This chapter examines areas of knowledge where the Romans displayed expertise and consciously sought to develop techniques and systems that enabled them to better understand and control future uncertainties. It begins by looking at architecture, military logistics and law, before moving on to aspects of financial management, such as maritime loans, interest rates and annuities; it then finishes by looking at the probabilistic thinking involved in the religious practices of oracle and dream interpretation. It argues that the ancients did not rely solely on religion to deal with uncertainty. The Romans thought systematically and creatively about many areas where future uncertainty could be assessed and managed. These approaches were not statistical but all show an awareness of a range of likelihoods and possibilities. The Romans did not have statistical models, nor had they worked out how to calculate probabilities, but they did develop a range of sophisticated ways of dealing with the many unknowns they faced.

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.

Freud wrote some admittedly far-fetched speculative works addressing what he considered to be fundaments of the human psyche. Chapter 7 considers two of his most speculative pieces, “The return of totemism in childhood,” the fourth essay of his Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Both writings, despite their fantastical nature, contain a coherence and completeness The Interpretation of Dreams lacks. Throughout the Totem and Taboo excerpt, Freud examines his suppositions and, in the end, offers an enlightening, if hypothetical, account of totemism, the evolution of religion, and a prehistoric piece of modern mentality. The steps, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through which he reaches his improbable anchoring of mental life in dueling life and death instincts are clear, if avowedly extreme at the time.

Freud’s investigation of mental life took him beyond psychoneuroses and dreams to other phenomena of waking life. Though well aware of behavior requiring no special explanation, he identified some occurrences on which he thought he might productively bring his explanatory apparatus to bear. Those occurrences consist of short-term behaviors and experiences that, although common, elude straightforward explanation, thus licensing Freud to explore the applicability of the mechanisms he had ascribed to other instances of non-ordinary functioning.

The chapter examines his treatment of the mental glitches he called parapraxes – small involuntary errors, like slips of the tongue – and jokes, as well as more passive experiences like getting lost in a book and the feeling of the uncanny. In each instance, Freud builds a more compelling case than he does with respect to dreams that processes along the lines he proposes are needed to produce the result in question.

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 investigation of dreams drew heavily from his first psychological effort, his treatment of patients with psychoneuroses. This chapter examines how Freud extrapolates from analysis to genesis in the case of neuroses and whether the extrapolation stands on firmer ground than does the one he makes for dreams. It reviews his first complete analysis, of Fräulein Elisabeth von R, conducted in 1892, and then a portion of his “Wolf Man” case history, completed in 1914.

The convergence of the ebb and flow of symptoms in both cases with the uncovering of significant emotional material lends strong support to the idea that the symptoms and themes were related. No comparable external support exists for Freud’s vision of the genesis of dreams, including in the Wolf Man’s case, in which the analysis of a dream proved instrumental in his recovery.

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.

In his final chapter, Freud tries to show that his dreams theory follows from larger principles about the way our minds work.

Wish-fulfillment, he argues, is a very old function, embodied, even, by the nervous system, which operates to discharge excitation. Dreaming, as psychically primitive, realizes that function, and only that function. It is set in motion by a wish that, if unattended, would wake us. A dream, fulfilling such a wish, allows us to sleep on. It hallucinates the fulfillment, hallucination of the mental equivalent of a reflex, serving the purpose of discharging an irritant.

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.