Sigmund Freud On Dream Analysis

Most famously, Freud is accredited with his work published in 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams on dream analysis. Next, there was Carl Jung, who proposed another perspective giving people insight to the meaning of dreams. After years of research, psychologists have made significant progress in understanding why people dream, its function, and to some extent a more valid theory of what dreams mean. Freud “proposed that dreams provide a psychic safety valve that discharges otherwise unacceptable feelings. He viewed a dream’s manifest content (the apparent and remembered storyline) as a censored, symbolic version of its latent content, the unconscious drives and wishes that would be threatening if expressed directly” (Myers, 2015, pg.113). Jungian …show more content…
Freudian analysis of my dream began with writing my dream down when I woke up, and re-writing what I remembered a few days later. Anything changed or substituted from the original dream would be the repressed symbol used to start a free association. The word I left out from the original dream in my re-write was the word “store” when referring to my friend James as the “store manager”. Through free association starting with the word store, the words that I associated to store were as follows: store, shopping, mall, money, bank, debt, unpaid, broke, work, time, and over. A common theme in the free association words seems to be the concept of money. Through a second free association, this time using the word money, the words I associated were as follows: money, credit card, debt, expensive, payments, weekly, bank, broke, dad. The common theme coming from this free association exercise was being in debt. The fact that I associated my father with the word debt could mean that I resent my father and blame him for me being in debt. In reality, my father has nothing to do with my debt and I’m the only one responsible for digging myself into it. Therefore, the Freudian analysis doesn’t offer an accurate portrayal of my unconscious desires. Furthermore, “based on accumulated science, ‘there is no reason to believe any of Freud’s specific claims …show more content…
I took away the symbol of my wallet being a major theme of my original dream, as most of it that I remember was about how I lost my wallet. Jungian analysis of my dream began with the amplification technique (Benedetto, 2009). The amplification technique is a way of analyzing the symbol on three different levels; personal, cultural, and archetypal. The personal level is how you think or feel about the symbol. My personal level regarding my feeling toward money is that I wish I had more. At the cultural level, the symbol is what others would perceive the symbol to be, thus money would be something used to buy other things. The archetypal level utilizes a dream dictionary. Using a dream dictionary, I substituted the word wallet for money to find the dream dictionary archetype. The archetype of money represents changes in your life and or certain values in your life. The final step of Jungian analysis of dreams is to relate how the archetype suggests what would make me feel fulfilled or what would make me happier. Jungian analysis would suggest that I would feel fulfilled or happier if I had more money in order to make changes in my life. In light of the above, the Jungian analysis interprets my dream to mean that because I was dreaming of my wallet, I must want to have more money and this would make me feel fulfilled. I disagree with this interpretation because I find