Sigmund Freud's Contributions to Dream Science

Although unpopular in some psychological circles, Sigmund Freud is arguably the most influential psychologist of all time, having had wide-ranging impact beyond the field of psychology in art, literature, advertising, and popular culture. There are many errors in his huge corpus but, also, seminal contributions that have been verified but which, because of psychology's severe silence, have been lost to psychology. This paper reclaims and elaborates Freud's contributions to dream science (e.g., dreams are hypermnesic; dreams have meaning, and at both surface ["manifest"] as well as deeper ["latent"] semantic levels; context is largely responsible for psychological depth; free-associations map semantic networks and provide context for deep meanings; both universal symbols and universal distortions are at play in dreams). Freudian distortions (e.g., dream-work distortions) turn out to be identical to Bartlettian distortions but for motive (defense vs. schematization). The manifest- versus latent-content distinction can be formulated in analysis of variance terms as the distinction between main effects and interactions. Because of the unique cluster of phenomena involved, the neural default network may be conceived of as the "Freud Network."