The Psychodynamic Approach to Dreaming - Literature review Example

Dreams and Dreaming affiliation Dreaming and psychological analysis Dreams have always been among the things in this life that have continuously intrigued people and that have remained among the most contentious topics in the world. Exactly why people dream and what dreams could be are questions no individual can answer fully whether through science or any given method (Hartmann, 1998). Dreams are good. Normally, people argue that they are another part of life that is lived. For instance, if an individual lives for 90 years and sleeps an average of 8 hours a day, then the individual will have slept a total of 30 years by the time they die. This means that if they have been dreaming all that long, for 30 years, then it is right to say that the individual has lived over a third of their lives in a certain unearthly realm. Today, while it is still difficult to state why people dream or what dreams themselves are, there are two theories that tend to explain well enough what dreams entail, or are. This essay will be looking at the two approaches beginning with the psychodynamic approach that was put forward by Sigmund Freud and then discuss the biological approach, which focuses on the brain, and the specific sleep cycle that is associated with dreaming. According to Freud (1950), dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. He explains this from the perspective that dreams happen when the ego’s defenses are depressed so that some repressed material are revealed, nonetheless in a distorted form. Dreams are an important part of life. They perform crucial functions for the unconscious mind serving as breadcrumbs to the discovery of how the unconscious mind really works. Freud used a dream, which he had in 1895 that went ahead to form the foundation of his theory. By this time of the dream, Freud had been worried about Irma, his patient. Irma had not been responding very well to treatment and this had caused Freud to place the blame on himself, eventually feeling guilty for having failed as a doctor. In his dream, he dreamt of meeting the patient in a party and examining her. Then he saw chemical formulae given to Irma by another doctor flash before his eyes and he noted that the syringe used to administer the drug to the patient was dirty. Automatically he realized what the patient’s problem was. Freud would later interpret the dream as wish-fulfilment. Before the dream, Freud had been wishing that he was not at fault for Irmas poor health condition and the dream came right up to fulfil the wish, that he was not to blame for the former doctor’s mistake. The doctor was the one at fault.  Freud (1900), based on this particular dream, went ahead to propose that among the major functions of dreams was to fulfil wishes (Fiss, 1993). On regard to this, Freud went on to distinguish between what a dreamer remembers when the wake up (the manifest content of a dream that is) and the symbolic meaning of dreams (what he called the underlying wish). What an individual remembers is usually based on what transpired through the day, the events of the day that is. Freud went on to discuss “dream work” as the process through which the underlying wish translates into what the patient remembers part of the dream, the manifest content. Dream work is responsible for transforming the forbidden part of a dream into something palatable, something that is less threatening that is and one that does not interfere with the sleep cycle. According to Freud, there is a number of things that occur during dream work. The process of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration. Condensation entails the joining of different ideas or images into one. For instance, dreaming of a house might be a condensation of the dreamer’s worry about their security and their appearance to the world. Displacement on the other hand occurs when a transformation of those people or objects that we care about into something else (Freud, 1950). To elaborate this, Freud mentions a patient who was exceedingly resentful and would refer to his sister-in-law as a dog one day dreamt of strangling one, a small white dog. In other word, the person already dreamt of killing the sister, but so that he does not feel guilty for doing that, his mind transformed the sister-in-law in his dream into a dog. This way the unconscious mind was protecting him. Freud discusses secondary elaboration as taking place when the unconscious mind twines together the wish-fulfilling images in our dream, as mentioned above, in a rational direction of events, increasingly obscuring the latent content. Freud supports this notion by expounding why the manifest part of the dreams may be in the form of events the dream can believe in. Carl Jung (1963), on the other hand looks at dreams as a way through which an individual communicates and acquaints himself or herself with the unconscious. In other words, dreams do not act as attempts to obscure true feelings of an individual from the waking mind; instead, they are windows to the individual’s unconscious. This way they serve to guide the waking self thus helps it to attain wholeness besides offering solutions to particular problem the individual is facing in their waking life. Freud looks at dreams as related to how the mind is functioning. Science, or rather biology, demands different approach to dreams. Nonetheless, the study on dreams is definitely among the most misinterpreted since dreams remain to be among the most tenuous and misconceived and thus falsifying Freud or supporting him scientifically through providing empirical support is quite intricate. Still, dreams need to be studied. Some researcher has come to view dreams as an outcome of random neural activity something that has had hypotheses such as the activation-synthesis hypothesis come up. The interpretation of the above theory is simple. If, in case, the hypothesis was true, that dreams are random neuro activities, it goes without saying that constructing a theory on the phenomenological dream state could serve function to the dreamer is improbable. It also becomes a dead-end to any person who would want to take an evolutionally analysis of dreams. Among the very first and most fundamental findings, studies on dreams is definitely one relating the whole spectacle of dreaming and its relationship to rapid eye movement (abbreviated and often known as REM). Although dreaming is “the subjective conscious experiences that we have during sleep” (Revenue, 2000, p.878) rapid eye movement sleep is a physiologically defined phase of sleep. Studies have established through collection of dream reports from a number of subjects awoken from the REM sleep that indeed dreaming takes place during this phase. Nonetheless, the same happens for the non-REM (Hobson, 1999). Psychological measures have revealed that sleep is essentially not a static process but one that contains a number of inconspicuous states. The study on the REM is a complex one. Among the methods used to study REM makes use of measuring brain activity with electroencephalography (EEG), while eye movements are measured using electro-oculography (EOG). Lastly, any muscle activity requires the use of electromyography (EMG) to measure. During sleep, the brain passes through a series of phases in a cyclic manner that may involve stages that require slow brain activities while other stages may mimic the actual behaviour of the waking brain. Sometimes this active phase is considered hyperactivated. This phase is known as the REM sleep and is characterised by three factors. One, the brain is more active in this phase than it is in any other phase and the EEG consists of both alpha and beta activity which resemble waking. Second, to promote paralysis, muscle activity is normally inhibited at this stage. This is done within the central nervous system. Third, since muscle paralysis does not affect the eye muscles, Eye-movement occurs and this is what gave the REM sleep its name as seen above. It is said that people awakened from this particular sleep is able to give a detailed account of their dream while compared to those awaked from the NREM sleep. Normally, sleep mechanisms in the REM may fail. Ordinarily during REM sleep, signals that prompt the motor output are actively inhibited. If an individual suffers from damage in the inhibitory response, then it causes the individual to act out during sleep. This includes sleepwalking. Most researchers studying the relationship between the eye movement and dreaming argue that the movement of the eye is directly related to the dream action. Among the most noticeable features of dream in this phase is that they are very vivid and an individual unlikely to forget. Initially, scientists thought that lack of REM sleep meant no dreams but today, it is widely known that people dream even in the non-REM sleep. The problem is that they easily forget the dreams. REM is mainly thought to process a particular day’s events. The second theory counters the belief by REM theorists that the rapid movement of the eyes happens during dreaming to reflect whatever the person was doing with the eyes during the night (Jung, 1963). They argue that babies in the womb also do that and it can only be of other factors but not dream. This line of thought supposes that the movement in the eyes is a result of the need to supply the eyes with the much-needed oxygen. Nevertheless, dreaming is thought to be a method through which the body heals, by burying the unpleasant thoughts and unfulfilled fantasies. There are a number of ways through which Freud and Jung’s definition and understanding of dreams is relate to science. Both cause believe in dreams and a brain. Nevertheless, the fact that Jung believe and biology, albeit in some difference in line of thought, believe that people dream so that they can heal. Sigmund also may have this kind of thought in his belief that interpretation of dreams as ways through which the brain fulfills its wishes. When he had a patient respond poorly to treatment, it was a burden he carried thinking that he was to blame. Such an issue could be very detrimental to his health and in fact, it was not a good situation for his mind. For this matter, his dream solved a big mystery that helped him out of the burden-that was healing. The main differences between these approaches to dreams happen to use different methods to do so. Sigmund Freud was a little less scientific and his hypothesis almost unverifiable scientifically. On the other hand, the REM theory is something that can be placed under scrutiny and facts challenged. It is verifiable by science. The activation-synthesis activity, however, falls far from the above beliefs. It is also a scientific approach believing that dreams are random neuro-activities that serve no meaning in life. This means that there is not even the slightest need to study dreams. That they are just there in the dreamers mind without any given purpose to serve. Conclusively, there is a lot that can be said concerning dreams. The fact that dreams are personal and not controlled by any external force means that there is no way any study can be comprehensively done and luck a few questions to raise. Nonetheless, the interpretation of what dreams are by Sigmund Freud is a fair way to look at dreams and in fact one of the few theories that most people are contented with. Bothe REM and activation-synthesis theories are also right in their own ways. The fact that Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and REM believe that there could be some therapeutic importance in dreams means that activation-synthesis theory might be a little way off the mark. While there is currently some information on dreams and dreaming, it is not doubt more study needs to be done. Spending over a third of a person’s life while dreaming means that there is two sets of lives that people live and this second set demands attention like the waking part. References Allan Hobson, J. (1999). The new neuropsychology of sleep: Implications for psychoanalysis. Neuropsychoanalysis, 1(2), 157-183. Breecher, M. M. (2015, January 3). The biology of dreaming: a controversy that wont go to sleep. Retrieved from 21stC: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/breecher.html Dement, W., & Kleitman, N. (1957). The relation of eye movements during sleep to dream activity: an objective method for the study of dreaming. Journal of experimental psychology, 53(5), 339. Fiss, H. (1993). The “royal road” to the unconscious revisited: a signal detection model of dream function. The functions of dreaming. State University of New York Press, New York, 381-418. Freud, S. (1950). The interpretation of dreams (Vol. 96). Hayes Barton Press. Hartmann, E. (1998). Dreams and nightmares: The new theory on the origin and meaning of dreams. Plenum Trade. Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams. Reflections, 84. Read More