Psychoanalysis & Psychodynamic Psychology
lesson iii. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Dreams
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| lesson iii. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Dreams Freud’s 1900 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, introduced his theory of dreams as part of his understanding of how the mind works. Psychoanalysts have continued to theorize and develop their understanding by incorporating information from other fields, like neurology, but the basic psychodynamic approach to dreams has changed little since Freud’s day. Freud viewed dreams as the royal road to the Unconscious.” i. Background Freud’s theory of dreams emerged out of his work with hysterical patients and the model of the mind that he developed through understanding their symptoms. A. Hysterical patients had physical symptoms with no physical explanation. Freud realized that the symptoms were symbolic expressions of something mental. B. Freud developed the idea that the mind was divided into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious parts, with unacceptable thoughts and wishes kept out of a person’s awareness through repression. The repressed parts were thought to be constantly pressing toward conscious expression. C. The body was important not only to express feelings symbolically, but also because body experiences and sensations were the basic experiences of people that shape their mental experience from early on. D. Freud used the technique of free association and found that by following his patients thoughts he could trace symptoms back to repressed wishes and, in doing so, relieve the symptoms. 13 ii. Freud’s theory of Dreams Through analyzing his own dreams and the dreams of his patients, Freud found that dreams represented the fulfillment of repressed wishes. The wishes were based on very early infantile wishes that moved toward consciousness in the form of unacceptable thoughts. These thoughts, the latent dream thoughts also known as the latent content of the dream, would become disguised by a process called dream work in order to pass by the censorship of the preconscious mind. A. Dream work had to present thoughts in a visual form, but with some sort of disguise. B. Often the dreamer made use of events from the day before that could be linked to the dream thoughts by some kind of association. Freud called this day residue.” C. To disguise the thoughts in the dream, the mind used two main mechanisms displacement, in which one thing stands for another and condensation, in which two or more ideas are represented by one element in the dream. D. The disguised dream elements were then combined by a process called secondary revision into a story with a narrative line, creating a decoy meaning.” E. The end result was called the manifest content of the dream, and the dreamer’s free associations to the elements of the dream would lead back to the latent dream thoughts, or latent content. F. Freud understood nightmares to be dreams in which the disguise was not sufficient and the underlying unacceptable idea was coming too close to consciousness, arousing anxiety. Download 283.67 Kb. Share with your friends:
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