Do you often dream at night? Most people do. When they wake in the morning they say to themselves,“What a strange dream I had! I wonder why I had such a dream.” Sometimes dreams are frightening and sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. Sometimes in dreams we can fly through the air, and at other times we are troubled by dreams. In dreams we act very strangely. We do things which we never do when we are awake. We think and say things we never think and say. Why are dreams so strange? Where do dreams come from?
People have tried to answer this since the beginning of time. But no one has produced a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. He said that one's dream-world seems strange and unusual because dreams come from a part of one's mind which one cannot recognize or control. He named this the ”unconscious mind.”
Freud was one of the great explorers of our time. But the new worlds he explored were inside man himself. The unconscious mind is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. These memories and feelings have been there from the moment of our birth --perhaps even before birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not think that they are there until we have some unhappy or unusual experience, or have dreams. Then suddenly we may see a face we forgot long ago. We may feel the same fear and disappointments we felt when we were little children.
This discovery of Freud's is very important if we wish to understand why people act as they do, for the unconscious forces inside us are as powerful as the conscious forces we know about.
Why do we choose one friend rather than another? Why does one story make us sad or happy, while another story doesn't influence us at all? Perhaps we know why. If we don't, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds.
When he was a child Freud cared about the pain of others, so it wasn't surprising for him to become a doctor when he grew up. Like other doctors he learned all about how the human body works, but he became more and more interested in the human mind. So he went to Paris to study diseases of the mind and nerves.
In Freud's day few doctors were interested in a man's thoughts, ideas or dreams. Freud wanted to know why we think and feel as we do. He wanted to know how our minds work. So, in 1886 he began to work as a doctor of nerve diseases.
One day a friend, Dr Josef Breuer, came to see Freud and told him about a girl he was looking after. The girl seemed to get better when she talked freely about herself. She told Dr Breuer everything that came into her mind, and as she talked to him she remembered more about her life as a little child. Freud was excited when he heard about this. Perhaps this was the way to help his patients, he thought. He began to treat his patients in the same way. He asked about the events of their early years, and wanted them to talk about their own experiences. He himself said very little because he did not want to stop them, and wanted them to speak as they wished. Freud kept silent and quietly accepted everything they told him, the good things and the bad. Sometimes, talking to him in this way seemed to ease their pain.
Freud called this kind of treatment the ”talking cure.” Later it was called psychoanalysis. When patients talked freely about the things that were troubling them they often felt better. They learned to control their fears.
The things that patients told him sometimes shocked Freud. For example, people can become blind, or lose the power of speech, because of the events they experienced when they were children. Freud began to find that the human mind was a dark and mysterious place.
Freud was attacked from all sides for the things he said and wrote. He made many enemies, but he also found many friends who gladly said. ”Freud has at last found a way to open the secrets of the human mind, and to help people who are very miserable.”
He became famous all over the world and taught others to use the ”talking cure.” His influence on modern culture and science is great. Writers, painters, teachers, and many more people learned something from the great man who discovered the way into the unconscious mind.
Not all of Freud's ideas are accepted today, but others have followed him and have helped us to understand ourselves better. Because of Freud, and others like him, there is more hope today than there has ever been before for people who were once just called ”crazy.”