THE JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY

SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS[*]

WITH A THEORY TO EXPLAIN THE DREAM-PROCESS AS APPERCEPTIVE TRIAL-AND-ERROR.

[*] A paper read at Columbia University, April 19, 1915, at a Joint Meeting of the New York Branch of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences, Section of Anthropology and Psychology.

LYDIARD H. HORTON

HISTORICALLY speaking, dreams have always been credited with meanings; but, in a given case, the psychologist must ask, how far does the accredited meaning represent the mere fancy of the interpreted and how far does it mirror actual conditions in the dreamer's mind. To seek aught beyond these is but idle divination. For of all dreams it is true, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "that the reason for them is always latent in the individual." "Things are significant enough, Heaven knows;" he exclaims, "but the seer of the sign,—where is he?"[1]

Not till the last year of the nineteenth century, did an answer come; it was
Sigmund Freud's work, "The Interpretation of Dreams," which said, in effect,
"Here am I, in Vienna."[2]