The Interpretation of Dream and Poetry

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAM AND POETRY V. G. HOPWOOD JUST as it is possible to trace back the manifest or surface elements in a dream, its images and events, to the previous experience of the dreamer, it is possible to show how the words and content of a poem are derivable from the poet's life. John Livingston Lowes has demonstrated this possibility in his justly famous study' examining the sources of two poems by Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Although it takes as its starting-point the common source of dreams and poetry in individual experience, this article has the purpose of indicating how the nature of poetry puts limits on its interpretation by the methods of psycho-analysis. Sigmund Freud states clearly the typical and fundamental psychoanalytic approach to art. [The artist] is not the only one who has a life of phantasy; the intermediate world of phantasy is sanctioned by general human consent, and every hungry soul looks to it for comfort and consolation. But to those who are not artists the gratification that can be drawn from the springs of phantasy is very limited; their inexorable repressions prevent the enjoyment of all but the meagre day-dreams which can become conscious. A true artist has more at his disposal. First of all he understands how to elaborate his day-drcams, so that they lose that personal note which grates upon strange ears and become enjoyable to others; he knows too how to modify them sufficiently so that their origin in prohibited sources is not easily detected. Further, he possesses the mysterious "bility to mould his particular material until it expresses the ideas of his phantasy faithfully; and then he knows how to attach to this reflection of his phantasy-life so strong a stream of pleasure that, for a time at least, the repressions are out-balanced and dispelled by it. When he can do all this, he opens out to others the way back to the comfort and consolation of their own unconscious -sources of pleasure, and so reaps their gratitude and admiration; then he has won-through his phantasy-what before he could only win in phantasy: honour, power, and the love of womeo.2 Although Freud, in a later set of lectures, revised his conception of the nature of dream from that of wish-fulfilment to resolution of conflict,' the modification remained primarily formal, and did not fundamentally alter his approach to the supposed underlying content of the dream. Certainly he never revised his approach to art in any fundamental way. Art, according to this approach, is a superior kind IThe Road to Xanadu (BostOD, 1927). 21ntToductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (London. 1922). 314-15. aNew Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (3rd ed., London, 1946), 25. 128 Vol. XXI, no. 2. Jan., 1952 DREAM AND POETRY 129 of dream. It is superior in that it is better at fooling the critical faculties and overpowering them. If there was ever a defence of poetry which is an admission of guilt to the charge of dope-peddling, the above quotation is it. However, the rejection of the implied concept of poetry should not blind us to a feature that poetry shares with dream. Although it is more accurate to say that a dream is an attempt to solve in phantasy a conflict arising in experience than it is to call it a wish-fulfilment, the concept of wish-fulfi1ment has relative validity. It has this validity because the conditions of solution in dream are easier than those in reality. The attempt at a solution of conflict in real life can only succeed on the basis that it meets the sterner conditions of real choice. In dream the resolution takes place according to wishdetermined autistic processes, rather than by critical thinking. The bridge between desire and realization in the dream world can be built of all types of logically false material, such as accidental associations, puns, and trivial resemblances. Reality is distorted according to wish. It loses the stubborn quality which characterizes it in our waking relations with it. The moral skeleton of our living is loosened and softened. We do things that in...