This work shows how Grunbaum’s critique, “Manifest Dream-Content a Compromise-Formation with Repressed Wishes. A critique of Freud’s pre-analytic and psychanalytic dream-theory” is wholly inconsistent.
First, it shows that Freud’s theory of dreams as wishfulfillment was not based on the neurophysiological model of the “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, as Grunbaum suggested.. Further, his reading of this text rests on four very serious conceptual confusions: 1) confusion between sleep and dream; 2) confusion between structure and function; 3) confusion between real and rational; 4) confusion between primary process and irrationality. Finally, it is demonstrated that, even in relation to psychoanalytic dream-theory, Grünbaum confuses the Ego’s different notions in the development of Freud’s theory and radically misunderstands what Freud says about the “wish to sleep”. For all these reasons it is believed that Grünbaum’s work has absolutely no epistemological value for a critical analysis of Freud’s true theories.
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