Sigmund Freud On Dreams…

Who is Sigmund Freud?  Sigmund Freud was born in He began his study as a doctor and then specialized in psychiatry. In 1896 Freud coined the term "psychoanalysis," which is the study of the mental causes of psychiatric disorders.

Contemporary Views  Freud's work is now often considered out of date; however his influence on modern psychology is undeniably momentous.  One of the main issues that many psychologists and scholars alike have with Freud’s work is that his patients or “test subjects” were all mentally ill to begin with.  Why is this a problem?

Freud’s Theory  One of Freud's main concerns was the amount of activity that goes on in our minds without our awareness, also known as our subconscious. This resulted in his proposal of the now infamous "Ego, Super Ego, and ID" model of the human consciousness and led to Freud’s further research into the area of dreams and dream interpretation.

What do Dreams Mean? Wish Fulfillment  According to Freud, dreams are a way in which we can “see” into our unconscious. In other words, fears, desires and emotions that we are usually unaware of make themselves known through dreams. To Freud dreams were fundamentally about wish-fulfillment. Even "negative" dreams are a form of wish-fulfillment; the wish being that certain events do not occur.  Freud believed that although our dreams contain these important messages, they are disguised just as the meanings in literature are disguised. The unconscious mind reduces language to rhetoric or symbolism through which it must communicate its meanings. Some of these symbols are near-universal, others very personal

Manifest vs Latent  Freud thus distinguished between the "manifest content" of dreams (what we actually dream) and the "latent content" of dreams (the unfulfilled wish that the dream represents).  Freud suggested that very often our conscious mind actively tries to reject the messages of our dreams; we "repress" this knowledge, or forget our dreams. Dreams are often an expression of a repressed wish that we would rather not admit to - they thus indicate an internal conflict that can in turn be at the core of mental disturbance. It is this reason that many schizophrenic patients are said to have been realized through hallucinogen drug use. The “dreams” or hallucinations that the drug users has while high can express internal conflict and cause the mental disturbance to occur for various reasons.

Freudian Technique  Freud's main technique for analyzing dreams was to encourage the dreamer, or patient, to look not at the direct content of the dream but at the thoughts and emotions it generated. These thoughts and emotions will then lead to other thoughts and emotions and so on. Simply, the technique was asking the patient to state the first things that came to mind when they thought of the dream or were asked about specific parts of the dream.

An example…  Assume your dream included birds. This image might remind you of feeding the birds as a child, which might lead to a memory of one particular day in the park, which might remind you of your mother, etc.  The job of the analyst is to record the chain of associations and assist the dreamer's self- understanding. Freud would look at each individual component of a dream and use each as a starting point then attempt to pull all the threads together into an overall analysis. In this way the dreamer can "sneak up" on repressed emotions.

Freud and Literature  Psychoanalysis, as a structure of modern psychology aims to investigate the interaction of the conscious and unconscious mind in order to bring repressed fears to the surface. Therefore, psychoanalysis has been theorized to hold the key to unlocking the unconsciousness or hidden meanings in literature.

An Interpretation  According to Freud, the vision of a house in a dream is the representation of the human form as whole. The fixtures that make up a house are also considered by Freud as symbolic, for instance a window or a door. A window, according to Freud is symbolic of the opening of the body which may allow evil to come in or be kept out of the body. It is through these representations that authors have found a medium in which to disguise their meaning and allow the reader to delve deeper in their own understanding of consciousness.