We shall now attempt to explain the three main parts of a dream in reverse to the order in which they occur in the mind, but in the order that we become consciously aware of them. The Manifest dream

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

All Dreams Represent Wishes;

Their Motive is a Wish and they Represent the satisfaction of It

by Martin Pierce. Student No: 1057404

“Dreams, psychologists immediately recognized, are phenomena that offer a means to explore mental structures and processes that are inaccessible to normal waking awareness. By means of careful observation, experimentation, and research, psychologists have found that dreams reveal many important aspects of our mental world. The dynamics of personality, the workings of perception and memory, the interactions of reason and emotion, the complex relations between mental experiences and bodily functions -- these are just some of the important subjects that psychologists have learned more about by studying dreams” .

A dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (repressed) wish (Freud, 1900a).

This is probably the most concise definition of a dream given by Freud.

“A more detailed definition of dreams would have to include such topics as the latent dream content, the dream work and the manifest dream, of which the dream-work is the most 'essential' part. Only through understanding its laws and conditions can we reach the latent dream content which contains the true and disguised wish. The reason behind the generally held view that dreams are invariably wish fulfillments is that dreams come from, and are products of the Unconscious. Which at its core has no other aim than the fulfillment of wishes” .

We shall now attempt to explain the three main parts of a dream in reverse to the order in which they occur in the mind, but in the order that we become consciously aware of them.

The Manifest dream is the culmination of the processes brought to bear on the latent contents of the dream by the dream work. It is the fulfilment in disguised form of our unconscious and repressed wishes and desires (Freud, 1900a). Manifest dreams are in general made up of a combination of objects, scenes and discussions, which have been observed either consciously or pre-consciously on the day of the dream. Another source of content from which the manifest dream can be derived is sensory or somatic stimuli during sleep e.g. thirst, pain, heat, sexual excitement etc.

Dreaming, Freud felt, is stimulated by unconscious and repressed wishes. Because these wishes are unconscious and repressed, a conflict arises between the unconscious and the conscious. This result's in what is known as the dream work, the dream work distorts and disguises the hidden wish behind innocent seemingly unrelated memories and abstract imagery (Freud, 1900a).

The dream work has at its disposal many tools with which it can disguise the latent content of the dream. It is by an understanding of these rules that we can attempt to prove that All Dreams Represent Wishes; their Motive is a Wish ...

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The process of the dream work is distortion, the transformation of the latent dream contents into the manifest dream, thereby allowing the wish to be expressed consciously while avoiding any problems a true expression of this wish would cause (Freud, 1900a).

There are two fundamental mechanisms at work in the distortion process. These are Condensation and displacement.

The first thing to be said about condensation is that people tend to underestimate the level of condensation that occurs in dreams. If you where to write out a dream and its corresponding analysis you would find that the analysis would take up to ten times more space than the actual dream, if not more. Condensation according to Freud is a process whereby a single manifest dream can carry two or more unconscious wishes simultaneously (Freud, 1900a). This can be most clearly seen in one of Freud’s own dreams i.e. The Irma Dream (Freud, 1900a, p.182). In this dream Irma is a condensation of Irma herself, Freud’s wife and a friend of Irma’s that Freud admires. In the dream, Irma has become a composite character; she represents all of these people, or at least certain aspects of them to Freud. Condensation does not only relate to people however. It also occurs with objects and even thoughts. A good example of this is another of Freud’s dreams The Botanical Monograph (Freud, 1900a, p. 254). An object in this dream, the “botanical monograph”, caused Freud to travel along a path of associations, eventually arriving back at one of the unconscious wishes that gave this particular dream its psychical energy (Freud, 1900a).

“Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wish fulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood” (Freud, 1900a).

Displacement is the process where by a psychically charged event or memory is removed from its original context and is adapted to fit into some other context. This other context is different or safe enough to provide distance from the original event. Through using displacement, painful or potentially harmful issues involving certain people or objects can be worked out in a dream using other less harmful or anxiety producing alternatives (Langs, 1988).

E.g., “Pauline was told by her surgeon that she would need a hysterectomy. That night, she dreamed:

She was watching a fireman being lowered into a well to rescue a cat that had been trapped in its depths.

Through displacement, the surgeon is represented by the fireman, and the removal of Pauline’s uterus is benignly portrayed as the rescue of a cat from a well” (Langs, 1988, p. 45-46).

In continuing to associate from this interpretation, we eventually find out that Pauline had had an abortion when she was much younger and that in her unconscious mind this had both frightened and horrified her (Langs, 1988). This was the event that gave the psychical energy to the construction of the dream. From this we can infer that the wish contained in the latent dream content was that this operation would not be as traumatic as her previous one, and that the fulfilment of this wish was the successful rescue of the cat from the well.

There are various other mechanisms used by the dream work to conceal the meaning behind a dream. Such as screen memories, this is where an innocuous memory is used as a screen behind which a more psychically charged memory can hide (Freud, 1900a). Another mechanism, reversal, generally occurs with affects in a dream. This is where the affect in the dream actually represents the opposite of the affect expressed (Freud, 1900a).

We then have the question of how anxious, distressing and nightmarish dreams can be wishes and wish fulfilments. This is easily explained if we remember that manifest dreams are the result of not one but two agencies acting in opposition, (the unconscious and the conscious) upon the latent dream content (Freud, 1900a). From this we can suppose that what is distressing to the conscious is not so to the unconscious. If this is so, then what is distressing to the conscious may actually be the fulfilment of a wish on behalf of the unconscious. Since we know that all dreams get their psychical energy from the unconscious and that the action of the conscious upon this energy is to censor and distort, it is reasonable to conclude that the distressing nature of these dreams is a direct result of the action of the conscious. i.e. the distressing content of the manifest dream serves only to disguise the unconscious wish (Freud, 1900a).

Freud maintained that all dreams when subjected to analysis by the recognition of the work of these mechanisms upon a dream would eventually lead back to an unconscious wish. Which being too traumatic, in its undistorted state to be expressed in the conscious mind, and which due to the force of psychical energy associated with it gave rise to the dream in the first place (Freud, 1900a).

“The term 'latent dream content' refers to all parts of a dream, which are not manifest but are only discovered through the work of interpretation” .

It is that part of the dream which is hidden from us, and which contains the primary trigger for the dream, the unconscious and repressed wish, i.e. wishes that are prevented from reaching consciousness during waking life.

The latent dream content may also contain preconscious material, these are the impressions of waking life that we have not taken conscious notice of during the day but which have retained some form of psychical energy and therefore arise in our dreams (Freud, 1900a).

Also sensory or somatic stimuli experienced during the night can under certain conditions be brought into the dream. This only happens however if these stimuli are in accordance with the psychical sources of the dream i.e. the unconscious wish (Freud, 1900a).

“Thus Freud maintained his theory that in 'the construction of dreams, the part of the catalyst is always played by the unconscious wish alone’ (Freud, 1900a) it provides the psychical energy for the construction of the dream” .

'...wishful impulses left over from conscious waking life must be relegated to a secondary position in respect to the formation of dreams. I cannot allow that, as contributors to the content of dreams, they play any other part than is played, for instance, by the material of sensations which become currently active during sleep.’ (Freud, 1933a)