Two Major Difficulties for Freud's Theory of Dreams *

Before 1920, Freud's wish-fulfillment theory of dreams asserted two universal major theses, which he encapsulated in the following conjunction: The manifest dream “content was the fulfillment of a wish [first thesis], and its motive was a wish” [second thesis] (Freud, 1900, p. 119). As Freud recognized, neither of these two theses is redundant with the other. But in his “Revision of the Theory of Dreams” (Freud, 1933), he did explicitly retract the first claim that the manifest dream-content universally displays the fulfillment of a wish though in a more or less defensively disguised form (pp. 28–30). On the other hand, there he continued to uphold his second thesis that the dream-motive is always a wish, rather than, say, a fear. And, moreover, that wish was purportedly always, at bottom, a repressed infantile one. But in his earlier 1920 revision in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he had even retracted this second thesis in favor of the notion that the so-called compulsion to repeat, rather than a wish, was the motive of dreams that reenact traumatic experiences.