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p. 152. Why did the analysis of dream content fail to become a science?locked

  • J. Allan Hobson

Abstract

‘Why did the analysis of dream content fail to become a science?’ focuses on Freud's psychoanalytic model as it was developed in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud wanted his psychology to have a solid foundation in brain science, but he was 100 years too early to build it as we now can. For this reason, he was forced to resort to speculative philosophy, the medium of all pre-modern dream theories that analyse content. The cause of the failure of psychoanalytic dream theory is discussed along with associations, brain–mind isomorphism, and the science of dreaming.

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