Prefreudian Anticipations of the Ancient Interpretations of Dreams - an Example of Plato, Herodotus and Cicero

The main goal of this paper is to substantiate the thesis of subconscious (not prophetic, not exclusively prophetic, that is) interpretations of dreams by the ancient. The quoted texts of Plato, Herodotus and Cicero reveal prefreudian roots of psychoanalysis. The author of the article makes clear obvious distinctions between the ancient way of thinking and the Freudian one and at the same time points out to the essential common characteristic of the ancient interpretations of dreams and the contemporary notions of depth psychology on that subject (Freudism, individual psychology of Adler, analytic psychology ot Jung, neopsychoanalysis of Fromm) - the belief in the existence of unconscious psychic phenomena expressing themselves among other things in dreaming. Therefore in the presented interpretations of ancient authors such contemporary terms as conscious, psychoanalytic and referring to depth psychology appear. The introductory part of the article is an attempt to describe the circumstances under which the widely known idea about the prognostic ancient attitude towards dreams was being formulated and established. The author proposes to replace the term a prognostic dream with a prospective dream, or rather introduce it as a compelitive one. The focal point of the paper is an extract from Politei in which Plato endeavours to prove that while dreaming "the wild animal" part of a soul "does not flinch from attempting sexual intercourses neither with the mother nor with anybody else from among humans, gods or animals, sheds whosever blood it happens to, and shuns no nourishment whatsoever. In short, it is not free of anything that comes out of stupidity or licentiousness”