PART I
Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in what is now Pribor, Czech Republic. He moved to Vienna, Austria in 1860 and Freud began school at Vienna University in 1875. In 1881, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine. Freud researched medicinal effects of coca, hypnotherapy, and in 1895, he began to analyze his own dreams.
PART II
Freud formed his theory of dreaming, published in The Interpretation of Dreams, by the analysis of his own dreams. He kept a journal of his dreams, reflected on them, and concluded that dreams are the fulfillment of wishes, whether conscious or not. Freud said that all dreams contain common elements such as a childhood memory, possibly a conflict or an emotionally-charged experience. This early memory is blended with events from the past few days that relate to it. These recent events are called “day residue”.
While dream analysis seems to be a simple process, early childhood memories or traumas are often repressed. An “inner censor” has hidden the dreamer’s true wishes. The inner censor distorts the dream’s meaning. Often, the features of many different people are compressed into one character. The censor can also transfer comments for one person to a different one in the dream, and sometimes substitute a symbol for a person. “… A father may become a king, a mother a cupboard, a child an animal.” (Muckenhoupt) The censor changes verbal thoughts into visual images, and other symbols can take the form of verbal cues.
The Essay on Freud And The Psychoanalytic Tradition
One of the most significant legacies Sigmund Freud left behind was the method he devised for interpreting the meaning of people’s lives. Freud developed a psychoanalytic mode of investigation and interpretation that relies on decoding hidden and disguised meanings. Interpretation from Freud’s standpoint is always a matter of going beneath the surface, beyond the obvious, to explore a ...
Once the censoring process is complete, the unconscious conflict has been changed and manipulated into symbolic content. When the person awakes he or she must make sense of the symbols and force a “logical structure” onto the dream. Freud wrote, “A dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.” (Muckenhoupt) Since a dream is simply a symbol for a deeper desire, the psychoanalyst must “decode” the latent content in order to find out what the subconscious is bringing out.
A common type of dream that Freud dealt with was the anxiety dream. Some dreams of this type result from sexual wishes where this sexual energy, or libido, is converted into anxiety. This is especially true when the wish is revealed too clearly in the dream. Other times, the cause of the anxiety is present before the dream begins and is used like day residue, to expose a repressed wish. For example, a patient of Freud’s once dreamed of a broken bone when his marriage was falling apart. This is just one of Freud’s theories on different types of dreams and shows his thoughtful analysis of why people dream.
PART III
I strongly agree with the basic principles of Freud’s dream theory. That is, I agree that dreams are a symbolic representation of a combination of early childhood experiences and recent events. Freud believed that most dreams are sexual in nature. I believe this also because, when it gets down to it, human beings, like all living creatures, are made to reproduce. Everything we do is to ensure the procreation of our species. This is part of the evolutionary theory, which is partly based on the Freud’s psychoanalytical theory. I believe that through social conditioning human beings are thought to repress their animal instincts and biological urges because they are “uncivilized”. It seems only natural that these urges would reveal themselves when our guard is down, in our sleep. Nevertheless, as Freud said, our inner censor can still hide the true meaning of our dreams. This is true because Freud said that children have not yet developed an inner censor so their dreams are a true reflection of their inner desires.
The Term Paper on Freuds Theories on Personality
Sigmund Freud developed psychodynamic theories on personality. He believed that there are three elements to our personality. The first is the ID, the second is the ego, and the third is the superego. He believed that each element keeps the others in check; therefore if all elements are well balanced the person had a healthy personality. Freud also developed a theory in which he believed our ...
Muckenhoupt, Margaret. Sigmund Freud Explorer of the Unconscious.
www.freud.t0.or.at/freud/chronolog/1895-e.htm
