical Rules of Dream Structures

Freud – primitive languages as intended for communication but dream was not a vehicle for communication (Freud, 1990 p. 341)

Would be interpreter of dreams has no rules for semantic substitution as dream interpretation resembles the decoding methods of ancient dream books which fixed meaning set out, necessary for the individual to provide associations to the elements of his dream (Freud, 1901 p. 684)

There are no syntactic rules, production of manifest elements by dream work is not governed by anything having character of grammatical rules of language but lack definite enabling ambiguous expressions to be deciphered (Dreams are divided into parts for the principal and the other for the dependent clause)

Freud, the interpretation of dreams was by no means completely analogous to the decipherment of ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphics (Freud, 1913 p. 177)

 

 

Amicably, Freud applies the dream structures in lieu to wolf man’s dream as one narrative assumption of language in grammar essence upon the studying of the dream as one narrative shifts attention from interpretation to analysis interpretation makes the meaning of dream clear to the dreamer, who is trying to grasp its references to both external and internal worlds, analysis identifies the tale’s form, as well as the characters, theme and structure. A dream cannot be interpreted without grammar associations that provide references, but it still can be analyzed as text and its narrative structure studied. Thus, certain study analyzed the frequency of grammar forms and words used in dream telling. Since the research does not require synthesis based on content categories, it allows generalizations that are independent of any theoretically based interpretative model. The process relates to Freud’s case of the wolf man as the latter remain one of favorite teaching case, certainly most detailed, documented of Freud’s case histories upon recording original discoveries and solution of complicated enigmas of symptom and character, personality development and regression.

The layers of dream meaning presented vividly, with clarity and cohesion pioneering formulation fostering insights and appreciation of new grammatical cues within the language denoted in dreams. Freud states that if sense of reality accompanies dream, analysis have showed that one or more latent thoughts in it do in fact refer to something real such as by sense of reality, in which two pears that the dreamer is given represent the maternal breasts, which the dreamer had once indeed received. The quality of realness in the dream indicates the reality present in the original situation. Freud’s use of covert methods of interpersonal control, such as the fixed time limit on the length of his analysis, the Wolf Man gave in and provided material Freud could use to support his theories and reconstructions, such as the primal scene interpretation of the nightmare about wolves. Freud fostered misalliance with Wolf Man and prevented the formation of a therapeutic alliance. Thus, along structural interaction with Wolf Man, Freud enacted transference complex organized and activated by the Wolf Man’s need for an idealized omnipotent and powerful person, the need to maintain relationship with Freud and to gratify needs, Wolf Man unconsciously complied with the pressures imposed on him by Freud’s use of indoctrination methods and such grammar formation, for example proponent, Foulkes (1999) has tackled Freud’s dream structures from within guiding behavior, topographical, structural and genetic based models, attempt to build on shortcomings of Freud’s attempted grammar rooted and or topographical model for explaining dream formation and content.

Furthermore, dreams have been the subject of extensive investigation through psychoanalysis since its inception.  The ideal composition of allegory through wolf man’s dream is being applied to grammar effectiveness and usage particular to English literatures and other forms. The detail and clarity of Freud’s reconstruction of such cases provides not only model of psychoanalytic investigation, but also an important testing ground against which the development of psychoanalytic insights and understanding can be paired off with the formulations of the founder of psychoanalysis, the greater appreciation for the congruence and continuity of analytic insights, or it may be conversely sharpening and focusing of the differentiation of such insights as factor of scientific progress. The case of the Wolf Man stands in the first rank of Freud’s clinical studies and has been object of continuing analytic interest since its original publication in 1918 (Freud, 1918; Gardiner, 1971) such as the Wolf Man’s seduction by his sister at the age of four can claim to be taken as memories in the ordinary sense of the word. Others are interpretive elaborations, worked up from the barest of memory fragments. The most important memory reported by the patient is a dream. Freud characterised dreams as ‘another kind of remembering, although one that is subject to the conditions that rule at night and to the laws of dream-formation’(Freud 1918, p. 285), if my surmise about them is correct, then the task of discovering just what it is that dreams remember comes down to search for the implicit metaphorical structures underlying the transformation of the day’s residues by the dreamwork the structures are the infantile scenes.

According to Freud, the transferential process guiding the dreamwork was fundamentally the same as that seen in neuroses and in the analytic situation (Freud Interpretation, pp. 601-2).   Though subject to conditions that rule at night there reflected the same infantile scenes and mediated the same conflicts. Thus there are good grounds for regarding the relationship between infantile scenes and the behaviour of neurotics as a metaphorical one as well. Freud thought of this pattern as originating in one or more infantile scenes, but acknowledged that these could be known only indirectly, through the traces they left on various aspects of the patient’s symbolic productions. We can now add that, from the standpoint of Freud’s interpretive practice with patients, it did not matter whether these scenes had any basis in historical reality, since their relation to the raw materials of analysis was never historical or causal, but metaphorical. In constructing them Freud was guided by his theoretical assumptions, but needed to instil that sense of conviction which he saw as therapeutic equivalent of actual recollection. Viewed strictly as an interpretive practice, psychoanalysis will be shuttling between two poles: the first consists of patient’s symbolic productions his dreams, recollections. The second pole is situated in the space of early childhood memory and consists of small cluster of ambiguous but emotionally potent figures, drawn from the master trope of infantile sexual life: the breast and so on. The work of grammar implied interpretation is process of reading figures into life and symbolic productions and fleshing the figures until arrangement will be found capturing truth of current predicament.

 

References

 

Foulkes, D. (1999) see. PsycINFO Database Record, 2009 APA

Freud, Sigmund, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘The Wolf Man’),’ in A. Richards (ed.) Sigmund Freud: Case Histories II, London, Penguin, 1979 [1918].

 

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Totem and Taboo,’ in A. Richards (ed.) Freud: The Origins of Religion, London, Penguin Books, 1984 [1913].

 

Kilborne, B (1981) Pattern, Structure, and Style in Anthropological Studies of Dreams  Ethos, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 165-185  Blackwell Publishing

Freud, S. (1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. In M. Gardiner (Ed.) 1971.

 

Endnotes

 

Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘The Wolf Man’),’ in A. Richards (ed.) Sigmund Freud: Case Histories II, London, Penguin, 1979 [1918], p. 285.

 

Freud repeatedly underscored the connection between the two kinds of transference in the Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote: We learn from [the psychology of neurotics] that an unconscious idea as such is quite incapable of entering the preconscious and that it can only exercise any effect there by establishing a connection with an idea which already belongs to the preconscious, by transferring its intensity on to it and getting itself covered by it. Here we have the fact of transference, which provides an explanation of so many striking phenomena in the mental life of neurotic. The unconscious prefers to weave its connections around preconscious ideas which are either indifferent or have been rejected – (Freud, Interpretation, pp. 601-2). 

Gardiner, Muriel (Ed.) (1971). The Wolf-Man. With The case of the Wolf-Man, by Sigmund Freud and a supplement by Ruth Mack Brunswick. Foreword by Anna Freud. New York, Basic Books.

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) in The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990): 341

 

 

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