Psychodynamic Dream Theory By Sigmund Freud: A Psychological Analysis

①The investigation of dreams has its long history all over the world. The mythologies of different cultures have various interpretations of dreams. It was commonly believed that dreams are important messages from higher powers. As humans’ understanding of the world progresses, more and more scientists have proposed the idea that dreams are meaningless and inexplicable. The debate on the meaning of dreams has never ceased. Sandor Ferenczi, an advocate of Sigmund Freud’s Psychodynamic Dream Theory, attempts to provide a psychological analysis of dreams by employing psychoanalysis in the article published approximately ten years after Freud’s discovery of the theory. According to Ferenczi, “dreams [are] the manifestations of mental life.”

Freud’s theory emphasizes dreams are associated with desires that are distasteful to the conscious mind; therefore, they can only exist in bewildering forms so that the content of the dream would not cause discomfort in people. The theory itself has a significant number of opponents. The opposition suggests dreams are produced by the brain in response to the sensory information the body receives during sleep, and they have no connection to the person’s thought and mind. Interestingly, the results of both Freud and Ferenczi’s dream analyses on their patients have helped substantiate dreams have more profound meaning. In fact, Freud discovered the significance of dreams by studying neurotic patients. Dream analysis on those patients had aided to find the cause of the disease. In Ferenczi’s article, the author expands on Freud’s theory and gives further detailed examples that support his

It is undeniable that people have different experiences and approaches of perceiving their environments, hence, the symbols in their dreams must have countless versions of interpretations. Furthermore, Ferenczi mentions in the article that the completeness of people’s recall about their dreams are not important, rather, only a few hardly noticeable images are crucial to dream analysis, such as the concert ticket. While deciding which objects or images are truly significant is a challenging work. Most importantly, most of the dreams are quickly forgotten, because the censor would become more active when people are awake, and it would erase the details of dreams that contain undesirable thoughts. The dreams later being recalled may lose their accuracy easily due to those facts. Nevertheless, Freud’s theory is revolutionary and it has laid the basis for further research on