hi everyone I'm John Cornelius and this is a thought cooperative presentation on Freud's theory of dreams I'm going solo on this one so we'll see how it goes now everyone seems to know that Sigmund Freud found dreams interesting and fundamental to a study of the mind something he called psychoanalysis however it's interesting and important to know exactly what Freud's model of dreaming is so we can both understand his model its implications and how new theories have both developed and challenged many of his ideas about dreaming so let's take a look in 1897 Freud aged 41
began as famous but somewhat dubious self-analysis additionally Freud had always been an active dreamer himself and much of his self analysis involved dreams Freud therefore decided to write a book on dreams and the interpretation of Dreams was completed in 1899 he had already noticed that when he asked his patients to free-associate they regularly discussed their dreams their association seemed to include material from the day before something he eventually called de residue but also incorporated material from the individual's past integrating the information in many different ways also in discussing the dreams and their meanings with Freud
there seemed to be an opening up of new areas of psychic exploration occasionally this would lead to sudden bursts of personal insight and a relief of symptoms that had plagued the person for a long time however what most people do not realize is that for Freud sleep was best when it was completely dreamless he actually did not believe dreams were a necessary part of sleep and stated in 1916 a dreamless sleep is the best the only proper one there ought to be no mental activity in sleep instead dreams served only one purpose they were a
reflexive and physiologic process that was completely designed to keep people asleep or to say it another way dreams functioned only to be guardians of sleep in 1925 he says it quite plainly there is only one useful task only one function that can be ascribed to a dream and that is the guarding of sleep from interruption to explore this model we need to understand that for Freud infant and waking life were full of emotions drives wishes and experiences that our mind simply could not consciously handle and that loaded psychic material would regularly be repressed or buried
in the unconscious in 1907 Freud said this way there is in fact no better analogy for repression by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved then burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades the problem is that during the night there is less automatic repression these latent dream thoughts would bubble up if unchecked these infantile wishes drives and traumas would be experienced in ways that would be so intense that people would repeatedly wake up if people kept
waking up they would suffer from sleep deprivation and increasing mental impairments until they simply could not function any more clearly there would be an evolutionary advantage to those who slept better so a psychic system evolved just for that purpose what Freud proposed is that each of us therefore has a sensor whose job it is to keep such materials safely unconscious so that we can stay asleep however if we have strong enough unconscious material that that material boils up against the sensor the pressure builds and builds and would lead to a psychic breakdown if unchecked the
solution here is dream work that acts as a pressure release valve dream work results when some material is smuggled past the sensor into the conscious mind but in an altered more acceptable form that will allow sleep to continue the pressure of the unconscious material is thus decreased yet the ability of the individual to stay asleep is maintained this material that slips by the sensor is called the manifest content of the dream and it is what we consciously remember about a dream when we wake up an example of this might be as follows one day George
who has a religious belief that sexuality is a sin passed his mother on the way down the hall while he was walking past her he noticed the exciting experience of seeing the top button of her blouse undone something that was very loaded with sexual innuendo too George this starts George's unconscious mind going and he is having increasing thoughts and memories about similar experiences with his mother however this material is largely repressed while he is awake however that night while asleep the strength of the psychic repression is loosened and there is a return of the repressed
and the unconscious latent dream thoughts regarding the sexuality of his own mother boil up the sensor feeling the strong religious and cultural taboo about this material does is best to block the material from consciousness and the pressure builds so there is increasing pressure on the system as the pressure builds alternative thoughts press and contort the dream thoughts for example the face of the person in the dream is altered to that of an unknown woman with a cross around her neck rather than sex the woman is praying on the ground with George accidentally calling on her
in a way that is exciting thus embodying some of the aspects of a mother and some of the intense sexual and guilty feelings surrounding her but in a hidden in manageable way thus allowing Jorge to stay asleep he consciously recalls a manifest dream about falling on an unknown praying woman with a cross and feeling strangely guilty and excited as you can see this process involves a series of shifts of psychic material three examples of these transformations include displacement the change of one thing into another condensation the collapse of several concepts into one and representation transforming
thoughts individual images dream work thus accomplishes censorship editing and compromise which allows the person to dissipate the sleep disturbing tension associated with infantile wishes by smuggle smuggling them past the sensor into the preconscious and conscious mind this is all done in a mechanical and reflexive way where there is no psychological work yielding maturational advanced inherent in the process dreams are just a necessary natural byproduct of maintaining sleep however even though there is no psychological work being done by the dreamer in Freud's completely reflexive process of the mind while asleep he did say it was a
mechanism that just happened to be useful for psychoanalysis to clarify this let's go back to the example about Jorge since the dream itself does not provide any actual psychological work Jorge continues to have the same conflict about his mother and sexuality the next morning however let's say the material was so loaded that in addition to having these dreams the repressed material continued to boil up to a point that it began affecting Jorge while awake now every time he passes a church he finds himself beginning to sweat and falling over this is completely impractical and George
is just psychologically minded enough to realize that he needs Freud's help he goes in to see Freud who tells him to free associate eventually this leads to George describing his experiences and he tells Freud the manifest content of the dream Freud then basically says that is the job of the analyst to interpret the manifest dream which is basically running the process described above in Reverse using all the information training and intuition Freud has to reveal George's own unconscious processes to George in a way that he can consciously handle how does an analyst know what to
say according to Freud analysts don't actually know in any absolute sense what they are supposed to say they can only do the best they can using their honest experience and close listening to what is happening to George in 1933 Freud said when the patient runs out of associations we intervene on our own we fill in the hints draw undeniable conclusions and give explicit utterances to what the patient has only touched on in his associations according to this model of Freud's presenting George's latent dream thoughts - George has the possibility of Leaning - true though shocking
insight and allow an actual process of psychological work to begin for example George might be able to come to terms with the his own impulses around his mother and maybe come to grieve the ways that he will never actually possess her he might learn to come to terms with both his own sexuality and hers and even decide to marry a woman who might possess the best qualities of his mother so that he may through compromise possess the best parts of her in another person through this work Jorge's sweating and falling over should come to an
end to be clear this is a historical model and there are new advances in theories about the mind and dreams we will discuss these in a different talk goodbye you
