Sigmund Freud's Theory On Dreams

Sigmund Freud was the one responsible for many different famous theories, a couple I will touch on is his theory on dreams and his sex theory. Though the majority of his theories intertwine with each other, these are the two that stuck out most to me. Freud started studying the realm of dreams in the late 1800’s and later came out with a book called The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. In this book, he goes into detail how to understand the meaning of the dream that the unconscious dreamer dreams about. Freud’s most famous phrase from this book is “The interpretation of dreams in the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud, Montenegro). His theory states “dreams serve to preserve sleep through the (covert) …show more content…
Who knows what kind of crazy things that our subconscious minds think of throughout the day? Freud believes that the residue from the day has a lot to do with our unconscious minds while we are sleeping, which is known as dream distortions. This is where his dream-work comes into play. Freud’s meaning of dream-work is “the set of mental operations that transform the latent content of the dream into manifest content to render its true sexual meaning unrecognizable to the consciousness” (Montenegro). He uses a few different apparatuses to explain how the dream-work provides a smoke screen for the untold and out of bounds wish fulfilment for an individual. He uses four different apparatuses in his dream-work. The first mechanism he uses is condensation which is the combination of many ideas of an element. The second one is displacement which replaces importance with insignificant ideas in a dream. The third one is representation that stands for the visual imagery of the idea. And the last one is secondary revision. This presents absurd or incoherent dream content in the form of an intelligible …show more content…
“ Because this lesson of ‘carpe diem’ had among other meanings a sexual one and because the desire it expressed did not stop short of doing wrong, it had reason to dread the censorship and was obliged to conceal itself behind a dream. All kinds of thoughts having a contrary sense then found voice: memories of a time when the dreamer was content with spiritual food, restraining thoughts of every kind and even threats of the most revolting sexual punishment” (Cooke). Anything that we desire to dream about whether it is our subconscious while we are awake or our unconscious mind while we are sleeping, has no limits. Whatever one may dream about isn’t wrong. Everybody has their own vice or in other words, their own