is dream interpretation a pseudoscience?

[dazed and confused]

I found this in a book called "pseudoscience and the paranormal", in it the author debunks dream interpretation as a pseudo science, i would like to know if anyone here has any thoughts or counter arguments on the matter. i copyd the relevant part here 

 

 

Symbolic Interpretation

 

The repressed contents of the unconscious could result in psychological disorders. It was the task of the psychoanalytic therapist to discover the repressed, hidden contents of the patient’s unconscious and to help the patient achieve insight into the psychological roots of his problems. According to psychoanalytic theory, once insight was achieved, the psychological problems would fade away because the insight eliminated the repressed cause of the problems. The problem for the therapist, of course, was how to get at the contents of the unconscious, since the patient did not have conscious access to this material. Symbolic interpretations of various forms of behavior, from dreams to accidents, became the primary method by which psychoanalysts attempted to delve into the unconscious. Freud tried hypnosis for a time, but abandoned it. He became especially enthusiastic about the method of free association and dream interpretation as roads to the contents of the unconscious. In free association, the patient simply says anything that comes to mind, often while reclining on the analyst’s couch. Freud felt that such free associations would be uncensored by higher levels of consciousness and would thus reflect the contents of the unconscious. If these free associations were interpreted using the proper psychoanalytic symbology, they could give valuable information about the patient’s hidden fears, anxieties, and desires. Another valuable source of such information was to be found in dreams. For Freud, a dream had two types of content, manifest content and latent content. Manifest content referred to the psychoanalytically uninteresting images of the dream itself. The latent content was the meaning hidden in those images. Latent content could be revealed only through the analyst’s symbolic interpretation of the images in the dream. Thus, “all sharp and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes represent the male member.... Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female [sex] organ; also cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels. A room in a dream generally represents a woman” (Freud 1913/1950, p. 242). The symbolism could be much more complex: “a woman’s hat may often be interpreted with certainty as the male genitals. In the dreams of men one often finds the necktie as a symbol for the penis” (p. 243). Everyday errors and slips of the tongue were also interpreted, symbolically, as reflecting hidden conflicts and motivations.

There is an extremely serious problem in symbolic interpretation, whether it is behavior or anything else that is being interpreted: Such interpretations are inherently nonfalsifiable. This is especially true in psychoanalytic theory, where the concept of repression can be used to further protect any interpretation, no matter how absurd, against falsification. Consider a hypothetical example in which a woman dreams that a man forces his way into her apartment through the front door. Doors and other entrances are said to be symbolic representations of the vagina. Since the “entry” in the dream was forced, the easy interpretation of this dream is that it symbolizes rape. Perhaps the dreamer has a great fear of rape or perhaps she has a hidden desire to be raped or otherwise sexually abused. Is there any way to disprove either of these symbolic interpretations? Absolutely not—if we ask the woman, and she protests that she is neither abnormally afraid of rape nor desirous of being raped, it merely shows that her fear or desire is deeply hidden. In fact, her denial is interpreted as further evidence that the interpretation is true. Thus, no matter whether she agrees with the interpretation or argues against it, her behavior will be seen by the psychoanalyst as supporting the interpretation.

The nonfalsifiability of symbolic interpretations of dreams is not limited to psychoanalytic interpretations. Rather, it applies to any type of symbolic interpretation. In nonpsychoanalytic symbolic schemes, where repression does not play such a large role in protecting an interpretation from falsification, another mechanism operates to make the interpretation seem more valid than it is. This mechanism is highly similar to the fallacy of personal validation that was discussed in chapter 2. It will be recalled that this fallacy convinces people that the vague “predictions” of psychics are much more specific than they really are. Like psychic predictions, dreams are vague in the sense that a given dream can appear, after the fact, to be consistent with almost any outcome. This characteristic of dreams has already been discussed in the context of prophetic dreams, but it applies with equal force to the symbolic interpretation of dream content. A major study of the effects of stress on dreaming (Breger, Hunter, and Lane 1971) illustrates this point.

Many nonpsychoanalytic psychologists reject the specific symbolic interpretations of psychoanalysis, but still believe that dream content is at least partially symbolic. A common view is that stressful situations the dreamer is experiencing, or is about to experience, will be symbolically represented in the dream, presumably allowing the dreamer to deal with the stress at less than its full intensity. Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) set out to test this view by examining the dreams of a number of individuals who were about to undergo the very stressful experience of major surgery. Their dreams were recorded during the nights before the surgery and were then analyzed to see if the content of the dreams symbolically reflected the impending surgery. The authors concluded that in fact the upcoming surgery was featured symbolically in the dreams of the patients.

The Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) study is an influential one, but the conclusions are seriously flawed because of both the way in which the data were collected and the way they were presented in the published report. The authors, who collected the dream reports from the patients and later interpreted them, were well aware of the particular type of surgery that each patient was facing. Thus, it was an easy matter, given the vagueness of dreams, to find symbolic relationships between dream content and the specific surgery that the authors knew patients were facing. In the published report, the reader is first presented with a medical case history for each dreamer; only then are descriptions of the actual dreams provided, followed by the authors’ interpretations of the dreams. Given such a sequence, it is not at all surprising that the reader will agree with the authors’ interpretations. But the seeming correctness of the interpretation is biased by the previous knowledge the reader was given. This knowledge acts like mental “blinders” to prevent the reader from thinking of alternative interpretations. The authors also had such previous knowledge before they interpreted the dream; it prevented them, as well, from seeing alternative interpretations.

The biasing effects of previous information about the dreamers’ surgery can be most clearly seen when that information is absent. If there really is a relationship between the symbolic dream content and the nature of the surgery, it should be possible to determine what type of surgery the patient is going to have from the dream itself, without any previous knowledge. Unfortunately, Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) made no attempt to find out whether such determinations could be made. Nor did they bother to assess objectively whether it was possible to distinguish between the dreams of stressed and nonstressed individuals if one did not already know which group the dreamer fell into.

The importance of the biasing effect of information about the dreamer can be most clearly seen when such information is absent. As an example, read the following dream report from Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971, p. 118-119), as edited by Antrobus (1978, p. 570-71), and try to determine the type of surgery this patient will undergo:

We was working on a train ... a work train ... this Oregon crew came over on account of some washout or something.... So we saw them come down to that last station and do some switching. We figures ... also they came across the bridge up there someplace and hooked over onto our railroad. We was ... looking at this other engine and ... we lined the switch, it seemed like our switch ... it was a funny thing. They had to come off this private [rail] road onto ours and them switches weren’t a standard switch. We had to dig some rocks out of the ground ... and throw this switch over. And I was doing that, I was helping ... I can’t tell you what a switch is, instead of them being flapped over and locked down to the padlock they was flapped over, the ends of two pipes together and there was a piece of this crooked zigzag piece of iron that was run first in one pipe and then the other so you couldn’t lift the one out ... and we was digging them things out of them pipes so we could throw the switch for them guys so they wouldn’t have to stop ... they hadn’t used that switch it seemed like for years and naturally the sand and dust had blowed into these pipes and it was rusty. It took quite a while.... (p. 570-71)

 

The salient features of the above dream, as far as its symbolic interpretation by Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) and Antrobus (1978) is concerned, are the train and train tracks, the switch, and the rocks and dust that seem to block the switch. Even knowing which “symbols” in the dream are considered important by those with knowledge of the dreamer’s surgery does not at all constrain the possible interpretations if one does not have such knowledge. In fact, it is almost impossible to think of an operation that is not consistent, after the fact, with the dream if symbolic interpretation of the dream content is permitted.

Perhaps the dreamer will have a brain tumor removed. In that case, the rocks and dust would symbolically reflect the tumor mass. The train and its tracks would represent the normal flow of cognition that was interrupted by the tumor. The switch could further represent the ability to change (“switch”) from one type of cognitive process to another, an ability lost in many types of brain damage. Or perhaps the fellow had a kidney stone. Here the train would symbolically represent the fluid in the kidney that is blocked by the kidney stones. The stones and dust in the switch would, of course, represent the kidney stone itself. The train tracks would no doubt be interpreted as symbolic representations of the actual nephrons of the kidney, the tubular structures through which fluid actually moves. In the case of a gallstone, interpretation is almost identical except that, if the gallstone was at the junction of the cystic duct, which originates in the gall bladder, and the common hepatic duct, which originates in the liver, the blocked switch would almost certainly be interpreted as an elegant symbolic representation of the dreamer’s particular anatomical problem. The dream could also be symbolically interpreted to represent a tumor of the intestinal tract; blockage of one of the major arteries of the brain; a stroke in which a blood vessel in the brain had burst; or atherosclerosis, a buildup of fatty materials in the blood vessels that, when it occurs in the arteries of the heart, can lead to coronary bypass surgery.

All of the possibilities given above could be seen as symbolically represented in the dream. But the dreamer was suffering from none of those conditions. Instead, he suffered from “vascular blockages in his legs” (Breger, Hunter, and Lane 1971, p. 106), and the surgery was to remove a portion of the blood vessel that was blocked. Naturally, Breger, Hunter, and Lane interpret this dream only in terms of the operation they know the patient is going to have, stating that the railroad tracks and switch represent the patient’s “clogged blood vessels” (p. 122). Antrobus (1978) gives an even more detailed symbolic interpretation, contending that “there is a double representation in this report of some features of the impending surgery. The veins are similar to the railroad track. Blood moving through the veins is similar to the train moving along the tracks” (p. 571). Certainly one must agree that some of the images in the dream are “similar,” in one way or another, to certain features of the patient’s disease. But they are also “similar,” given a little creative interpretation, to some features of almost any other conceivable type of surgery. In summary, symbolic interpretation of dreams, whether the intepretation is explicitly Freudian or not, meets one of the major criteria for being considered a pseudoscience: the interpretations are unfalsifiable.

It is appropriate to inquire here a bit further into the nature of the content of dreams. If the contents are not symbolic, what are they? Studies of the neurobiological basis of dreaming sleep have shown that the dreams contain semirandom collections of images, thoughts, and feelings thrown together in a hodgepodge that seems particularly bizarre and incoherent (Hobson and McCarley 1977; Hobson 2001; Lydic and Baghdoyan 1986). Dreams are generated only during certain phases of the sleep cycle, when structures in the midbrain randomly activate groups of neurons in the cortex. Since most memories are stored in the cortex, this pattern of activation of cortical neuronal groups results in a bizarre, at least semirandom, sequence of images that are experienced as a dream. The dream content is not totally random because activities during the day can influence dream content. However, such influence is rather direct and not symbolic. Thus, one’s dreams are likely to have rather different characteristics if one has just seen a Walt Disney film as opposed to a horror movie. Similarly, studies have shown that personal problems and anxieties do show up in dream content, but in a fairly straightforward way (Hobson 2001; McCarley 1977); thus, if one is worried about an important exam, one might dream about being in the examination room but not being given a copy of the exam and being unable to attract the instructor’s attention so as to obtain a copy. Similarly, if one has spent a good portion of the day working on one’s stamp collection, a stamp-related theme is somewhat more likely to appear during the night’s sleep. This is probably because those areas of the cortex corresponding to the activity engaged in during the day are somewhat more easily activated by lower brain center stimulation during dreaming sleep.

The process of dream generation, at least as far as content is concerned, can perhaps best be compared to taking one hundred feature-length films, cutting them all up into two-foot-long segments, and mixing all the tens of thousands of segments together. One would then draw out about fifteen or twenty minutes’ worth of these segments and splice them together. When the result was shown, one would have a bizarre and incoherent set of images, most of which would still be recognizable to some degree. The film would, of course, have no “meaning” whatsoever, but this would certainly not prevent those inclined to find hidden, symbolic messages everywhere from interpreting the film symbolically in any way they wished. Any such interpretation would have no validity, in spite of the fact that it might be highly creative.

[Guest spam dumpster]

I read enough of this to get the point...

Science doesn't know that much about dreaming.  Not yet, anyway.  Science doesn't discount the idea that dreams mean something about how we're feeling, but I do think they're highly sceptical about any universal textbook approach to their meanings (i.e. door = vagina or bridge =  challenge).

 

When people ask me what their dream meant, my proposed interpretations are limited by what I know about them.  I think dreams aren't without meaning.  I think, more often than not, they're metaphors for how we're feeling at the time, even in ways we may not aritculate or admit to ourselves in our waking hours.  But, like any metaphors, they're defined by the individual, not by some freudian text book.

Here's a condensed version what science did know about dreaming as of last September:

[Mister Mister]

   Yes I don't think dream interpretation is or should be considered to be a science, any more than the interpretation of a painting or a movie or a song, until/unless we have a more solid understanding of dreams and consciousness in general.  It is a process that involves some speculation, creativity, and imagination, which means we should be careful, but does not mean that it cannot be useful.  The scientific method is great in many ways, but does not have a lot to say about creativity and imagination and I don't think we should allow ourselves to be convinced that these most mysterious aspects of consciousness have no value.

[dazed and confused]

well, when i say "is it pseudoscience" then what i basically mean is "is it bullshit". and the more i think about it now, the more the answer seems to be "yes it is"

[Guest spam dumpster]

 

well, when i say "is it pseudoscience" then what i basically mean is "is it bullshit". and the more i think about it now, the more the answer seems to be "yes it is"

 

 

Oh, I wouldn't go that far.  Most of psychology is bullshit, and all of is it pseudoscience.  That doesn't mean there isn't a valid way to interpret dreams.

[Pepin]

Science is quite an annoying term because there are many definitions, and many like to claim that concepts that don't adhere to strict definitions or metholodies cannot be considered to be true and ought to be discarded. This kind of argumentation drives me a little crazy, especially in regards to psychology, because we are talking about a complex arrangement of atoms trying to understand another complex arrangement of atoms. Rationally, expecting any sort of physics like accuracy is not quite understanding the mechanisms invovled in the task at hand. Even worse is how scientific minded people are so willing to discredit the effectiveness of placebos. If a placebo works, does this not indicate a biological change in the person, meaning that it did. I think I am ranting.

[Guest darkskyabove]

 

Science is quite an annoying term because there are many definitions, and many like to claim that concepts that don't adhere to strict definitions or metholodies cannot be considered to be true and ought to be discarded... I think I am ranting.

 

Sounds like you're annoyed by amateur commentary about science. In my experience, people who actually do scientific work are not as arrogant as the arm-chair geniuses who have a lot to say, but no work of their own to show for it. I always like to check my premises. Reading actual research vs. what someone says about the research can reveal significant insight into the motivation behind the non-scientist, in addition to gaining a clearer understanding of the actual research.

One of the many good things about science is the amount of different views that come to be explored; good science does not claim to have all the absolutely-proven truths that non-scientists take such delight in propping up as straw men, followed by a liberal dose of accelerant and the ceremonial application of the match.

Yes, modern science has fairly strict guidelines on methodology; it's been shown to be a better idea than otherwise. But only so far as science attempts to go. Again, good science is not claiming that it knows, or can explain, everything (though they try hard). In fact, the scientific method is just that; a carefully defined set of criteria with its own limitations. Seems fair. If I can't put god in a test tube, don't try to put god in my science.