Freud - The Dream as Wish Fulfillment

The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud

The chapter "Distortion in Dreams" seems tenuously argued-

• "Probably this is precisely its function"
• "This discovery may prove to be generally valid..."  followed almost immediately by the bald assertion-
• "Wherever a wish fulfillment is unrecognizable and disguised there must be present a tendency to defend oneself against this wish, and in consequence of this defense the wish is unable to express itself save in a distorted form."  There follows a clever and suggestive analogy to political life in Austria and then-
• "The detailed correspondence between the phenomena of censorship and phenomena of dream distortion justifies us in presupposing similar conditions for both."  Does the cleverness and completeness of an analogy really constitute proof of an idea?
• "It is not a farfetched assumption..."
• "It may be shown that psychopathology simply cannot dispense with these fundamental assumptions."
• "We may now begin to suspect..."
• "We now see that this is possible..."
• "Proof" is then constructed by his analysis of some dreams (using a method that presupposes that every dream is a wish fulfillment).  We are pretty deep into some circular reasoning here.
• "You know that the stimulus of a dream always lies among the experiences of the preceding day."  Do I?  Where is the proof of this assertion?"
• "Now the meaning of the dream is clear."  The interpretation is ingenious and seems plausible, but is it proven in any degree of rigor?

 "Dream Analysis" seems not too far from Literary Criticism.  The analysis may be ingenious, creative, even plausible, but what method would serve to offer conclusive proof of an interpretation?

The most striking image from the entire chapter is Freud's conviction that many dreams offered as counter example's to his theory that all dreams are wish fulfillment simply arose from the WISH of his detractors to prove him wrong.  Whatever his other faults, I do not get the sense that Sigmund suffered from an unhealthy ego.