Critically Compare How the Concept of Dreams Has Been Theorised by Freud and Two Other Psychoanalytic Theorists

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Critically Compare How the Concept of Dreams Has Been Theorised by Freud and Two Other Psychoanalytic Theorists

The dream is an often studied area of psychology, and looked upon with great detail in the area of psychoanalysis. Historically, dreams were first thought to be supernatural in origin. People assumed that a dream was an attempt, by some god or ghost, to contact the terrestrial realm with the goal of portraying a vision of the future. It would seem that with differing attitudes towards spirituality and religion, came differing attitudes towards exactly what certain dreams meant. Sometimes dreams were described as being of positive intention, sent from good willed gods as a way of aiding humanity in some way, while at other times, dreams are reported as being ‘daemonic,’ having nought but bad intentions behind them, sabotaging the lives of those unlucky enough to suffer a nightmare. This chaotic period of time, before psychoanalysis became prevalent, saw no exact conclusion as to the intrinsic meaning of dreams, or even a sound attempt at a method of working out why certain people were having certain dreams or how to decipher such dreams. It wasn’t until the work of psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud that a passable method of identifying dream meaning emerged. In the wake of Freud came other theorists, proposing different methods of looking at the content of dreams but a general theme seemed to remain; that the content of dreams was a collection of symbols pertaining to the inner most desires of an individual.
 This being an essay on dreams, it would make sense to first discuss how the material in dreams comes to be, or rather, why is it we see the things we see when we’re dreaming?
In ‘the interpretation of dreams,’ Freud states that all the material that makes up the content of dreams is ‘in some way derived from experience.’ This makes sense, as it would be impossible for the unconscious mind to create images and scenarios from nothing, with no point of reference. What is odd, however, is that a lot of the dream material comes from events in our past, be it recent or distant, that we have little or no conscious recognition of. Not to say we have blocked out these occurrences, but rather dreams seem to bring back memories of events we simply didn’t commit to conscious memory. Perhaps they were particularly mundane, or things that we do so often that we do not make note of them. This highlights the interesting ability of dreams to enhance many of our cognitive faculties while we are in the dream state. Dreams sometimes occur where the dreamer finds themselves in an arbitrary situation and for quite some time after waking, the dreamer pays no attention to what they have experienced. At a later date, the dreamer might experience something that suddenly brings to mind the event that had caused them to have the previously discussed dream, revealing that they had retained the memory of a long passed event and not even noticed! Freud calls this phenomenon the ‘hypermnesic dream.’
There have also been reports of multilingual people experiencing a greatly improved fluency when speaking or recalling words from their secondary language while dreaming (Vaschide 1911).

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  Aside from these interesting effects dreams seem to have on our minds; it seems more productive to focus on the more basic side of the material in dreams, as this is the foundation of Freud’s theorisations. According to Freud, the dream is nothing more than the fulfilment of a wish, an unconscious desire. Unconscious desires seemed to Freud to be linked much more often than not to the id, which is the fully unconscious, animalistic section of the unconscious mind. The id is the only section of the mind that we posess when we are born, making the infant ...

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