Theories of Dream Content in The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud

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Recommended: Freud's view of dreams

I have chosen an original psychology classic based on Sigmund Freud. The title of my review is “The Interpretation of Dreams”. This book was written to find out why do we actually dream and what does it mean in our psychological lives. In Freud’s view, dream is viewed as wish fulfilment. It is known as the satisfaction of a desire through an involuntary process. Therefore it can occur in dreams or daydreams in the symptoms or neurosis or hallucination of psychosis. It requires interpretation to recognize this satisfaction.
I chose this book to explore whether our dreams do mean anything, and whether it does symbolise and influence our past and future. The points that I will be talking about The Interpretation of Dreams in my review is the theories of manifest and latent dream content, dreams as wish fulfilments, and the significance of childhood experiences.
Dreams are mental images and emotions during sleep that may also have sounds and it can be confusing and surprising at times. In Freud’s earliest writings in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), he insisted that dreams are “the royal road to knowledge of activities of the unconscious mind”. This means dreams offer a means of understanding walking experience. According to Freud, it is important and meaningful to understand our dreams. Hence, Freud identified two types of content in our dreams, that is the manifest and the latent content.
The manifest content is the actual subject of the dream that one remembers, while the latent content appears to be hidden and often discovered by a dream analysis to find out the underlying meaning of these symbols. In order to protect the individual from thoughts and feeling that are hard to deal with in real life, Freud believed that drea...

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... Freud associated certain dreams with childhood experiences and also gave a greater view on why some people are fixated at certain stages in their development.
‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ by Sigmund Freud can be concluded that the unconscious mind can be expressed through dreams. As it is believed by his that it represents the fulfilment of wishes. Just as Freud’s ‘iceberg’ model of personality states the conscious is where we have contact with the outside world, the preconscious is material just beneath the surface of awareness and lastly the unconscious where this is difficult to retrieve the material as it is below the surface of awareness. The unconscious holds an individual’s experiences everyday as it is also known as the biological aspect of the mind. As Freud believed some thoughts and wishes are hidden in the unconscious and not made conscious.

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