Freud's Interpretation Of Dreams

Sigmund Freud was, in his time, a world-renowned psychologist and a pioneer in the field of the unconscious and the inner workings of the mind. In 1896, Freud had a drastic turn of events in his life. Freud, being profoundly close to his father, was highly impacted by his death. This huge loss caused Freud to enter a deep state of self-analysis in which he interpreted dreams and their latent meanings. In 1900 Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams”, the fruit of his analytic labor. He opens with:
“I shall bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that, if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which

In this dream Freud visualizes a patient named Irma with extreme pain in her throat, stomach, and nose. He then examines her medically, though Irma is reluctant, and then goes back to see if he has made any errors in his treatment. In the dream, he also calls over his two friends, named “M.” and “Otto”, to re-examine Irma, to further confirm if there has been a mistake in his treatment. When Freud awoke from this dream, he believed that the dream revealed that his fellow doctors had misdiagnosed a patient, and that he needed to fix it. After this dream, Freud believes it to be an unconscious fulfillment of his need to deflect responsibility of Irma's mistreatment to somebody other than himself. He labeled this interpretation as “a fulfillment of a wish”. According to Blass in 2002, “Once the nature of the meaning of Freud’s one dream is revealed to be of a specific kind, a wish-fulfillment, Freud wants to show that indeed this finding is generalizable to all dreams.” Freud believed that even if a dream doesn’t reveal itself as a “wish-fulfillment” it can be further deeply analyzed to be proven otherwise (Blass, 2002).
Rather as looking at dreams as a whole, Freud separated dreams into tiny visual fragments, and believed each were symbolic and meaningful (Mazlish, 1993). He found more meaning one object in a dream as opposed the entirety of the dream as a whole. For example, in one of his