0.2 Sigmund freud  (Page 29/37)

The Elements of Dream Analysis

For someone who considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious mind, it is no surprise that Freud’s first book of his own was The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1995). The value of this work never diminished, and Freud devoted a chapter to dream interpretation in one of his last books: An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Freud, 1938/1949). In the latter book, published only a year before Freud died, he wrote:

The only thing that can help us are states of conflict and uproar, when the contents of the unconscious id have a prospect of forcing their way into the ego and into consciousness and the ego puts itself once more on the defensive against this invasion. …Now, our nightly sleep is precisely a state of this sort, and for that reason psychical activity during sleep, which we perceive as dreams, is our most favourable object of study. In that way, too, we avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of normal mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person… (pg. 38)

Freud described our recollection of a dream as a façade, a covering that hides the underlying process of the dream. Thus, a dream has both manifest content and latent content . The manifest content (or the dream-content) of a dream is what we actually remember when we wake up. The latent content (or the dream-thoughts), however, is the true underlying meaning of the dream, the unconscious material from the id desiring satisfaction. Freud described the process by which the latent content is transformed into the manifest content as the dream-work (Freud, 1900/1995). Studying the nature of the dream-work, the way in which the unconscious material from the id forces its way into the ego but is transformed by the ego’s opposition to the impulse, allows us to understand what is known as dream-distortion (Freud, 1938/1949). The importance of dream-distortion becomes clear when we consider the purpose of dreams. Freud believed that all dreams represent our true desires. Therefore, all dreams can be viewed as wish fulfillment. Although some dreams can be very anxiety-provoking, and certainly do not seem to represent our wishes and desires, this is the result of the distortion. If we successfully analyze the dream and identify its latent content, then Freud believed we would recognize the true wish-fulfillment nature of even anxiety-provoking or frightening dreams (Freud, 1900/1995).

When we sleep, the ability of the ego to repress or otherwise redirect the unacceptable impulses of the id is paralyzed. The id, then, is afforded “a harmless amount of liberty” (Freud, 1938/1949). But the ego is still the seat of consciousness, and still exerts some influence over the expression of the id impulses. And so the dream is distorted, transformed into something less threatening to the ego, particularly into something not threatening enough to wake the person up. To summarize this situation, when we are asleep the ego is less able to restrain the id. Consequently, the impulses of the id intrude in the preconscious and then into the conscious mind. This provokes anxiety and threatens to wake us up. However, the dream transforms the id impulse into the fulfillment of a wish, and we are able to continue sleeping. As Freud described it: