Sigmund Freud: The Study Of The Human Mind

Improved Essays
To this day, Freudian concepts and theories are put to use in treating and analyzing problems associated with the human mind. Sigmund Freud, a Jewish Austrian-born physiologist, is perceived as the father of psychoanalysis, a method of treating mental illness and unlocking the hidden motives of human behaviour. His contributions toward the study of the human mind are widely known, and are still upheld in the world of psychology today. Though his theories and ideas are widely debated and controversial even today, they are seen as the basis of talk therapy as it is in modern society On May sixth, 1856, Sigmund Freud was born to Jakob and Amalia Freud in the town of Freiburg, Austria. Freud was the first of eight children, though his father …show more content…
This was, by self-assessment, Freud 's greatest work. By showing how parts of dreams suggest the whole range of personal issues in the individual 's past and present experiences, Freud lays out a plan for a new brand of psychology, and much of his later studies on psychoanalysis and talk therapy.
Though The Interpretation of Dreams was Freud 's most important work, it took the original 600 copies printed in 1900 eight years to be sold. For these eight years, it was largely ignored, though psychological journals published crushing criticisms of the theories expressed in the book.
Although Freud argues that repressed thoughts that show themselves unconsciously in dreams generally have something to do with sexual feelings unresolved from one 's childhood because dreams are important and concern themselves only with matters that one cannot resolve by conscious deliberation and action, he allows for the dream satisfaction of other wishes that have not been allowed in one 's waking life. There are many desires that cannot be acted upon in reality, such as wishing for the affection and attention from a loved one that has passed on, wanting to return to one 's childhood, wishing to sleep one 's life away in order to avoid the struggles of real world, and the desire for revenge that cannot be acted
…show more content…
Freud himself has said, “only the context can furnish the correct meaning” of the symbols in a dream (enotes). All dreamers utilize the material of their own experience in their own way, and only by careful analysis, obscured by the symbolism seen in the dream, is it possible to analyze the particular use of symbols in one 's dream. It is worth noting Freud admits that many symbols appear with much the same intent in many dreams of different people. The way the symbols are seen does rely on cultural limitations; it can be easy to apply limitations of one 's imagination into the material

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Freud believed that it was possible to use the manifest content of the dream to discover the latent content, that which revealed the unconscious desires of an individual. Because Freud saw dreams as a form of wish fulfilment, the latent content was deemed to be the innermost wishes of an individual and his research was founded in this idea of discovering the latent content through the analysis of the manifest content of his dreams and those of children. Freud kept a journal of his dreams as well as those from patients that he recorded using recall methods, arguing that the internal functions affected the mental unconscious in the form of dreams and that dreams revealed important and forgotten details in regards to the lives of individuals. His Freud’s findings emphasized the idea that dreams have a deeper meaning accessible to interpretation—the latent content of the mind—and the idea that dreams have a function—hallucinatory wish-fulfilment (Marcus, 1999). While Freud focused on the visual interpretation of dreams and how repetitive events could be analysed, he took a neurobiological approach to research, which preceded the activation-synthesis theory that honed in fully on the biological implications of dream…

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    On the surface, psychoanalysis can be defined as “a system of psychological theory and therapy that aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation and free association” (GOOGLE). As a primary component of the psychoanalysis movement, Sigmund Freud encompasses theories regarding dream interpretation in order to reveal one’s internal thoughts. According to Freud 's theories about dream analysis, our unconscious mind enables us to manipulate our internal thoughts and emotions into a form of artistic expression. As humans, we typically have an innate tendency to suppress…

    • 860 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dreams In The Odyssey

    • 1809 Words
    • 8 Pages

    What are dreams designed to do? How do we dream? Do they even mean anything? These are questions people may contemplate when they wake in the morning after encountering a series of thoughts, images, and sensations that occurred during their sleep. Every person in the world – big or small, rich or poor – has drifted off and dreamt at some point in their life.…

    • 1809 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In his analysis of dreams and the dream-work, Freud theorized that there were two distinct kinds of content in relation to dreams. The first kind of dream content is manifest content and refers to the material experienced in the surface of the dream. Manifest content includes all of the elements of images, thoughts, and content in the dream that is retained in an individual’s memory upon awakening. The second kind of dream content is latent dream-thoughts and refers to the relevant material of the dream discovered through analysis. Latent dream-thoughts consist of the hidden meaning of an individual’s unconscious thoughts, wishes, and desires.…

    • 526 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Freud believed in the expression of language to help reveal the nature of his patient's dreams. He used the term 'dream-work' to describe the ways in which dreams materialize from the unconscious and argued that dreams reflect desires which are supressed by the superego in order for the ego to develop as a social individual. There are instances however, when desires often escape from the unconscious and are revealed through slips of the tongue or within dreams themselves. The content of a dream is produced by 'dream-thoughts' and presented in the form of illustrated signs which are then deciphered back into dream-thought to obtain the correct meaning. The relationship between the way dream-thoughts are displaced and condensed can be applied…

    • 151 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Annotated Bibliography: Freud Hebbrecht, M. (2013). The dream as a picture of the psychoanalytic process. Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 6(2), 123–142. Retrieved from https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.lopes.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=93354202&site=ehost-live&scope=site This article references the Interpretation of Dreams by Freud in reference to the pictures of dream life and the psychology behind dreams.…

    • 609 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dream Theory Everyone on planet Earth dreams, whether they claim they dream or not. Dreams are a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind, typically occurring during REM sleep. But, why do people dream? Many famous psychologists have come up with theories on why humans dream and the purpose of a dream is.…

    • 1097 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Sigmund Freud said in his land- mark work the interpretation of dream that “dreams are the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes.” He also gives two components of dreams the manifest content and the latent content. These demonstrate the elements of a dream that is consciously experienced and remembered by the dreamer; while the unconscious wishes, thoughts and urges are concealed in the manifest content of a dream. However my belief is not in standing to what Sigmund Freud mention in his manifest content.…

    • 921 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When these desires are hidden by strange images and symbols this gives the dreams a higher chance of reaching us through our conscious. Freud says this whole hidden message can be explained by the famous term of ‘dream distortion’. We sometimes see our dreams come to us as the what we consider to be the complete opposite of what we would have secretly desired or wished for; Freud said that this can happen because we as humans like to keep our deepest wishes and desires as secrets incase we are never able to achieve them then we are not having to deal with failure or humiliation. We tend to hide these wishes deep down and never let them rise to the surface, because of this the only way a dream can make an appearance is by coming to us in the opposite form of what we really want. That is why we call it dream distortion, because in a way it distorts what we are really desiring, to expand further on this Freud also said if our psyche is really trying to reach out and communicate with us that the only way it can get to us is in the unconscious by censoring the message by making it more…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Freud believed that nothing you do occurs by chance; every action and thought is motivated by your unconscious mind at some level. a. In order to live in a civilized society, you have a tendency to hold back your urges and hide your impulses. b. Because they can’t be expressed in a social setting, our urges and impulses are expressed in our unconscious mind, through our dreams. 2. For this reason, Freuds theory about dreams focused primarily on sexual desires and symbolism.…

    • 1734 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Both the concept of repression and wish fulfillment are perpetuated by the ego in order to grant the dreamer long-term psychological and physical energy. In On Dreams, Freud describes the primary function of dreams as being entities that fulfill wishes. Freud calls the dreams we directly see the “manifest dream” (DUKKY) whilst calling the latent themes behind dreams, appropriately, “latent dream thoughts.” (DUKKY) Freud claimed that components featured in in manifest dreams where representations of latent dream thoughts that represented desires.…

    • 1610 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Freud thought of dreams as the main road to the unconscious. Freud pointed out that dreams always seem to be self-centered. " The wishes fulfilled in them are invariably this self's wishes". When other people appear in a dream they’re merely symbols of ourselves or symbolized what another person means to us.…

    • 266 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Compare and contrast Psychoanalytic Theory to that of Social Cognitive Perspective and the Humanistic Perspective. Also, tell me who are the primary psychologists who came up with each theory/perspective? Sigmund Freud was an influential psychiatrist and clinical psychologist. Freud began his work when he found that the disorders of the patients he was seeing made no neurological sense. What could be causing feelings that had no physical cause?…

    • 1455 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    During ‘prescientific days’ dreams were considered a ‘manifestation’ of a ‘higher power’. The introduction of psychology, the scientific study of our mind, rejects and replaces this interpretation with many others. Freud lists 4 distinct interpretations. The first is his own interpretation. His states that dreams are a subconscious manifestation of our desires.…

    • 1694 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Freud dreams: In ancient times, dreams were believed to be gifts from the gods in which glimpses to the future and life direction were given. Freud preferred to look at dreams with a more scientific base. He believed dreams were the unconscious leaking the repressed desires of the dreamer. As a child dreamer, a wish fulfilment would be very clear such as eating a cookie, this rarely required interpretation. Adults, being more complex, required a sensitive exploration by the dreamer and analyst to unravel the true meaning.…

    • 661 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays

Related Topics