Sigmund Freud:
The Theory of Dreams
December 2016
Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939)
·
Rest
or sleep is broken with a disturbance in unconsciousness. Dreams are
hallucinating experiences which ensures continuity of sleep. We only dream
something which we know we can cope with.
·
When
we are unable to cope with it we wake up in a state of anxiety. In dreams we
are aware of the comfort ability of the dream. "After all, it is only a
dream".
·
Dreams
give us a glimpse of what goes on in our unconscious mind and they are quite
different from our conscious thoughts, dreams appear as faulty and preposterous
to our conscious mind. These dreams also affect our neurotic systems as latent
dreams are turned into manifest dreams.
Manifest
Dream: dreaming repressed; true emotions of the dreamer. They are buildup of
Unconscious thinking.
Latent Dream: hidden
psychological meaning of dream.
·
Latent
dream becomes manifest dream after interpretation. The dreams acknowledge that
he thought so at one point of time or even done so. The dreamer rejects one
thought. All other dreams are formed in walking life/day. This rejected thought
is of an unconscious, this thought had to wait the conscious to be repressed to
come out. With other dreams which we don’t object this disowned dream also
comes onto surface. In dreams our instinctual wishes are seen as fulfilled. In
dreams our instinctual whishes are seen as fulfilled.in dreams we are cut off from
reality. These unconscious, represses and latent thoughts thus become visual
pictures in the dream.
Stages of
dream
- wish to sleep
- Voluntary withdrawal from outside world
>thinking of older or possible activities
>repression is resisted which gives
rise to unconsciousness and dream formation begins
Latent dream thoughts- a repressed impulse which obtains expression, these
thoughts give satisfaction and are turned into collection of sensory and visual
images.
·
There
is representation of certain things through objects which have become strange
to conscious thoughts, when thoughts are translated into pictures, then those
thoughts are preferred which provide a telescoping.
Because dreams are created by condensation of thoughts then many dream thoughts
can have same elements, this element is represented through dream pictures.
·
What
is important in dream-thoughts is represented in dreams. Displacement is chief
method in dream distortion, after many effects on dream thoughts, the dream is
ready. Secondary elaboration comes into appearance after the dream has come
into consciousness. Then the dream is treated as perception, we add links, try
to fill in gaps and often believe its misunderstandings.
·
Dream
does not function entirely on dream-thoughts, sometimes it works through parts.
The dreams could be normal brain activity or something that happened before in
the day.
·
Whish
theory of dreams has two difficulties; first difficulty is people who
experienced traumatic situations face them even n their dreams; second
difficulty is people with amnesia of childhood sexual abuse, they recall those
memories in dreams. According to Freud all unrealizable
desires are due to bad childhood experiences and they bring pain to the surface.
Sometimes in case of traumatic nervousness, dreams end up in anxiety. Dream is a wish fulfillment. Dream can achieve its end
in an incomplete way or has to abandon t. the sleeper has to dream because the
nightly relaxation of repression allows the traumatic experience to become
active and the dream- work of sleeper results in wish fulfillment or changed
memory traces of traumatic event.
OEDIPUS COMPLEX
·
When
the child has love toward the mother then repression has already begun,
Sophocles' story. Many people mate with their mothers in dreams but the dreams
are of no account. The play is immortal and it sets an individual's
responsibility toward law and society. Moral instinct of human are repressed
which could force him not to do such things. In play god and destiny are reason
behind their acts. The hearer or watcher of play find the Oedipus complex in
himself, he sees the Gods and Oracle in his unconsciousness. Even though
the man has suppressed his evil thoughts in his unconscious and says he is not
answerable to them, he still has a sense of guilt for which he can't bring out
a foundation.
·
The
sense of guilt which the man has acquired through beliefs in religion
and morality. The child often caresses mother in absence of father and
promises to marry her, these thoughts later dwell in the unconscious of the
child. People think it’s due to erotic movies or egoistic motives. Mother's
motives are to be concerned with child and his needs. When boy shows sexual
curiosity (seduction, sleeping with mother, watching her change) mother
observes this erotic attachment without a change.
·
A mother watches on daughter as well but this
effect is not produced on her. Sex preference is also important and needs to be
considered.
·
Little
girl's devotion to fathers and adopting womanhood is also awakening of oedipal
complex in girl. Oedipal complex is possible relations closely related
to Oedipus complex. These feeling that a boy or girl has of affection towards
the opposite sex parent is discontinued with birth of another child, the child
gets away from parent and on becoming an adult harbors an embitterment or
estrangement.
·
The
boy can be attracted to sister instead of heart less mother; he sees other
bother as a substitute for father and little sister as a child that she expected
from father. Though incest is considered taboo but the first love
objects of a person are in his own family. Also God's have incestuous
relationships in many culture's mythology and in Egypt they married their own
brothers and sisters.
·
Hamlet-
father died
revenge from mother. A hatred for father arises with several motives including
sexual desires with mother. The boy frees himself from parent after finding an
external love in reality and reconciling with father who was antagonistic. In
neurotics the boy fails to find a new sexual object and remains all his life in
subjection to his father. All men not just neurotics have incestuous and
murderous dreams. Neurotics’ shows this complex in a magnified and exaggerated
form and this is also revealed in dream analyses of normal people.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
·
Many
philosophers say that mental thing being unconscious is self- contradictory.
Consciousness is a highly escapable condition, what is conscious is conscious
only for a moment. Unconscious condition can also become conscious. The
pre-conscious thoughts also become conscious. There are many mental processes
which can't be conscious, these must be interpreted, discovered and translated
into conscious.
·
Mental
Processes- -unconscious,
pre-conscious and conscious. There is no line between them; any can become
conscious, unconscious or pre-conscious.
·
[ID,
Ego and Super Ego]
ID- a chaos, it has direct contact with
somatic (bodily) process. It takes instinctual needs and gives them mental
expression. There is no logic in ID, no organization and no unification. There
are contradictory impulses which neutralize each other's impulses. There is an
idea of time, passage of time and no alteration of mental processes by passage
of time. Impulses which don't go beyond ID are immortal and are preserved as if
they happened just right now. They are robbed of their energy and they become
conscious through analyses. ID knows no values, no good and evil, no morality.
Economic or pleasure principle dominates all processes. ID is instinctual and
the energy for these instinctual and the energy for these instinctual impulses
is stored elsewhere in the mind. ID stands for untamed passions.
Ego- different from ID and super ego, also
called perceptual conscious system. It is the sense organ of interior of mind.
This forms perception of external world and generates the phenomena of
consciousness. Ego is part of ID relating to external world and also influenced
by it. Ego observed external world and preserves a true picture of it in
memory. It controls path of access to motility (power) but it also roams between
desire and action which gives rise to greater security and success. It works
through idea of time; there is high degree of organization which ego needs for
achievement. Ego stands for reason and circumspection (attention to facts). It
has three masters- external world, ID and super ego. Ego develops anxiety when
it is too hard presses or threatened by danger. It wants to obey to demands of
external world but also be obedient to id. It has to maintain balance between
ID and reality.
Super Ego- it holds certain norms of behavior
without caring about difficulty coming from ID and external world. If the norms
are not acted up to it punishes Ego with feeling of tension and manifests
themselves as inferiority or guilt.
·
Ego
thus facing pressures from three sides, tries to work in some kind of harmony.
When Ego acknowledges it's weakness it breaks out into anxiety.
ID : neurotic anxiety
Superego : normal anxiety
External World : reality anxiety
All parts are mixed into each other; a
geographical line can't be made.
Deepali Yadav
Student at Kamala Nehru
College (DU)
Contact me @ deepaliyadav2896@gmail.com
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