When looking at the last point, it is more common in present times for people to have dreams that express their wish to fulfill fantasies. Freud’s feeling was that dreams were always driven by the person’s necessity to fulfill a wish. An example of such a dream occurred with Freud’s daughter, Anna. At the time, she was ill and so could not eat any food. In her dreams she would keep seeing strawberries, omelets and pudding.
Freud also felt that dreams represented a form of regression to our childhood and that they showed instinctual forces and images that at the time were present in our lives. He believed that the wishes we had in dreams had to be infantile desires although he accepted that this would not always be true.
When looking at dream mechanisms, Freud posed the question that although a simple dream can be a wish fulfillment, would the case be the same in a nightmare or anxiety dream. To explain this Freud said that dreams were made up of both manifest content and latent content. The manifest content is the part of our dream that is consciously remembered and the latent content is the part of our dream that can not be consciously remembered before the process of analysis begins. He stated that if a dream was interpreted properly, then it should be possible to find a wish fulfillment. The Latent is also the cause of the dream, and Freud identified two mechanisms here. These were that the sleeping mind begins to create a dream, based on a wish fulfillment
And the mind is shocked by the wish and censors it. This leads to distortion in the way the wish can appear in the dream.
There is also evidence that supports Freud’s claims here. When Freud was analyzing a patient, she told him that she had wanted to hold a dinner party but things kept going wrong. For example there was never enough food and as it was Sunday she could not order any more, the phone would not work and other problems. In the end, Freud found that the patient actually had an underlying jealousy for a friend that she had intended on inviting to the party. It turned out that the patient was afraid that her husband would be attracted to her friend.
Freud stated that the latent part to a dream would only be revealed through dream analysis and free association. He felt it was important as it showed the real intentions of the dream which at this point have been censored. The aim o it is to avoid the censor and let the dreams intentions be revealed.
The Symbolic Method; in Joseph’s dream in the bible, there were seven fat cows which were then followed by seven thin cows which ate them. The symbols in this dream showed that there were to be seven years of famine and then seven years of plenty. Although this method did not work well on dreams that had been confused and unintelligible.
The Decoding Method; in this case a fixed key was used to interpret the meaning of the dream. Freud criticized this though, saying that it was unscientific as the key could be wrong.
Freud discovered that his patients, when relaxed and free associating, would start to tell him of their dreams. He felt that this was a sign of more symptoms and used a similar form of free association. In order for the free association process to take place, the patient would need to be relaxed and feel safe. Therefore the following had to occur; that patient and analyst pay close attention to what is occurring in the patients though processes, and
They would be able to get rid of the critical censor.
In other words, Freud was trying to get his patients to look at themselves in an uncritical way and he would look at each part of the dream. His book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ gives examples of himself analyzing dreams, particularly his own. This was because he felt that as his patients had a problem, they would not really represent the norm. Freud has also given some advice which can still prove useful today. This was to interpret dreams are hard work and required perseverance, and after working on a dream it should then be left alone- fresh insights may come later.
One theory that Freud came up with was displacement. This is the shifting of emotions to different ideas. In such a case, the manifest content of the dream is different to the latent content but the feelings remain similar.
In the idea of condensation, two or more ideas get fused together within a dream. The deeper real meaning may then lie behind this dream image.
Symbolization is the idea that the images in dreams are symbolic and may secretly represent other things. Freud believed that most symbolization was of a sexual nature.
Resistance was the idea that we may forget a dream due to censorship.
Freud also felt that the content of a dream was hidden by a series of symbols and so named them Freudian symbols. He had the opinion that symbols could have more than one meaning and so they would need to be analyzed to come to the correct conclusion. In order to understand the symbols, Freud used two different methods, which were exploring the dreamers own associations
And using the analyst’s knowledge of common dream symbols to ‘fill in the gaps’
Freud as a result came to the conclusion that the following represented symbols of a sexual nature. Sticks, knives, umbrellas and other pointed objects represented the penis. Boxes, chests, ovens cupboards and any other containers show the uterus. Going up and down ladders or stairs represented sexual intercourse. Playing with young children represented masturbation.
