Category: Freud

I am sitting in a room, waiting for an appointment. On the wall, there is a big painting with different people : Two girls have a fruit basket on their head, dressed as if they’re part of the Rio Carnival ; some men seem ready to go to the beach ; a Marylin-like girl is very glamourous ; all are smiling and seem very festive. Next to the painting, a fashion show is playing on the tv : male models walk across the stage, their clothes floating and –ing as they walk. Next to the tv, a fan is sitting on the floor, not connected to any power, therefore not blowing any air.

I think of the scene and it makes me reflect on my life. I’ve always wanted to travel, but never really did. Recently, I considered travelling away for work and for vacation, but I am ambiguous on doing so. The painting – with festive people in world settings – is a reminder of my desire to travel the world and live new experiences. The fan that is disconnected must be to blow air. It represents that I must take action, connect the plug so that air is blowing ; air blowing represents change, movement towards a goal, in opposition to stagnation. Air seems to blow in the clothes worn by the fashion models on tv, these models seem to be free and to walk in an important direction. At the same time, this freedom is illusional : those models are stuck in the tv, they are imprisoned in this black box. Similarly, the people in the painting are not free : they are eternal prisoners of the canvas. These two representations are reminders that the association between travelling and freedom is a chimera ; bringing me back to the ambiguity in which I am regarding my projects.

That is the interpretation of my dream. Oh, wait, I did not dream. The described scene is actually the environment I was in at the moment of writing this response…

I have to admit that my reaction is a bit exaggerated : Freud certainly had a point. The dreams come from somewhere, they are fabricated by the brain of the person who is sleeping, they are not the fruit of someone’s thoughts, concious or not. Therefore, they are not random like the scene I described above. However, the problem I have resides in the way interpretations of these dreams are made. As I tried to show, anything can be interpreted the way one wishes.

It reminds me of the way certain people interpret literature ; in the most original, unlikely manners. As a professor once told me, the meaning is written there, black on white.

It is uncanny how much dreams resemble literary creation and interpretation at least if according to Freud’s ideas on the Interpretation of Dreams. The whole notion of dream-content and dream-thought could be easily extrapolated into the literary realm. In terms of interpretation of dreams dream-content refers to the dream in itself, the mental images we get while asleep. The dream-thought on the other hand is the interpretation of what the subconscious or unconscious wanted to represent, the hidden meaning. Very much like in literature, where what we read can be considered as a representation of something else that can only be discovered through interpretation.

Dream-content also uses some “tools” that work as to help create further symbolism in the dream. Things like condensation which refers to the dream-content being a lot shorter than the dream-thought. Displacement, objects that appear central in the dream-content that are not really important for the dream-thought; and transference, which appears when some kind of affect is displaced from one element to another. By being aware of the existence of this “tools” the interpretation the dream becomes more accurate. There are other interesting things that take place in dreams such as the loss of meaning of words or the creation of a new meaning that is different from the official , the mix of real and imaginary events and words that are treated as concrete objects to name a few.

Perhaps all the previously mentioned characteristics of dreams could be exchanged in a literary text as rhetorical figures and poetic licenses that is, if we only focused on the form of dreams versus the form of literature. However, I wonder if literary creation and art in general could be treated exactly as a dream. Namely, if we could say that what an author expresses in a novel or in a poem could be considered as a direct reflection of his hidden anxieties and desires and furthermore the possibility that the author does not even realize what he is projecting through his writing, not until it has been psychologically interpreted of course. If that were the case then it wouldn’t really matter what the author wanted to say but what he unconsciously says and we couldn’t kill the author as Barthes would have wanted us to because his psyche would be essential for the analysis of a text.

And in terms of the audience maybe some authors use this psychological theory to create texts that appeal to the hidden desires and motivations of a certain kind of ready who may feel unconsciously drawn to them. Could an extreme example be the Twilight Saga and teenage girls?

I have probably allowed my imagination to run a little wild and maybe most of my assumptions are farfetched however I feel very interested in all the possibilities that psychoanalysis brings to the plate of art and literature.

Dreams have always been a topic of interest for not only theorists such as Freud, but for people of the general population. Whether it is a nightmare, an enjoyable or simple strange dream, one always asks: what does that dream really mean? Is it insinuating something deeper about my life? Is it pure fiction or does it have elements of truth? Is what I experience on a regular basis in my dreams an indication about the person I am? These are questions that I often come up with when thinking about dreams. For Freud, dreams can be in fact interpreted and are not at all random or absurd occurrences but rather have meaning. Dreams are “wish fulfillment”; they serve the purpose of fulfilling a desire and satisfying the dreamer. This desire is nonetheless unconscious and thus, its meaning must be interpreted. In this sense, the dream functions as a means of understanding what is truly going on in someone’s mind. But since the content of dreams can sometimes be disturbing, it must be repressed and enters the consciousness under a “masked” form. In other words, these dreams are not what they appear to be and must be interpreted further in order to determine their true meaning in the realm of the unconscious.

Freud explains the difference between the manifest content and latent content of dreams. On the one hand, the manifest content refers to the dream as the dreamer tells it. This dream is believed to disguise a repressed desire and therefore, needs to be interpreted in order to uncover its latent content. The latent content is the product of the interpretation of the dream, its symbolic meaning. This is what is of particular interest to psychoanalysis since the latent content of a dream is what reveals the hidden meanings.

Dreams naturally refer to the events in our day-to-day lives. Last night, for example, my younger sister dreamt about her soccer game that took place this afternoon. It was a competitive match-up and a game that she had been looking forward to for a long time, so her dream-content was very much related to her desire to win the match (they won the game by the way!). However, Freud explains that in many instances dreams can be distorted, their real significance concealed by the latent content. Freud defines the dream-work to be the system that connects the manifest and latent dream-thoughts and aims to understand the mechanism by which the manifest content of dreams transforms into the latent dream-thoughts.

The processes of condensation and displacement are two ways by which Freud believes such a transformation can occur. First, condensation occurs when a number of dream-elements are combined into one, so that the dream becomes more condensed than the dream-thoughts. As Freud states, “Dreams are brief, meagre, and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts” (401). Second, displacement happens when your dream refers to one thing whereas your dream-thoughts seem to reveal that it was about something else. This operation masks the true meaning of your dream by displacing the emotion associated to one idea (something that may be embarrassing) to a totally different idea. This happens in day-to-day situations when for example, we take out our anger on others but are simply upset about something else. My question is that if the dream “gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish that exists in the unconscious” (412), how does one come to explain the role of nightmares from a Freudian perspective?

Dreams seem mysterious at ancient times, they are always connected with the augury in some countries, if you remember your dream-content, the visionary will tell you what your dream signifies, whether it is a favorable or an ominous augury. When I was a child, I wondered what a dream was, where did they come from? It’s a consciousness existing out of our mind? Or it’s just our imagination? Freud made an analysis of dreams as a psychological research, it’s more reasonable for us to understand the formation of the dream. In 《The Interpretation of Dreams》, there are relations investigated between the dream-content and dream-thoughts.

Sometimes, dreams are weird, but most of them are vivid. You can even “watch” yourself doing activities with a feeling as an outsider. Dream-content can be manifest or obscure in different forms. In general, the background in the dream is our living environment and dream-content is made of familiar objects, our friends or family members, but it also could be a nightmare about being injured or murdered.

It’s obvious that dreams are generally connected with the related events happening in the daytime. I could have a dream taking an examination nervously because of the coming test in the real life; I could have another dream looking for water with difficulty because I’m thirsty when I’m asleep… These are typical examples coming from the potential consciousness, that’s an unconscious process of thought. During the state of sleep, the brain is still “awake”, and these active thoughts form the dream. That’s another reason why dreams always seem real, a person may cry during his sleep because of a sorrowful dream, or feel disappointed because he thought that happy dream were the reality. Due to the close connection with dream-thoughts, dream-content becomes living. The subconscious dream activity persists for several minutes after waking. Even though you have realized that’s a dream, not real, you’re still inclined to finish this dream.

Dreams can lead us to relevant memories or even childhood memory, the childhood recollection sometimes arises by accident in the dream. I still remember when I was a little girl, I was so keen on sketch and watercolor, but I had to give up this hobby as my studies were getting busy, after I graduated from high school or even recently, dreams of being a painter appear frequently, it’s sentimental, there is no obvious connection with my daily life, but this childhood memory still returns to me.

In the view of the visible nature of the relation between manifest dream-content and latent dream-thoughts, we can see a dream of which the different visible or obscure elements are determined by the whole mass of dream-thoughts. We can analyze these elements separately and treat them as they are of small value to dig for the inherent psychical value and signification in the dream-thoughts. In the meantime, dream-displacement and dream-condensation should be considered as two important aspects and influential factors in the formation of the dream.