Freud next elaborates consequences of the structure he has postulated, as he examines the material dreams use (his Chapter V) and the mechanisms by which they reach their manifest form (his Chapter VI). The former investigation allows us to see whether his conception illuminates characteristics of dreaming he has not yet considered, like its favoring of recent and indifferent impressions. The latter effort – his delineation of the means by which the underlying “latent,” wish-fulfilling content of dreams changes into its manifest form – assumes the theory without providing any additional grounds for its evaluation. His fifth chapter turns out, on inspection, also assumes the theory.

A novel contribution of the fifth chapter is the assertion that dreams serve to guard sleep. The sixth chapter introduces the idea that dreaming is a primitive mental process. Freud overstates the case for the former and has yet to elaborate the import of the latter.

This chapter watches Freud develop and deploy his approach to dreaming. The chapter reviews the first three of five chapters that develop his vision of dreaming from observation.

Those chapters provide the core of Freud’s book’s argument, to wit: Dreams can be inserted into dreamers’ waking thought through a process of interpretation based in dreamers’ retrieval of memories and conjuring of impressions related to the elements of the dream. The process permits the identification of a wish the dream has fulfilled: A state of affairs dreamers would be happy to see come to pass. At least adult dreams rarely express directly wishes of the sort to which interpretation leads, wishes we would hesitate to express openly. Accordingly, Freud posits a process of distortion that converts the wish-fulfillment into unobjectionable, if bewildering, form.

Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams both painstakingly builds the case for a revolutionary theory of dreams and lays the foundation for Freud’s general theory of the mind, the latter an undertaking he believed necessary to account for dreams. He identified as the real breakthrough of the treatise his discovery that dreams fulfill wishes, a wish-fulfillment embodying a condition of relief, whether expressly desired or otherwise welcome.

The argument contains a gap absent from Freud’s account of other phenomena. The central problem—that even a successful dream analysis does not thereby translate, in reverse, into an account of how the dream formed – though observed before, warrants scrutiny in the context of Freud’s full argument and in comparison with his arguments elsewhere.

Accordingly, the book reconstructs Freud’s treatise, in preparation for an evaluation of his argument, after which it compares the account of dreams with his explanation of other experiences and with his avowedly speculative work.

Neither Freud’s extrapolation from the endpoint of the analysis of dreams to their origin nor his attempt to derive the account from general theory appears to support the conclusions he reaches about dreaming. The gap in his argument appears not to have an equal in his other lines of writing. Consequently:

1. 1. The Interpretation of Dreams cannot form the bedrock of his other treatises.

2. 2. His larger project, consequently, is little affected by the weakness of the tract.

3. 3. We need not, on those accounts, abandon the practice of interpreting dreams.

4. 4. We may still be driven by a pleasure principle, even if dreams do not carry out wish-fulfillment.

Freud might have been blindsided, in formulating his dreams theory, by his insistence that all mental processes are purposive. Purposiveness may be incompatible with sleeping, and by extension dreaming. The apparatus Freud maps out in The Interpretation of Dreams and elsewhere may pertain only, though still illuminatingly, to waking life.

Freud shows that dreams, via the process of element-by-element analysis, can be inserted into the occupations of dreamers’ waking mental life, of which dreams, as analyzed, represent an improvement for the dreamer. It is less clear that dreams themselves accomplish that outcome, that they fulfill a wish. Freud does not offer any grounds independent of the analysis itself that dreams arise for that purpose. Counterarguments he proposes, like that dream analyses could not arrive at the conclusions they do without the tracks’ having been laid down beforehand, do not salvage the argument.

To try to situate the apparent gap within Freud’s thought and to investigate its implications for his larger program, the next three chapters examine to what degree similar weaknesses appear in his treatment of other subjects.