Latent Content Of A Dream Essay

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Manifest content and Latent content of a dream Every person has at one time in their life experienced a strange dream that has some hidden meaning. Many people believe that the events in their dream serve to indicate hidden message about an aspect of their life. The development of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory borrowed a lot from the hidden meaning of dreams. Feud believed that an individual could relieve psychological distress by bringing the hidden meaning of dreams in their conscious awareness. In explaining this psychoanalytic Sigmund proposed two types of dream contents namely manifest content and latent content.
Sigmund Freud believed that the fears and problems that we experience in life are temporary and can quickly be eliminated …show more content…

It goes beyond the actual meaning of a dream and addresses the hidden content within the dream (Freud 12). For example, if a person dreams about walking naked in the street, an interpreter may associate this dream to the fear of exposure, fear of other people or a sense of insecurity. This hidden message in a dream constitutes the latent content of the dream. The latent content of dreams holds the key to understanding our hopes, fears, and experiences in life. The latent content of the dream is usually suppressed and hidden by an individual's subconscious mind. By hiding these feelings and thoughts, an individual can protect himself from elements that can cause harm or thoughts and feelings that are hard to accept in …show more content…

Condensation and displacement form part of the mechanism that helps in repressing contents of different dreams. Condensation involves the combination of various these in a dream to form one main symbol. The main symbol in the dream is a representation of the feelings thoughts, wishes, and ideas of the individual who is dreaming. Condensation results in minimizing the representation of individual hidden desires during the dream. During condensation, multiple dream images are joined to form one single image that serves to hide the meaning of a particular