Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

Why persons dream, what they dream, and what their dreams mean, are subjects of interest to a wide range of researchers, and a wide range of artists and clinical practitioners. The Interpretation of Dreams looks at what dreams mean intrinsically and at what meanings dreams make for waking dreamers. It must also be recognized that the perspective from which Freud examines and interprets dreams is that of the professional psychologist and that the clinical neurosis of the subjects of his interpretations is to be presumed. To put it another way, Freud's subjects are patients, but the conclusions that he draws from observing them and interpreting their dreams are generalized to the human condition as a whole.

Three premises dominate Freud's approach to explaining the role of dreams in the human psyche. One is that "interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." In other words, determining the meaning and significance of a dream may provide clues to the real nature of a dreamer's psyche. Once a dream is interpreted or decoded and the latent content or actual meaning is discovered, then the implications of such content can be dealt with at the dreamer's conscious level. The second Freudian premise is this: "The dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber. . . . The wish to sleep . . . must thus always be taken into account as a motive of dream formation" (Freud 287. The third premise, which flows from the second, is tha

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agitator, of human psychology, Freud goes even further than this: "sexual motives, in infantile forms, play a very considerable part, which has been too long overlooked, in the psychic activity of the child" (Freud 41). The fact that Freud's insistence on childhood sexuality was controversial in his own day is a commonplace of the culture. The controversy was undoubtedly aggravated by the fact that Freud declares that "parents play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all persons who subsequently become psychoneurotics" and that as a matter of fact neurotics are not "sharply distinguished . . . from other persons" (Freud 306-7). The fact that Freud realized how controversial and revolutionary his theory about the repressed Ucs of ordinary and neurotic persons might be is confirmed by the fact that Freud systematically addresses issues that might point up weaknesses in his argument. First of all, the Ucs, Cs, and Pcs formulation is meant to be scientific in its uncovering of pathological mental and emotional processes and to "eliminate [in a patient] the critical spirit in which he is ordinarily in the habit of viewing such thoughts as come to the surface" (Freud 192). Secondly, the whole idea of differentiated states of

Category: Psychology - S