Aristotle was Plato’s student that carried on similar principles on psychoanalysis but leading them further to the beginning of psychoanalysis as a science. He was the first to completely reject the idea of any relationship between dreams and divine intervention. He rejected the theory of Plato about the soul as an ideal entity separated from the body. He claimed that the soul and the body are interconnected and interact in reliance of one another and not autonomously. His concept brings to light the connection of biology and psychoanalysis and establishes a scientific viewpoint that is more connected to that of Hippocrates.
We can now talk about a biological soul that cannot reincarnate as it functions as a unity with the body and not separately from it. He believes that the soul has three forces or capabilities. The nourishing force that is connected to the nourishment and development of the body (reproduction), the sensory part that is our ability to collect information through our senses and is related to perception, movement, memory and association and the intellectual part that is the part of our rationality.
Even though the sensory part of the soul in the dream world is not active according to Aristotle it plays an important role in the way that dreams are produced. Our senses that are working during the day are inactive during our sleep but their effect is still occurring. When we are awake we can’t perceive the effects of our senses as we are experiencing new senses over and over again. In our sleep though when the senses are tranquil their effect is released and using our imagination we experience the movement of sensory impressions. These impressions may feel like actual senses in the dream but they are in fact the effect of senses we had in the past as a product of our imagination. In W.D Ross’s work ‘Aristotle’ we find the description of imagination “Imagination constitutes a by-product of the sense because it is connected with the appearance”. Imagination can manipulate pictures in its own ways.
So how do we perceive our dreams according to Aristotle? There are only two ways, either with the sensory or the rational part of the soul and since the sensory part of the soul is inactive during our sleep, we could only use the logical part to perceive our dreams. In his written passages about dreams he gives a very interesting example about our inactive senses. He writes that when we sleep our eyes our closed so we cannot see which means that our senses are inactive.
With this analysis Aristotle was considered one of the most influential philosophers in the West. He was the one that connected our everyday experiences with the content of our dreams. More specifically Freud’s theory of the subconscious mind could have been based on the idea of the effect of our senses during sleep. According to Aristotle when awake we have too many sensory stimuli, one after the other, that we cannot experience all the effects at that time. But somehow these effects are accumulated and stored somewhere in order to be released in our sleep when our senses are still. This could later be, according to Freud, the part of the brain where all the suppressed feelings, experiences and ideas are stored, our subconscious mind.
In Aristotle’s theories on dreams we have a direct advancement from divine elements connected with dreams to the biological state of man when dreaming. As we go through the history of dreams we find connections between theory patterns but also we can indicate the need of man to leave away from the blurry paths of the mystic and come closer to science and realism.