Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [112]
I ought to have listened to the warning myself. “Now,” I ought to have said to her, “it is from Herr K. that you have made a transference onto me. Have you noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil intentions similar (whether openly or in some sublimated form) to Herr K.’s? Or have you been struck by anything about me or got to know anything about me which has caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.?”20
This, he said, would have enabled Dora to clear up her feelings about Freud, remain in treatment, and look still deeper into herself for other memories.
Transference, Freud concluded, cannot be avoided; dealing with it is by far the hardest part of the task but is an essential step in breaking through resistance and bringing the unconscious to light:
It is only after the transference has been resolved that a patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been established during the analysis… [In treatment] all the patient’s tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused; they are then turned to account for the purposes of the analysis by being made conscious…Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient.21
Seen from the viewpoint of therapy, the analysis of transference is a corrective experience that reveals and repairs the trauma. Had Freud acted in time, Dora would have seen that, unlike Herr K., he (and presumably many other men) could be trusted and that she did not have to fear their feelings about her or hers about them. Seen from the viewpoint of psychology, the analysis of transference is a way of investigating and verifying hypotheses about the unconscious motivations behind inexplicable behavior.
The second element of analytic technique that became a principal method of psychological investigation for Freud is dream interpretation. Despite his failure to recognize Dora’s dream as a signal of her transference to him, he had been fruitfully using patients’ dreams for five years to get at unconscious material; he later called dream interpretation “the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious in mental life.”22
Freud was far from the first psychologist to be interested in dreams; in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he cited 115 references to earlier discussions of the subject. But most psychologists had viewed dreams as degraded, absurd, and meaningless thoughts that originated not in any psychic process but in some bodily process that was disturbing sleep. Freud, conceiving of the unconscious as not merely ideas and memories outside of awareness but as the repository of painful feelings and events that have been forcibly forgotten, saw dreams as significant hidden material breaking into view while the protective conscious self is off duty.
He hypothesized that dreams fulfill wishes that would otherwise wake us and that their basic purpose is to enable us to continue sleeping. Some dreams fulfill simple bodily needs. In Interpretation Freud said that whenever he had eaten salty food, he became thirsty during the night and dreamed of drinking in great gulps. He also cited the dream of a young medical colleague who liked to sleep late and whose landlady called through the door one morning, “Wake up, Herr Pepi! It’s time to go to the hospital!” That morning Pepi particularly wanted to stay in bed, and dreamed that he was a patient in bed in the hospital, at which point he said to himself, “As I’m already in the hospital, there’s no need for me to go there,” and went on sleeping.23
But the wish fulfillment of many dreams is far subtler and more recondite. Often,