The Rediscovered Dream – Freud’s, Binswanger’s and Heidegger’s Concept of Dream

Abstract

After Romanticism, 19th century thinking conceives of the dream as a denial of reality. Freud, and later Binswanger, in different ways, gave dreaming a primary role over waking thought. For Freud, the dream is a hallucinatory wish-fulfilment, while in Binswanger’s conception it is a representation of existence. In formulating his own theory of dreaming, Binswanger is greatly inspired by Heidegger’s Being and Time. However, Heidegger describes in Being and Time the waking modes of being of Dasein, moreover dream is not a preoccupation of the late Heidegger. In the Andenken-texts, the references of dream function actually as metaphors for Dasein’s waking modes of being.