Nature of Dreams by Freud - Essay Example

Running Head: DREAM ANALYSIS - A PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE Dream Analysis - A Psychoanalytic Perspective [The Writer’s Name] [The name of the Institution] Dream Analysis - A Psychoanalytic Perspective The paper is meant to recollect a dream and examine it from multi-faceted theoretical standpoints. Dreams have been considered a medium to convey sentiments, notions and thoughts. Sometimes they pose questions which have been rooted in our conscious. Dreams are personalized works which we have consciously directed and created in our minds and no one interpretation is right or wrong. Weeks later upon receiving this assignment I had an incredible dream of my mother of which I will never forget.     It was a beautiful sunny day, not one cloud to blemish the sky. I remember this particular afternoon being warm and bright. The scenery seemed to depict a post card perfect summer's day. My mother and I were walking in a park, a park I've never visited or seen. I felt as if anyone were to stare at us they could see the contentment and harmony radiating from myself. I was watching myself lay down on very soft green grass, but before I did I turned around to see if my mother was still near. I saw myself lay down under a tree. This tree was uniquely beautiful because of its thin twisting, almost fragile looking branches. The tree was unusual for it was bare, there were no leaves, nor was it green. The tree just stood by itself colored naked and bare for all to witness. The birds of summer seemed to favor this unique looking tree by gathering and sitting on its thin but strong branches. I kept lying under this tree looking up towards the birds feeling happy. I heard myself laughing and listening to these birds singing. Where after I walked towards a pond, a man made pond of gray marble brick. An immense wall lining a narrow stairwell was to its left. My mother was kneeling by the pond wading her hand just above the water, touching it very delicately. This was her pond and her pond had the most incredibly beautiful bright fish. They consisted of aqua blue, yellow and green colored fish with fins that seemed to be as fine as hair as it floated towheads my mother's hands. I watched myself watching her, feeling as if I was invading a private moment and in awe of the spectacle I was witnessing. We left the park and her pond and were on our way home. As we walked arm in arm the weather seemed to be getting darker and colder. The clouds rolling in seemed to be constricting and threatening to engulf us. We arrived an immense bridge which was hundreds of feet above a body of murky water. I felt threatened and didn't trust crossing this bridge and my mother instinctively new my fear and preceded to cross, reassuring me it was safe. I didn't cross the bridge but watched her take her steps alone. She reached the middle of the bridge and it collapsed. I ran towards the edge looking down at my mother as she was struggling to hold on and trying to get a better grip. She was calling out my name, begging me to help her, but I just stood there frozen in silence and feeling no emotion. I saw her fingers turn white as they lost their hold one by one, until she was holding on with just one hand. She turned her head to look at me one last time before she lost the grip in her other hand and fell. I remember hearing no noise of her body hitting the water, just empty silence, but the expression of her face is etched into my memory.   Remembering this dream brings up emotions of guilt and was painful to envision. There are many theoretical perspectives one can use to analyze such dreams. Ultimately to find a potential explanation or interpretation of what dreams mean. I have gone thoroughly the works of Sigmund Freud to learn what are the interpretations of all this and an appropriate analysis of this specific dream. Freud is one of the most popular theorists today and has developed many theoretical perspectives pertaining to personality. He organized three levels of mental life; the unconscious, preconscious and the conscious. Simply put the unconscious is the irretrievable stuff in our memory, the preconscious if the retrievable stuff and the conscious if the stuff in current awareness. Over lapping this concept is his three levels of the mind which are the Id, Ego and Superego. The "id" is a part of the mind which seeks pleasure; it is irrational and not rooted in reality. (Isbister, 1985, 251-54) The "ego" serves the reality principle and is more rational and connected to reality. Finally, we have the "superego" which is our moral and idealistic principle. It speaks as your conscious, judging and making you feel guilty. All these concepts display sides of personality whether good or bad. Freud believed that dreams or "Freudian slips" were a "disguised means of expressing unconscious impulses or hidden desires." He gave greater emphasis to that of the latent content over the manifest content. The latent content being the unconscious material in our dream which reduces anxiety. (Bettelheim, 2003, 238-41) Whereas the manifest content is the surface meaning or the dream as recalled by the dreamer. Freud's basic assumption was that all dreams are wish-fulfillment.    Freud noted three typical anxiety dreams: the embarrassment dream of nakedness, dreams of death of a beloved person and dreams of failing an exam. In my case I dreamt the death of my mother and felt guilty for not saving her. Freud interprets the death of an older person such as a parent as fulfilling the oedipal wish. During my dream I felt anxiety and guilt which he depicts as typical for adults as well as children. The female Oedipus complex is a term used by Freud to indicate feelings of hostility for the mother and sexual love for the father. Although I dreamt of death, he states that I do not necessarily mean to have a death wish for my mother. I agree it could have been a reflection of hostility towards her but disagree greatly with the generalization of sexual love for my father. There was a significant emphasis on the description of the tree. The tree looked fragile, thin and naked. This could be interpreted according to Freud as an anxiety of the embarrassment dream of nakedness. Adults repress the desire to exhibit the nakedness of oneself. Freud may have interpreted the tree as a reflection of myself and the birds as spectators. These particular spectators refrain from scolding and make me feel accepted and happy. Dream content may be distorted through condensation and displacement according to Freud. Condensation is the compression of several ideas of the latent manifest content. Condensation is embodied by three characteristics of compression, omission and fragments. Compression is the latent content projecting itself towards the manifest content. Omission is a "guardian" which doesn't let the latent element through. Fragments are pieces of the latent element which does get through. Displacement is the shift of emphasis from important to unimportant (vice-versa) in the manifest content or the replacement of latent item with a remote item. My dreams seem to have a greater emphasis on the 'nice' things such as grass, trees, water and de-emphasized the 'dark' side of the dream leading up to my mother's fall. Freud concluded this structuralization of the dream to reduce fearful or anxiety -provoking situations. (Rieff, 1999, 44-50)  Sexuality is a recurring them in the works of Freud and it is believed to be the root problem or feeling in our dreams. Nakedness and sexuality also play a major role in my dream which display symbolic meaning, psychoanalytic importance (latent content). Freud generalized the manifest content to always relate to conscious and preconscious material from the day before. Freud supposed that dreams are a transformed form of wish-fulfillment; certainly this is not the matter in my dream of my mother falling. He perceived many of our wishes in dreams as originating during our early childhood experiences. This resulted from the suppression of infantile sexual behavior which recur many years later in our dreams. He distinguished that not all dreams originate in childhood experiences, but result from adult wishes. Freud contributed to the works of dream interpretation and his is just one of many insights to the mystical world of dreams. Everyone has their interpretative analysis and no one answer is right, but we may come closer to a simplistic generalization, maybe even produce a dictionary on how to read your dream. The id may be defined as the drive within us to bring ourselves pleasure. The desires of the id are often placed in the subconscious, and can manifest in dreams in order to bring about wish fulfillment, so that the individual is not psychologically damaged by the constant suppression of these thoughts. The ego is what brings about one's understanding that one is a part of a society, and cannot always satisfy the urges of the id. The ego is often seen as being responsible for practical and rational decision making. The superego governs over all of these, and is often seen as the conscience. The superego is concerned with the long-term ramifications of actions, adherence to what is "right and wrong," and producing pride or guilt as a result of one's actions. The purpose of these different forces would seem to be providing a "check and balance" system for the mind, and insuring mental stability and personal wellbeing. The majority of the information in the mind is a result of these three conscious levels. (Lou, 1996, 78-82) To access these dreamers must search through the information and activate it. When an individual interacts with these subconscious thoughts, a dream vision is made. One important fact of interpretation is that it takes into account that every character is a reflection of the dreamer’s feelings, thoughts, desires, and fears. To this day, dream interpretation has not reached a culmination. Most importantly, Freud felt that dreams served as the primary channel for getting information from the unconscious to the conscious. Because of the fact that Freud lived during an era where sexual repression was norm, he concluded that dreams almost always were sexual in nature. Nevertheless, Freud provided a path in which all dream interpreters began to follow. As Sigmund Freud once said that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious. To find the evidence for the concept that a dream is a wish fulfillment we must go back to the beginning of psychoanalysis. Freud was of course the founder of Psychoanalysis and the basis of many of his theories can be found in his work 'The Interpretation of Dreams'. So therefore it is important to study his opinions and theories first as a basis for the premise that all dreams represent wishes. Indeed it was Freud who first put forward this theory and is only there for others to agree or disagree. However Freud was not sure when he wrote the Interpretation of Dreams whether a dream was a wish fulfillment and only that. He speculates in the book whether this was just one of the many different types of dreams which represented different facets of each individual’s psychological makeup and whether he was basing this judgment solely on the Irma dream and his analysis on that alone. (Jean, 2005, 22-25) Freud was well known for changing and revisiting old texts and ideas and constantly updating them and changing them. Within the text he poses many questions, whether material for the dream was gathered during the day or was just psychological stimuli being used by the unconscious mind. Significantly though, his work The Interpretation of Dreams remained largely unchanged in its ideas and principles. Freud was as sure as he could be that he believed that dreams were a wish fulfillment portrayed by the unconscious mind and the analysis of any dream should be based upon this foundation. Freud uses simple examples to demonstrate wish fulfillment in dreams. This is because he does not want to get bogged down in the wildly extravagant dreams that can lead to many interpretations and opinions suggested. He gives a number of interesting examples such as the women who dreamed of having her period. Freud ascertained that the women dreamed of that because she would miss her period. The reason being, she was pregnant and she wished to announce it and the dream was a clever way the unconscious found to announce it. (Jones, 1981, 121-29) Freud stated that dreams as wish fulfillment came from five different causes. (1) What has been left unfinished by some chance delay during the day; (2) what has been left unsettled, unsolved by some failure of our powers of thought; (3) what has been rejected and suppressed during the day and (4) any unimportant -and hence unresolved- impressions of the day. And finally, these are joined by the powerful fourth group, which have been stirred in our unconscious (Freud S, 1900 ch.7). Before studying the unconscious desires that cause dreams it is first important to understand the role of preconscious in the roles of dreams as it is necessary to understand where dreams come from to be able to understand their roles. Freud believed that the role of the preconscious was much more prevalent in children in dreams as opposed to adults. For example a child might dream of eating an ice cream when they had been refused one that day by their parents. In adults Freud believed that a preconscious image could trigger a dream in an adult, but it would be a representation of an unconscious desire and would only be part of the dream because that image had triggered the unconscious thoughts to come to the surface. The unconscious is a force or a knowledge that we do not allow ourselves to see. It is an unrealized part of the mind and it's self-contained and functions independently from us. This is what distorts and displaces our dreams. It is the higher form of dream i.e. it contains unseen thoughts and repressed wishes unlike a child's which is predominantly concerned with the preconscious thoughts. It is this that creates the strange images in our dreams that would seem to contradict our normal behavior and lead down the road to conclude that the motive for a dream is not a wish fulfillment. (Gay, 1988, 89-93) Freud argued that the images and scenes we see in our dreams are not necessarily to be taken as face value. He supposed that all dreams should be analyzed with the wish fulfillment theory firmly in mind. This essentially means that you must produce as many different meanings for each image and then select the one that is most likely to be the unconscious desire and that is likely the cause of the dream. Of course self analysis has many flaws as Freud himself admitted and repression and resistance are inevitable downsides when looking into your own or someone else's unconscious. Freud himself admits that many obstacles stand in the way of a correct interpretation, though he still proceeds as though his interpretations are true, objective and replicable (John, 1996, 161-70). So Freud provided us with interesting examples of how an image in a dream that would seem on the face of it to be totally contradictory of any normal behavior can represent a wish and desire. He used these examples to show the difference between the manifest dream content and the latent content and how they essentially clash with each other and lead to the distortion of the dream. Through his work Freud has began a debate about the nature of dreams and the unconscious that will cause anger and interest for many centuries to come. He began to interpret and analyze dreams when very little work or thought on the subject was being considered in a clinical sense. Some believe that The Interpretation of Dreams was not simply written as a methodology of deconstructing dreams and assigning them meaning, but its latent content was a critique of Science's New Formula, and was designed to question, and even undermine, the possibility of objective methodology in psychoanalysis (Jeffrey, 2003, 110-16). That dreams are a wish fulfillment is still the most fundamental theory Freud put forward regarding dream analysis. Concepts such as condensation, displacement and distortion derive from this central premise to be used as a way of understanding all dreams. They allow us to see the latent content behind the manifestation of those thoughts in the dream. But for all these to be used correctly, as Freud saw it, the idea that dreams represent a wish of the unconscious has to be accepted. References Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford World's Classics, translated by Joyce Crick. Ch 7 Jones, Ernest: "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.", Publisher: Basic Books, 1981, 121-29 Lou Andreas-Salome: "The Freud Journal”, Publisher: Texas Bookman, 1996, 78-82 Jean-Michel Quinodoz: Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud's Writings, Publisher: Routledge; 2005, 22-25 Bettelheim, Bruno : "Freud and Man's Soul" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 2003, 238-41 Gay, Peter: "Freud: A Life for Our Time" Publisher: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1988, 89-93 John Farrell. Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (NYU Press, 1996). 161-70 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Ballantine Books (November 2003) 110-16 Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 44-50 Isbister, J. N. "Freud, An Introduction to his Life and Work" Publisher: Polity Press: Cambridge, Oxford. (1985), 251-54 Read More