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The Interpretation of Dreams is the one most famous books written by Freud. This book was written in 1899. Freud wrote this book on his theory of dreams. His theory implies that your dreams represent a desire of your unconscious to fulfill a wish.
Your dream is what your unconscious is thinking, and by dreaming it, you are in a way acting out your wish. Dreams have long been subject to controversy, whether they are a source of predicting the future, or as Sigmund Freud portrayed them as the royal road to the unconscious. Sigmund Freud was a renowned psychologist who, although did not originate the concept of dream interpretation, was integral in developing some methodologies of utilizing the dream as a means of deciphering the psyche of the dreamer, particularly in uncovering and analyzing the dreamer's psychological problems. In Freud's view, the purpose of dreams was to allow the individual to experience the instinctual urges that society deems unacceptable. As Freud was a product of the Victorian age, much of his dreamworks focused on the symbolism of dreams as projections of feelings of sexual frustration and guilt.
The leading dream theory since the early twentieth century has been that of psychoanalysis according to Sigmund Freud. Freud's theory encompassed the idea that dream formation is the psychological disguise of an unconscious wish. During the sleep state, the ego or self relaxes its vigilance toward the id or instinct, which allows forbidden wishes or drives to escape from their safe confinement that resides in the unconscious. If these freed desires invaded the consciousness, they would disrupt sleep.
The part of the psyche called the censor protects sleep by transforming the real import of the unconscious wishes into symbols whose meaning is concealed from the dreamer. Freud believed that all aspects of the manifest or remembered dream content were the result of censorship and in disguise of its true content. This means that the true meaning of dreams was obscure to the dreamer, but that it could be revealed by psychoanalysis using an interpretive technique that urged the dreamer to free associate in response to the manifest content. Freud analogized that dreaming was similar to a neurosis in that all mental content of both the waking and sleeping states were symptoms of pathologically repressed wishes. Freud's theory of dreams embodies a distinction that he made between two levels of dreams. One level is the manifest content of the dream; this is the content of the dream, which a person is able to remember.
If I were able to tell someone the dream I had experience the previous night, I would be reporting the manifest content. Manifest content, in Freud's view, possessed no meaning or significance because it was the disguised representation of the true thoughts underlying the dream. These thoughts make-up the latent contents (the second level of dreams) and consists of unconscious wishes and fantasies, which have been, denied gratification. These wishes find an outlet through being expressed in a transformed way and eventually appear in an unrecognizable form in the manifest content. It is as if two languages are represented, with one being a cleaned-up version of something that is much more raw and crude. The first dream that Freud analyzed using this method was one of his own (The Dream of Irma's Injection).
In the dream, Freud was at a gathering at which Irma (one of his own patients in real life) fell ill after being injected by one of his colleagues with propyl. Freud then saw vividly before him the formula for the chemically related substance trimethylamin, printed in heavy type. Like dream, contents are this dream was disjointed, somewhat bizarre, and made no obvious sense. When Freud free-associated to this directly experienced but nonsensical content of his dream a series of unsuspected ideas emerged that did make sense. These included the recollection that his best friend Fliess, who was a doctor (although not the doctor in his dream), had been dangerously negligent in an operation that he had asked Fliess to perform on Irma in real life.
Freud also recalled a recent conversation with Fliess in which they had speculated about the role of trimethylamin in the chemistry of the body's sexual processes. These recollections in turn led to a whole jumble of conflict-laden thoughts and wishes regarding both Fliess and Irma. These encompassed feelings of resentment and anger towards his friend Fliess and of a certain sexual attraction between himself and his patient (Irma). Many of these thoughts were anxiety arousing and difficult to accept, but Freud felt forced to acknowledge that they were true, that they made sense, and that they therefore constituted the real motivation and meaning of his dream. Freud was convinced that virtually any dream could be interpreted in much the same manner as he interpreted his own dream of Irma and could be shown to have some remarkable similarities to hysterical symptoms. When the remembered dream experience, referred to by him as its manifest content, was subjected to free association in the same way that hysterical patients's ymptoms were, a previously unconscious latent content was revealed.
This latent content seemed to stand in many of the same relationships to the manifest content that unconscious pathogenic ideas stood to hysterical symptoms. In both instances, the conscious products were psychologically safer (less anxiety arousing) than the original unconscious ideas that had to be recovered through free association. Further, individual symptoms and manifest dream images both seemed to represent several different unconscious ideas at once; e. g. , a whole group of different pathogenic ideas often underlay a single hysterical symptom, just as a large number of complexly interrelated ideas had been associated with his brief dream sequence of Irma's injection dream. Freud called this phenomenon over determination in the case of symptoms and condensation in the dreams. One of Freud's most interesting patients where he employed his dream analysis was the case of Ida Bauer a.
k. a. "and his Dora." During October of 1900, an industrialist took his eighteen-year-old daughter (Freud used for her the name of "Dora") to see Doctor Freud. Dora was acting peculiar and saying strange things. Freud welcomed Dora as a patient who would provide him with a suitable test of his theories of hysteria, his analysis technique and of his interpretation of dreams. Freud described Dora's family as follows: her father (Phillip Bauer) as a dominating figure, in his late forties, having unusual activities and talents (which Freud did not elaborate on) and living in a standard of comfort. Freud described Dora as being tenderly attached to her father, but took offense at many of his actions and peculiarities.
Her mother (Katherine Gerber Bauer) was supposedly an uncultivated woman, who concentrated all her interests upon domestic affairs and apparently had an obsession with cleaning and fears of dirt and contamination. Her brother (Otto Bauer) served as a role model for her, but their relationship had become distant during the last few years. Dora was on excellent terms with her governess until she found out that the governess was in love with her father. Dora recounts her first dream to Freud as follows: In her dream, their house was on fire. Her father was standing beside her bed and woke her up.
She dressed quickly. Her mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but her father said that he refused to let himself and his children to be burnt for the sake of her jewel-case. They hurried downstairs, and as soon as she was outside, she woke up. Her dream was analyzed by Freud using the house on fire, her father standing beside her bed, and her mother wanting to save her jewel-case from the burning house as the main components. He interpreted the father standing beside her bed as the father being there to protect her from the fire of sexual desire, which threatened to ruin them, by wetting them with disgusting sexuality, the jewel-case representing her genitals. Attempting to understand Dora's disgust for sexuality, Freud probed her amnesia of early masturbation, linked to her bed-wetting that lasted late into her childhood, and her first hysterical symptoms.
These had been sympathetic identifications with her father's physical exertions in intercourse, compounded by her self-reproaches for her vaginal discharge, which she linked to the frivolous and untrustworthy sexuality of men, as her governess viewed it. Her symptoms of hysteria expressed identification with an excitement in her father's sexuality, but they were also an attempt to escape contamination (her father had syphilis) by escaping heterosexual contact. It is easy for me criticize Freud's treatment, especially after a hundred years of growth and research in the area of psychology. One must remember that Freud was an originator of much of psychology's modern day practice. The concepts of his that have endured in modified form are transference-counter transference, the unconscious, defenses (like repression), free association, historical / developmental influences on psychological development, insight, dream interpretation, unconscious fantasy, the metaphysical structure of the mind (i.
e. , id, ego, superego), and the role of sex and aggression in personality and psychopathology. Many of his concepts are used differently than he originally intended, but this does not make them of less importance. In addition, we must note that the process and goals of therapy are different now than they were in Freud's era. The skills of a modern professional may facilitate dream work for those who are resistive to it, but they do not alter the nature of dream work itself. Dream work provides today's therapist with a tool, which enables them, a penetrating glimpse of what lives beneath the surface of one's psyche.
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