Herman Westerink is Associate and Endowed Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University. A significant portion of his research is dedicated to Freudian psychoanalysis, alongside his studies in the philosophy of religion. Following his participation in a public lecture at Radboud Reflects, titled ‘What Are Dreams Made Of’, we decided to interview Herman and discuss a Freudian approach to own our theme, ‘Hopes and Dreams’. While the lecture was very informative, we had some remaining questions, especially since terms like ‘hope’ and ‘dream’ are often used interchangeably. Herman was happy to join us and further discuss these matters.
Sophie: Thank you for joining us today. We’d like to ask you about your thoughts on dreaming, especially since the theme of this Splijtstof edition is ‘Hopes and Dreams’. Given your recent work, particularly with Radboud Reflects, we thought it would be interesting to explore the topic more.
Herman: Excellent.
Sophie: For the uninitiated, could you tell us a bit about the relationship between your work on Freudian psychoanalysis and dreams?
Herman: Well, the ‘dream work’ of Freud is his most famous text, certainly among a larger audience. The Interpretation of Dreams is not necessarily in the centre of my research, but again and again, I am confronted with his dream analysis. Again and again, various texts refer to The Interpretation of Dreams, and to the dreams of patients, which are always very important in his clinical writings, as well.
For Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams is not his only work on dreams; it is a topic that comes back again and again. Notably, the topic appears in his clinical writings, and sometimes also in his metapsychological writings, because dreams are supposed to give us an insight. That’s the first important thing to say about Freud’s interest in dreams: they tell us something about an aspect of our psychic life to which we normally have no access. To this, even dreams only grant us access to a certain extent, because there is also a kind of censorship mechanism. So, it’s also always in a filtered and indirect manner that dreams give us insight into unconscious mental processes, but nevertheless they do.
Having said that, according to Freud, dreams also give us insight into the fundamental principles that organise psychic life. Since dreams give insight into unconscious processes, they also help us detect when certain mental principles are no longer at work, like consciousness or perception. For instance, this is the case in our ability to organise impressions into a spatial or temporal chronology. They function not only as an insight into certain principles that organise mental life, but also show what psychic life looks like when these when these principles are shut down, or partly shut down.
Sophie: Do you think there’s much overlap between Freud’s perspective and your own? What do you think about dreams?
Herman: I don’t have much opinion on dreams, but what intrigues me is the cultural, historical perspectives. Freud is part of that history. Generally, we in the Western world, although certainly not exclusively in the Western world, tend to attach a lot of meaning to dreams, whereas it’s not self-evident to do so. In the case of Freud, you could say dreams are a way to know more about ourselves than we would normally be able to detect or see. This is something that you find throughout Western history. I find that intriguing because it’s not self-evident that dreams have a meaning or a significant place in the way that we understand ourselves.
Although, that’s just an observation. That’s not an opinion. I don’t know if Freud’s theories can be maintained. He argues that dreams are wish fulfilments – or attempts at wish fulfilment. There is current research, especially in neuroscience, from those who claim that Freud made a good point here. Though, I don’t know whether Freud’s arguments about dreams are absolutely plausible. It’s not my field, but as I said, I find it intriguing that he paid so much attention to dreams as being meaningful and providing self-knowledge, whereas one could also spontaneously argue dreams have no meaning – that it’s just chaos.
Charlie: Since you mentioned wish fulfilment, I was thinking about how sometimes we use the word ‘dream’ as a synonym for a hope or a desire. I was wondering what Freud would make of this, and maybe also what you think about this yourself.
Herman: Yeah, that’s the popular use of dreams, right? The American Dream, dreams about the future, et cetera. This use of ‘dreams’ could well be seen as a kind of popularised version of a Freudian take on dreams, right? There’s a lot of stuff in Freudian thought that has been popularised. The idea of dreams as wish fulfilment is among them. I’m not really sure whether ‘dreaming of the future’ in terms of what you hope or what you wish to happen can fully be reduced to Freudian thought. Although, I think that Freudian ideas have been very important for shaping this idea of dream as wish or hope for the future. It is indeed phrased like that today, as opposed to the classical idea that dreams can be messages from the gods that reveal what is going to happen in the future – that was a very antique idea. So, I think the idea of dreams, as wish fulfilment, or hope for the future, is a kind of popularised version of Freudian thought. I think Freud is part of that, at least.
Charlie: That’s very interesting. I’ve never made a connection between the American Dream and Freudian thought.
Herman: Well, the American dream, of course, also has other sources, right? It’s also the dream of the colonists to have their own country, to have their own land, et cetera, to make to make your life a success – ‘Manifest Destiny’. There are also other sources for that, but I think to phrase it in terms of dreams and dreams as wishes is a very Freudian idea popularised.
Charlie: Yes, that’s interesting. For those of us who perhaps have less pleasant dreams, could Freud offer any words of comfort for us, or is his work likely to make us feel worse about our weirder, more uncomfortable dreams?
Herman: Ah, yes, most dreams are uncomfortable. First of all, I would have to start by saying that Freud is very analytical, in honest and realistic depictions of dreams, and taking seriously what is communicated in dreams. If dreams are wish fulfilments, they are closely related to fantasies. That also means what you find in dreams, as I already mentioned, is somewhat – but not fully – censored. Repressed or unconscious thoughts show themselves in the form of very violent dreams. For example, you can kill people in your dreams, or you can get killed in your dreams. There is violence and absurdity in your dreams. There is also power in dreams: being able to do things that you would normally not be able to do, like flying. There are all kinds of bizarre things, but also some aspects of human life that we would normally rather not be confronted with, especially violence and anxiety.
For Freud, nightmares are also wish fulfilments, but they are wish fulfilments in the sense that we react with fear to the consequences of what we are dreaming about. Waking up in a nightmare is usually at a point where something we do not find acceptable is going to happen. When the censorship breaks in, or when consciousness breaks in, you suddenly start to realise the implications of what you are about to dream, and this is where the dream ends. This is the point where the wish fulfilment shows its implications and then something in psychic life says, “this this is unacceptable, this cannot be!” Dreams are not just wish fulfilments in the sense that they show us pleasurable sides of our own fantasies and imaginations. Quite to the contrary, they can also show the violent or the anxious side of psychic life.
There is also a special case to which Freud devotes some attention: the traumatic dreams of traumatised people. They may repeatedly dream about the traumatic events that they lived through. This is a really puzzling issue for Freud, because if dreams are wish fulfilments, even anxiety dreams to some extent, it is very difficult to explain why a traumatised people would return to their trauma in their dreams. That is counterintuitive for Freud. Therefore, he believed that there are some dreams that are ‘beyond’ wish fulfilments because they have something he calls ‘demonic character’. Dreams that bring us back to scenes of trauma are special case, but also shows, again, that dreams are not in any way related to pleasure.
Sophie: Following that line of thinking, how satisfied would you be with the conclusion that our dreams don’t mean anything – none of them?
Herman: I think that nobody would actually object to that. This is also something I said in Radboud Reflects: from the very start of our own cultural history of thinking about dreams, there has always been the idea that at least a part of our dreams is perhaps meaningless. Of course, in the antique world, that means there are dreams that don’t entail any messages about the future. Sometimes the gods are not speaking in dreams.
Freud would probably say that some dreams are more significant than others, but there are no dreams that have no meaning. All dreams reveal something of unconscious and repressed material. In this sense, dreams are, per definition, informative about psychic life. Yet, some dreams are more significant than others.
Sophie: What do you make of the dreams that come true? For instance, something bad might happen or things go wrong in an anxious dream and might really go wrong in practice.
Herman: Apart from self-fulfilling prophecy? You could give an answer from the idea of a wish fulfilment. If you dream that something is going to go wrong, it’s probably because you wish, to some extent, that it goes wrong, and so why wouldn’t it go wrong? Maybe dreams can also reveal something of an unconscious self-sabotaging mechanism. They may at least show you that there is a conflicting voice to what you may consciously think. Freud would say that our psychic life is always in conflict. There’s always also another voice. There’s a counter-tendency – for instance, not succeeding in things you think you want to succeed in – and it is that kind of mechanism. A Freudian answer to your question is that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in this case.
I certainly don’t want to return to the idea that that dreams are really messages from ‘gods’ about what is going to happen unavoidably in the future. We can only prepare for what might happen. In the example that you mentioned, someone dreams of something that goes wrong, and it actually goes wrong. That indeed shows that they are probably self-sabotaging.
Sophie: Would you say this further illustrates that some dreams may be considered more meaningful, or at least less random or chaotic, than others?
Herman: Yes. I am now voicing a more or less Freudian take on dreams, but such cases are quite telling of our relation to what is going to happen. Our relation to persons or objects is never straightforward, but always ambiguous.
Charlie: I was doing some homework for this interview and I found that Freud analysed his own dreams for his work. I was wondering if, in your opinion, we should be able to get away with this kind of practice in our own work. Could I cite something that I’ve dreamed as a source for my own dream analysis book or essay?
Herman: I think this is a challenge. Strictly speaking, in psychoanalysis, it is not a good idea to analyse your own dreams. You could bring your dreams into analysis, vis-à-vis an analyst, but the idea of a self-interpretation of dreams is probably not the most fruitful form. At the same time, having said that, there’s a long history since Freud in psychoanalysis where analysts, and also patients, keep dream books. This is not only something in psychoanalysis: there are people who do that, who wake up and the first thing they do is make a note about what they have dreamt and keep it in a book. This can be seen as an ongoing diagnosis of their own mental states.
There is a technical problem with doing self-analysis, which can easily take the form of a kind of self-deception. This is because I’m not sure whether we are the best interpreters of ourselves given the censorship I already mentioned. The other element in your question would be whether it is a good idea to do any form of self-analysis. Why would we be so obsessed with analysing ourselves? Self-analysis is also a way of self-problematisation, and why would we make our lives so much more difficult than necessary? This is a somewhat Foucauldian answer; he criticises psychoanalysis, notably for the obsession with analysing ourselves in Western history.
But are we a problem? I don’t know. Should we be a problem for ourselves? Who says that we should be a problem for ourselves? This kind of argumentation that you find in Nietzsche and in Foucault can be used against psychoanalysis and against any form of treatment. Why would you make a problem out of yourself? Or consider yourself a problem? That’s actually part of the idea of self-analysis. There is something happening in myself that I want to gain control over, and what is beyond my control is de facto a problem.
In the Radboud Reflects lecture, I already mentioned this in connection to the early Christian monks. They fought their dreams and thought the thoughts and images that appeared in dreams were fundamentally a problem. They thought their dreams were a problem, and self-analysis was a way to gain control over one’s inner life. That’s another way to answer your question.
Charlie: Thank you. When I was re-watching the lecture, you were talking about how the contents of the dreams were worrying to the monks. I was wondering if you’ve ever had a dream about Freud when you’re in the midst of all of your writing!
Herman: Did I ever have a dream about Freud? I must have, but I don’t remember anything. I’m not very good at remembering my dreams, and I don’t keep a dream book.
Charlie: What do you think Freud would say about that? If you think you’ve dreamt about him, but you can’t remember, does that say anything about things going on with your psychic apparatus?
Herman: It would be very strange if we would be able to remember our all our dreams. According to the Freudian argument that dreams reveal something of the unconscious, when you are asleep, the consciousness is more or less shut down. You would expect that in waking life, these things are again repressed, unconscious, and not accessible. In this sense, they are also not remembered for the large part. My colleague (and neuroscientist) from the Radboud Reflects lecture shows that you have a lot of dreams during the night – you don’t remember most of them. The participants in dream experiments need to immediately share what they have been dreaming about when they wake up, because otherwise the dreams are forgotten. Most dreams are normally forgotten, that’s not a strange thing.
It is actually more or less abnormal when you remember very vividly what you have been dreaming. This is likely the case for the dreams that were really impressive somehow – disturbing or perhaps very pleasant. I don’t think that I’ve ever dreamt, for example, being in an analysis with Freud. That would be the ultimate Freudian dream – to be a patient on his sofa. And, as far as I know, I’ve never dreamt that I was the analyst and Freud was on the sofa – I’m sure about that.
Charlie: That must be reassuring to some extent.
Sophie: Returning to the Radboud Reflects lecture, one thing we were curious to discuss is whether any new questions about dreams occurred to you throughout the process of preparing for the lecture and working with Sarah Schoch.
Herman: No, not really. The lecture that I made was based on research that I had been doing in the past, which I already knew quite well. Instead, what I hadn’t realised before was that most dreams in the antique world were not about big, societal future events. For instance, when gods were believed to give messages in dreams, most dreams concerned medical issues. That was quite a new insight.
Those dreams in the antique world still had a kind of prognostic quality in the sense that something was predicted to happen in the near future. Nevertheless, there was already something also of a diagnostic quality in these dreams because they were supposed to reveal something about psychic or somatic processes that were, as of yet, hidden and going to be a problem. This nuances the distinction between predictive dreams and more analytic dreams telling us about unconscious or hidden processes.
Another thing I found interesting, in relation to Sarah’s talk, did not necessarily surprise me, but more or less confirmed something I had already expected. The team at Radboud Reflects discovered that there was not that big of a difference between our work. They tried to create an opposition between the neuroscientific work of Sarah and my talk, which focused mainly on Freud. They initially thought there must be a fundamental disagreement on the issue of dreams, but there isn’t. Neuroscientific research does not falsify Freud or, at least, not completely. Freud is important for thinking about dreams and putting dreams on the on the scientific agenda – I would say historically, that’s certainly true. However, they expected that the neuroscientific research would show a fundamentally different perspective on dreams and that Freud would be basically nonsense. Yet, that’s not true, there is no such fundamental disagreement. As I said, this is what I actually expected from the research, although they are completely different forms of science – if psychoanalysis is a science at all.
Sophie: That’s certainly an interesting reflection. Given everything we’ve discussed today, I’d like to ask one final question for the readers of Splijtstof. Most of this interview has been about dreaming, but our edition is themed around ‘hopes’, too. Is there anything you’d like to share about ‘hopes’? Perhaps I’m returning to wish fulfilment with this question.
Herman: Yes, this comes back to wish fulfilment. I don’t have specific hopes or wishes apart from very general ones that everybody would immediately agree with; these are open doors. I hope the next generation, such as you and younger people, will use all their efforts and all their creativity to find solutions to fundamental problems in our society and in our world. I’m thinking of the problems that my generation did not succeed in resolving and only made worse, such as climate change. That’s a very open-door and very general answer. I’m not very pleased with this answer, but maybe this is exactly what you wanted to hear.
Sophie: I think that answer is a hope in itself.
Herman: It’s always my hope that the next generation does better than the previous generation.
Sophie: That’s a good hope to have.
Herman: It’s a good hope to have, indeed.
Sophie: Thank you very much for joining us today. I’m sure Charlie and our readers would agree that this conversation has been very insightful.
Charlie: Yes, thank you very much for your time.
Herman: Thank you. It was a pleasure. If you have any afterthoughts or dreams about what is missing, you can always contact me.
For further information, the Radboud Reflects lecture can be found on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/xQI9vU9PIrU?si=5V3SHc3EvMmhzP0j.
