Analysis Of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalysis

Psyche

Living in our culture and society means that we hold back impulses and inhibit compulsions. The way these impulses and compulsions are let loose is through dreams; they come to the surface in a disguised form in order to protect us from content that may be disturbing or wounding. Using his personality traits of the ID, Ego and Super Ego Freud believed that the Super Ego suppresses the ID’s impulses and desires. In dream state the unconscious ID is given permission to express its most hidden desires (usually sexually repressed desires). In order to preserve our sleep, dreams manifest themselves in symbolic form, which are obscure and perplexing. Recalling dreams is difficult; in awakened state the Super Ego presents itself and does what

The latent part of the dream was the most important to Freud. Dreams were such an important part of Freud 's psychoanalytic theory that he believed the way to resolve clients of their physical and psychological difficulties was through dream analysis.

Process of Analysis

In Freud’s ‘interpretation of dreams’ he highlights that the manifest content of the dream is what is obvious and not to assign too much significance to this. But the latent content is the dreams camouflage and can often result in hasty inaccurate interpretation. What Freud sought was the analysis of the dream to be a ‘process’ where the dream comes into awareness and ‘dream-work’ can take place.

He identified four main aspects to this work. Using these aspects in the analysis process is how the unconscious’ hidden wishes and desires become considered, controlled and begin to make sense in the conscious being. Freud calls the structure of transformations condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision. These transformations express the manifest and latent content (dream-work), which is organised by method of symbolisation (Freud,

Firstly is the critique that dreams are worthless, they are just the effect of unsystematic nerve discharge that occurs during REM sleep. This concept seems to be the present day view but in his Interpretation of dreams book (ch. 1, The Scientific Literature on the Problem of the Dream) Freud agreed that dreams are a way in which nervous tension is discarded.

Secondly is the critique that Freud 's theory does not account for the story formation of dreams and does not suitably contemplate the relationship between the manifest and latent content. Freud’s lack of importance placed on the manifest element of the dream has been criticised. It has been stated that the apparent nature of the manifest narrative should not be dismissed so readily and that it may just be another layer of the latent structure, bringing its own significant