Sigmund Freud Interpretation Of Dreams Research Paper

Sigmund Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud, the man who developed psychoanalysis, dedicated a lot of time researching dreams. He even wrote a book completely dedicated to dreams called, The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Even though many of his ideas were thought to be nonsense at the time he published it, within a few years, most fellow psychologists began to agree with Freud. In his research of dreams, he came up with quite a few theories concerning both the sleeping mind, and human nature in general all while researching dreams. One of the ideas he came up with was wish fulfillment. Freud believed that a major reason for dreams is to fulfill the wishes of the person with the dreams to not only help the person cope …show more content…
Freud was fascinated with this concept and spent a lot of time with patients trying to unravel their dreams to find their underlying desires. The idea that the dream would distort the true meaning of the dream was even hard for Freud to grasp. He, along with other psychologists, found it hard to not take the dreams face value. (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900 by Freud) However, it quickly became clear that there truly is an underlying meaning usually concerning a wish or desire of the dreamer that the unconscious mind wishes to censor in order to protect …show more content…
He would often refer to his sister-In law as a dog. (Stevens 31) He then had a dream that he was strangling a small dog to the point where he killed it. This dream would demonstrate his wish to kill his sister in law, but because morally this would be very wrong, his unconscious mind censors it so he can not feel guilty for his secret desires. A final area touched on by Freud is the research of universal symbols in dreams. He wanted to find symbols that would always meant the same thing in all his patient’s dreams. However, Freud decided to abandon this issue because he believed that it would be impossible to classify objects for every person as everyone’s dreams are incredibly unique. Freud was an incredible psychologist. It is amazing to think that dreams were only one area that he focused on, as it seems he had dedicated his whole life to just dreams with the research he created. Without Sigmund Freud, we wouldn’t know nearly as much about dreams and their connection to wish fulfillment, the concept of manifest content vs symbolic meaning, and how the unconscious mind censors everyone’s dreams to protect the dreamer. Sigmund Freud was truly a