Sigmund Freud and the Analysis of Dreams
Sigmund Freud and the Analysis of Dreams
PART I
Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in what is now Pribor, Czech Republic. He moved to Vienna, Austria in 1860 and Freud began school at Vienna University in 1875. In 1881, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine. Freud researched medicinal effects of coca, hypnotherapy, and in 1895, he began to analyze his own dreams.
PART II
Freud formed his theory of dreaming, published in The Interpretation of Dreams, by the analysis of his own dreams. He kept a journal of his dreams, reflected on them, and concluded that dreams are the fulfillment of wishes, whether conscious or not. Freud said that all dreams contain common elements such as a childhood memory, possibly a conflict or an emotionally-charged experience. This early memory is blended with events from the past few days that relate to it. These recent events are called “day residue”.
While dream analysis seems to be a simple process, early childhood memories or traumas are often repressed. An “inner censor” has hidden the dreamer’s true wishes. The inner censor distorts the dream’s meaning. Often, the features of many different people are compressed into one character. The censor can also transfer comments for one person to a different one in the dream, and sometimes substitute a symbol for a person. “… A father may become a king, a mother a cupboard, a child an animal.” (Muckenhoupt) The censor changes verbal thoughts into visual images, and other symbols can take the form of verbal cues.
Once the censoring process is complete, the unconscious conflict has been changed and manipulated into symbolic content. When the person awakes he or she must make sense of the symbols and force a “logical structure” onto the dream. Freud wrote, “A dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.” (Muckenhoupt) Since a dream is simply a symbol for a deeper desire, the psychoanalyst must “decode” the latent content in order to find out what the subconscious is bringing out.
A common type of dream that Freud dealt with was the anxiety dream. Some dreams of this type result from sexual wishes where this sexual energy, or libido, is converted into anxiety. This is especially true when the wish is revealed too clearly in the dream. Other times, the cause...