Sigmund Freud

The Herzen StatePedagogical University The interpretation of dreams The interpretation of dreams by Sigmund Freud Course ProjectIn English2nd year studentSinkevitch D.230 groupSaint-Petersburg 2002Introduction. The Interpretation of Dreams provides plenty of Freud s dreams in his own interpretation, among which thefamous dream of

Irma s injection, which he considers a key issue inunderstanding the mysteries of dream life. It opens Chapter II Interpreting Dreams An Analysis Of A Specimen Dream andprovides material for an analysis covering several pages ahead. Just as Freudhimself maintained, the analysis of the dream is not complete but it was herethat Freud for the first time asserted that dreams are the disguised fulfilmentof unconscious wishes.

The explanation of the dream is quite simple it triesto hide Freud s lack of satisfaction with the treatment given to a patient ofhis, Irma, and throw the guilt of partial failure upon others, exonerate Freudof other professional errors it also hints at. Dream interpretation alsoprovides a dream psychology and many other issues.

The volume is extremelyinventive and rich in information, and, in its author s view, it is his mostimportant work.Chapter 1. How this book start.Freud wasboth a medical doctor and a philosopher. As a doctor, he was interestedin charting how the human mind affected the body, particularly in forms ofmental illness, such as neurosis and hysteria, and in finding ways to curethose mental illnesses. As a philosopher, Freud was interested in looking atthe relationship between mental functioning and

certain basic structures ofcivilization, such as religious beliefs. Freud believed, and many people afterhim believe, that his theories about how the mind worked uncovered some basictruths about how an individual self is formed, and how culture and civilizationoperate. In 1897Sigmund Freud began his famous course of self-analysis. He had already noticedthat dreams played an important role in his analysis of neurotic and hysterical

patients. As he encouraged them to free-associate, thatis, talk about whatever came into their minds, they often referred to their dreams,which would set off other associations and often illuminate other importantconnections in their past experience. Freud also had noticed thathallucinations in psychotic patients were very much like dreams. Based on theseobservations, Freud began to believe that sleeping dreams were nearly always,like day-dreams, wish fulfillment.

Freud hadalways been an active dreamer, and much of his self-analysis focused on dreams,convincing him conclusively in the wish-fulfillment theory. Within a few monthsof beginning his self-analysis, he decided to write a book about dreams. Helooked into the literature and was pleased to see that no one had proposed hisidea before. In fact, most people believed dreams were just nonsense. It tookFreud about two years to write The Interpretation of

Dreams, finishingit in September 1897. It was published late in the year and released in 1900.Freud was paid about 209.The bookexplained the double level of dreams the actual dream with its manifestcontent, and the dream s true if hidden meaning, or latentcontent. The idea of dream as wish-fulfillment was explained, and heintroduced the theory that sexuality was an important part of childhood, ashocking idea at the time.

He also outlined a sort of universal language ofdreams, by which they might be interpreted.Most peoplenow agree that The Interpretation of Dreams was Freud s most importantwork, but it took eight years to sell the 600 copies printed in 1900. In thefirst year and a half, no scientific journal reviewed it and few otherperiodicals mentioned it. It was largely ignored, though in psychologicaljournals it received crushing reviews.

One critic warned that uncriticalminds would be delighted to join in this play with ideas and would end up incomplete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness. In 1910,however, Freud s overall work was becoming better known and a second editionwas printed. There would be six more in Freud s lifetime, the last in 1929. Hechanged very little in the book, only adding illustrations, elaborating certainideas, and adding to

the portions on symbolism. The book was translated intoEnglish and Russian in 1913, and into six more languages by 1938. Interpretation of Dreams remained Freud s mostoriginal work. Despite the initial cold reception, Freud himself knew it was abreakthrough. Insight such as this falls to one s lot but once in alifetime,

he wrote.Chapter 2. The dream theory.According to Freud in his book The Interpretation of Dreams ,dreams are symbolic fulfillments of wishes that can t be fulfilled becausethey ve been repressed. Often these wishes can t even be expressed directly inconsciousness, because they are forbidden, so they come out in dreams but instrange ways, in ways that often hide or disguise the true wish behind thedream.Freud believed that dreams acted as a form of fantasy, a defensemechanism

against the unacceptable urges of the id. Fantasy allows theindividual to act out events in the imagination, which can satiate the urges ofthe id which are repressed. Freud theorized that dreams were a subconscious manifestation of theserepressed urges, and that they served mainly to satisfy sexual and aggressivetendencies. The interpretation of dreams has come to be one of the aspects ofFreud s studies which are most popularized,

as he took the importance of dreamsfar more seriously than many of those who came before him or studied after him,even students of his own science psychoanalysis.Freud recognized that the interpretationof dreams was a very difficult task. Many barriers to clear insights intodreams exist, and many elements of contamination may render the analysis of thedream as being incorrect, or make the dream impossible to analyze at all.

One of the biggest problems was remembering the dream in detail. Asdreams take place on a totally subconscious level, there is a good chance thataspects of dreams will be muddled or forgotten completely, aspects which mayhave had a significant impact on the analysis of the dream. He alsorealized that a the patient might fabricate the missing pieces of the dream,which would render it ingenuine and result in an inaccurate interpretation.

Freud stated that the dream must be accepted as total fact if the dreamis to be analyzed, which seems contrary to his typical practice of constantlyquestioning the validity of patients statements.Another significant barrier to interpretation of dreams is the fact that thereis often no textbook diagnosis available. This is to say that dreams ofcomprised of symbolism, and that what an object symbolizes for the individualvaries from person to person. Therefore, the analyst must rely on thepatient to provide

significant amounts of background information in order todetermine what objects symbolize. Of course, another obvious problem isthat the meaning of the symbol may be repressed as well, or stem from a repressed event, and therefore the patient can offer no explanation ofthe symbol. Freud himself admitted in his works that he often encounteredproblems with patients not divulging enough background information, and thataspects of dreams were left uninterpreted.

Freud still offered some symbols as constants, however, and felt that allpeople incorporated these symbols and their meanings into dreams.However,the emphasis on sexual imagery is a majority of this text, ranging formsymbolism of the genitals and other erogenous zones, to symbolism of sexualacts such as intercourse and orgasm. This is perhaps one of his mostassaulted theories, as it not only states that there is a constant or law among all individuals that object a meaning a, but alsothat there is such an absurd

amount of these sexual symbols that almost everydream could be boiled down to nothing more than an expression of sexuality. Though sexuality was certainly a present theme in nearly all Freud sworks, modern analysts do not seem to find such a gross amount of sexualcontent in dreams. Dreams use two main mechanisms to disguise forbidden wishes CONDENSATION and DISPLACEMENT. Condensation is when a whole set of images ispacked into a single image

or statement, when a complex meaning is condensedinto a simpler one. Condensation corresponds to METAPHOR in language, where onething is condensed into another love is a rose, and you d better notpick it this metaphor condenses all the qualities of a rose, includingsmell and thorns, into a single image . Displacement is where the meaning ofone image or symbol gets pushed onto something associated with it, which thendisplaces the original image.

Displacement corresponds to the mechanism ofMETONYMY in language, where one thing is replaced by something corresponding toit. An example of metonymy is when you evoke an image of a whole thing bynaming a part of it when you say the crown when you mean the kingor royalty, for example, or you say twenty sails when you meantwenty ships. You displace the idea of the whole thing onto a part associatedwith that thing . You might think of condensation and metaphor as being likeSaussure s syntagmatic relations,

which happen in a chain x is y is z , anddisplacement and metonymy being like Saussure s associative relations. Conclusion.This workwas, by his own assessment, Sigmund Freud s greatest. In the process of showinghow seemingly meaningless fragments of dreams suggest the whole range ofpersonal issues in the dreamer s present and past life, Freud lays out thebasis for a new psychology and therapy.

And anyone can use this book to knowmore about his life.