Freud’s scrutin de liste
There is so much to consider in these texts that at moments that it seems foolish to read more than a single author, and even a single passage from a single author. Nevertheless we read quite a few authors in this seminar, in the hope that, having scouted out different approaches, you can come back to one that is particularly appropriate for your preoccupations. Whatever the justification for our blitz reading (a colleague calls it “hit and run reading”), the feeling that we are missing the point persists. (The full text is here: Interpretation of Dreams.)
Freud’s text gives a name to the problem and fuels my misgivings. The problem is condensation; theoretical texts are dreams that require all the interpretative effort at unpacking that Freud illustrates in his interpretation of dreams. As Freud unpacks a dream, he only further condenses the theory he presents. Is that why he spends so much time on condensation? There is something more than meets the eye in condensation. But first let us wander through Freud’s packing room — where he unpacks dreams and packs up theory.
Borders crossed
As Freud untangles the weave of a dream he has a slight twinge that he might be focused on weaving in his own thoughts:
“The first reader and critic of this book…protested that ‘the dreamers seems to be too ingenious and amusing.’ This is quite true so long as it refers only to the dreamer; it would only be an objection if it were to be extended to the dream-interpreter. … Dreams become ingenious and amusing because the direct and easiest pathway to the expression of their thoughts is barred.” (footnote 13).
The objection is that the interpreter traces out paths of interpretation that are beyond the dreamer’s ordinary thoughts, latent or otherwise. It looks like the interpreter (Freud) is helping the dreamer a bit too much, or that, just as confusingly, there is no clear line between the interpreters and the dreamer’s minds.
Along with common philological references, Freud is constantly making references to literature. The latent content seems to inevitably resonate with a text that is generally known, as if the dreamer were weaving that common literary language into the latent ideas of his text and then the interpreter, because he is familiar with those references, is able to pull them out again.
In “A lovely dream”, the dreamer is on stage and off — audience and actor. That seems to be the case with Freud, who accompanies the dreamer in his dream. Freud’s interpretation condenses several texts, literary and otherwise, just as a single word tends to condense all the texts it belongs too. The reader has some difficulty distinguishing what Freud presents as latent content provided by the dreamer, what is a pedagogical tool for presenting the theory, or an illustration of the interpretation that is confirmed by a literary texts. Sappho is is found, though inverted, in the dreamer’s play. What is latent is teased out in the conversation with Freud, where Freud’s life and experience are woven into the life of the dreamer.
This too is a displacement: from patient to analyst.
The “scrutin de liste” –the voting for more than one candidate at a time– is part of Freud’s method: one thing does not exclude the other, and everything and everyone is on the list.
Symbols
Freud finds two other transformations (not in our text) in dream creation: plastic representation and symbolization. The former is about transforming all signs of the latent content into visible objects. There are several ways this can be accomplished. One is through a rebus, where the sounding out of the names of the manifest objects of a dream says the name of an object or an idea in the latent content. Another is through a metaphorical link:
It is evident that this process is not simple. In order to get an idea of its difficulties you must pretend that you have undertaken the task of replacing a political editorial in a newspaper by a series of illustrations, that you have suffered an atavistic return from the use of the alphabet to ideographic writing. Whatever persons or concrete events occur in this article you will be able to replace easily by pictures, perhaps to your advantage, but you will meet with difficulties in the representation of all abstract words and all parts of speech denoting thought relationships, such as particles, conjunctions, etc. With the abstract words you could use all sorts of artifices. You will, for instance, try to change the text of the article into different words which may sound unusual, but whose components will be more concrete and more adapted to representation. You will then recall that most abstract words were concrete before their meaning paled, and will therefore go back to the original concrete significance of these words as often as possible, and so you will be glad to learn that you can represent the “possession” of an object by the actual physical straddling of it. The dream work does the same thing. Under such circumstances you can hardly demand accuracy of representation. You will also have to allow the dream-work to replace an element that is as hard to depict as for instance, broken faith, by another kind of rupture, a broken leg. In this way you will be able to smooth away to some extent the crudity of imagery when the latter is endeavoring to replace word expression.
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalyisis, chapter XI
The dream transformations are part of normal writing. For example, condensation is found in portmanteau words. Plastic representation and condensation exist as well in metaphors: “Richard is a lion” compounds a lion and a man, and at the same time gives a plastic representation of courage in the shape of a lion. This is a good metaphor for courage not because lions are courageous (there is nothing that makes them any more courageous than any other beast), but because they make us afraid. Again, inversion of meaning is part of dreams and literary tropes as well.
The most difficult transformation to appreciate is perhaps symbolization (see summary here). Symbols raise some tricky terminological difficulties (for Saussure, a symbol is a motivated sign, for others a symbol is an arbitrary sign), and it isn’t certain what a symbol is for Freud. Sometimes I think it is metonymy: the crown represents royalty; the beaver represents Canada. These are cases where a part represents the whole, but it isn’t an arbitrary part; it is a metaphorical part. Should we define symbols as the figure where metonymies and metaphors come together? What is the relation between symptoms, signs and symbols?
This seems crucial because obsessions and neuroses are symbolic in nature, and can be cured by a symbolic tool — the talking cure.
Condensation and wit
No conclusions here, but let me add a famous piece of the subsequent book by Freud that explores wit. Wit, psychosis, dreams and literature: they seem to all be peculiar expressions of language.
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Impressions on “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
Adam Smith – considered the father of Economics – introduced the idea of the invisible hand. He showed that if every individual in an economy is doing the best for himself, efficiency will result and no better resource allocation will be possible. That is the foundation of economic liberalism. If one was to follow Marx’s idea and to put all production in the government’s hands – this economy now being fully centralised, the same result would happen. How come then communism is against this economic freedom?
Without directly stating so, Marx saw the failures of the free market. To lead to efficiency, free markets must happen under perfect conditions ; conditions often not met in real life. One of this condition is perfect competition. Under perfect competition, there is a very large amount of economic agents on both sides – supply and demand. However, in the economies depicted by Marx, the numerous workers are under the control of fewer employers. Therefore, these employers can use their market power to impose work conditions to labourers who have no option but to accept if they want to survive. This situation is not acceptable for Marx.
Smith also introduced the idea of division of labour. He argued that more of a good can be produced if its production is divided in a series of steps each performed by a different worker, than if the same workers were doing all the steps by themselves. By dividing the the production process, each worker becomes more specialised, therefore more efficient ; this way, more can be produced. To Marx, such production process reduces the worker to a tool used to increase the bourgoisie’s wealth, takes away his humanity, enslaved him.
Free markets also do not take into consideration issues that are fondamental to Marx. One of this is child labour. The economic system supported by the bourgeoisie destroys the family. Parents have no choice but to put their children at work to survive, hence depriving them of an education and condemning them to live in the same conditions for the rest of their life (system in fact reciprocating the feodal system). Also, free markets are not concerned with wealth distribution. Marx defends a world in which the bourgeoisie is not poorer, but in which proletariat has the tools to develop his wealth.
Finally, I find that the reality described by Marx would give very interesting voices in novels as defined by Bakhtin. For him, conflictual situations are the source of double-voicedness, a condition necessary for literary novels.
Impressions on “The Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund 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.
DREAMS AND LITERATURE
(This entry is very stream of layperson’s consciousness)
Dreams = manifestations of latent content i.e. the unconscious.
Speech = manifestation of language
Language = manifestation of the unconscious
Literature = what permits human beings to communicate with another consciousness and perhaps a collective unconscious?
I love this quote Freud used in The Interpretation of Dreams: “… a thousand threads one treadle throws,/ Where fly the shuttles hither and thither,/ Unseen the threads are knit together,/ And an infinite combination grows.” (Goethe, Faust)
However, I don’t believe that all those threads that make up the unconscious or dreams can ever be completely known, or even need be discovered. Perhaps interpretation is not what is important in art. Perhaps the effect its form has on the perceiver at the moment of its being perceived is. In other words, we can no more understand an object of art than we can know the unconscious.
The more theory I read, the more I realize that the search for definitions of what literature, an author and a reader are will never be found until we stop looking for some fixed “truth”. So far we think that literature is created through language, the human psyche of authors and readers, and the socio-economic climate of a historic moment. All these aspects of literature are in constant flux, so it seems to me that literature is simply a momentary expression of what it is to be human. It follows, therefore, that we are all authors and readers. We can all be artists, and we can all appreciate art. However, we have this word ‘art’, which is a term for what?
Regarding the human psyche, Freud’s analysis of dreams shows that dreams are a condensation and displacement of dream-thoughts. Also, he admits that it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation and that “some trains of thought may arise for the first time during analysis” of the dream. From this I gather that the manifest content of a dream comes from many sources all of which can never be identified, and that new thoughts can be associated with a dream even after its occurrence. Furthermore, Freud indicates that as all the sources of a dream are not represented by the dream, the condensation is created out of omission.
The dream then is a fragmentary version of the dream-thoughts as the subconscious must select the dream-thoughts that “have the most numerous and strongest supports.” (The repetition of elements is very interesting)
Dreams are a condensation brought about by omission = LITERATURE
Displacement in dreams means that text may be the same but it is given several or different meanings from the original = LITERATURE
Real and imaginary events have equal validity = LITERATURE
Repetition is important = LITERATURE
Fragmentation is key = LITERATURE
Confusion of time and space = LITERATURE
When applied to literature then, Freud’s theory fits very nicely with the idea of literature as langue. In other words, like meaning in dreams, meaning in literature has several sources that are condensed and displaced by the language of both the reader and author.
Problem:
I find it difficult to see how Freud’s analysis of dreams can access dream-thoughts to arrive at an understanding of the way his patient’s mind works. The unconscious can only be inferred from the way consciousness operates because it is imperceptible. Also, he admits that his and his patient’s interpretations add new thoughts/meaning to the dream. Therefore, it is impossible to discover all the dream-thoughts on his “nodal points” to arrive at the truth behind a dream. Freud’s interpretation of dreams can never be definitive.
Consciousness never completely reveals what we want to say because behind it lurks the unconscious, which can never be known. Therefore, literature as language reveals only a fragment of the unconscious and can never reveal a single truth. It can only make us aware of another consciousness that somehow helps us to learn something about being human.
Marx argues that religion and literature have objective value and are determined by social, economic and historical factors. In other words, authors and their work are a product of the writer’s past and present and therefore literature does not deal with universal truths. What we know and how we know it is determined by factors outside the individual’s control. This means that what we read is contrived by dominant discourse to make us think in a certain way about both the world around us and ourselves. Consciousness then is another product that can be fabricated/labeled and consumed.
There is no author!
My question is where does the individual fit in? Is there no individual consciousness that has developed out of both public and private experience? Every human being’s interaction with the world is distinct, and we are able to choose how we process physical and mental stimuli. Literature is both social and personal.
What about literature that subverts hegemonic discourse? Where does that come from?
Also, I have a problem with his treatment of women in society. He argues for the abolishment of public and private prostitution, and recognizes that there has always been a community of women. However, would he give female individuals agency in society?
Perhaps less interpretation and more appreciation of the art form is in order.
DREAMS AND LITERATURE
(This entry is very stream of layperson’s consciousness)
Dreams = manifestations of latent content i.e. the unconscious.
Speech = manifestation of language
Language = manifestation of the unconscious
Literature = what permits human beings to communicate with another consciousness and perhaps a collective unconscious?
I love this quote Freud used in The Interpretation of Dreams: “… a thousand threads one treadle throws,/ Where fly the shuttles hither and thither,/ Unseen the threads are knit together,/ And an infinite combination grows.” (Goethe, Faust)
However, I don’t believe that all those threads that make up the unconscious or dreams can ever be completely known, or even need be discovered. Perhaps interpretation is not what is important in art. Perhaps the effect its form has on the perceiver at the moment of its being perceived is. In other words, we can no more understand an object of art than we can know the unconscious.
The more theory I read, the more I realize that the search for definitions of what literature, an author and a reader are will never be found until we stop looking for some fixed “truth”. So far we think that literature is created through language, the human psyche of authors and readers, and the socio-economic climate of a historic moment. All these aspects of literature are in constant flux, so it seems to me that literature is simply a momentary expression of what it is to be human. It follows, therefore, that we are all authors and readers. We can all be artists, and we can all appreciate art. However, we have this word ‘art’, which is a term for what?
Regarding the human psyche, Freud’s analysis of dreams shows that dreams are a condensation and displacement of dream-thoughts. Also, he admits that it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation and that “some trains of thought may arise for the first time during analysis” of the dream. From this I gather that the manifest content of a dream comes from many sources all of which can never be identified, and that new thoughts can be associated with a dream even after its occurrence. Furthermore, Freud indicates that as all the sources of a dream are not represented by the dream, the condensation is created out of omission.
The dream then is a fragmentary version of the dream-thoughts as the subconscious must select the dream-thoughts that “have the most numerous and strongest supports.” (The repetition of elements is very interesting)
Dreams are a condensation brought about by omission = LITERATURE
Displacement in dreams means that text may be the same but it is given several or different meanings from the original = LITERATURE
Real and imaginary events have equal validity = LITERATURE
Repetition is important = LITERATURE
Fragmentation is key = LITERATURE
Confusion of time and space = LITERATURE
When applied to literature then, Freud’s theory fits very nicely with the idea of literature as langue. In other words, like meaning in dreams, meaning in literature has several sources that are condensed and displaced by the language of both the reader and author.
Problem:
I find it difficult to see how Freud’s analysis of dreams can access dream-thoughts to arrive at an understanding of the way his patient’s mind works. The unconscious can only be inferred from the way consciousness operates because it is imperceptible. Also, he admits that his and his patient’s interpretations add new thoughts/meaning to the dream. Therefore, it is impossible to discover all the dream-thoughts on his “nodal points” to arrive at the truth behind a dream. Freud’s interpretation of dreams can never be definitive.
Consciousness never completely reveals what we want to say because behind it lurks the unconscious, which can never be known. Therefore, literature as language reveals only a fragment of the unconscious and can never reveal a single truth. It can only make us aware of another consciousness that somehow helps us to learn something about being human.
Marx argues that religion and literature have objective value and are determined by social, economic and historical factors. In other words, authors and their work are a product of the writer’s past and present and therefore literature does not deal with universal truths. What we know and how we know it is determined by factors outside the individual’s control. This means that what we read is contrived by dominant discourse to make us think in a certain way about both the world around us and ourselves. Consciousness then is another product that can be fabricated/labeled and consumed.
There is no author!
My question is where does the individual fit in? Is there no individual consciousness that has developed out of both public and private experience? Every human being’s interaction with the world is distinct, and we are able to choose how we process physical and mental stimuli. Literature is both social and personal.
What about literature that subverts hegemonic discourse? Where does that come from?
Also, I have a problem with his treatment of women in society. He argues for the abolishment of public and private prostitution, and recognizes that there has always been a community of women. However, would he give female individuals agency in society?
Perhaps less interpretation and more appreciation of the art form is in order.
Marx
The socio-economic history of the world has been shaped by the existence of two main classes which have the role either of the oppressor or the oppressed. With the Industrial Revolution and its consequential shift on the means of production the oppressor and oppressed received the names of bourgeoisie and proletariat. In this relationship the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and the proletariat works to produce capital that the bourgeoisie will keep and in turn will receive a wage that is no way proportional to the time and effort invested working nor with the capital that work has produced. This situation falls into the exploitation category and creates a condition of raging inequality within society.
The main idea of Marxist communism is to restore economic and social equality through the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the elimination of private property. This is supposed to occur when the “self-destructive” capitalist system comes to a point of inefficiency which allows for the proletariat to organize into unions and later into political parties that will start a revolution. Land and industries will then be expropriated and the power will be centralized in the hands of the State who will make sure to look after the wellbeing of its society in terms of equality. This is of course an over simplification of Communism that only serves as contextualization for this exercise’s purpose.
Communism and capitalism are of course much more than only economic systems, they are also ideologies that can be perpetuated through many different vehicles and that can be used as tools to theorize about artistic and cultural representations. In terms of literature I believe communist theory can be utilized to analyze content in terms of the ideologies denoted in a story or in terms of character development; is there an oppressor or an oppressed? What kinds of struggles are being fought socially? Is any character resisting or embracing the values representative of certain ideologies?
I believe some writers tend to bring upon themselves a social responsibility of giving a voice to the oppressed (probably because they consider themselves as part them). I can see how communism serves as the foundation for the creation of a kind of literature that has as a purpose to rebel against oppressive power structures, and as a consequence to help spread a certain ideology. Latin America has hundreds of examples because of its history of authoritarian governments. Let us only think about all the literary creation that has come from the dictatorships in Chile or Nicaragua, for example. Communism can also work in literature as a way of understanding the historical meaning of a certain novel or poem in relation to the discourses of power it presents.
As an ideology it is inevitable for communism not to permeate many aspects of representation within a society, literature is especially prone to reflect or criticize ideologies because of its “word spreading” nature.
Freud
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.
Manifesto of the Communist Party– Could the Communism be finally realized?
In the nineteenth century–the epoch of the bourgeoisie, a newborn power–communism gradually expanded in Europe. 《Manifesto of the Communist Party》 was sketched to declare Communists’ views and missions, the Manifesto expounds the theory of historical class conflicts and struggles, the characters and aims of Proletariat, the principles of Communist Party and it criticizes spurious socialism and literature at that time and devises the struggle tactics of Communists.
In the history, every epoch had class struggles. The modern bourgeois society simplified class antagonisms and divided the society into two great hostile camps— Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
“The bourgeoisie set up an unconscionable freedom — Free Trade– for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions to substitute naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation in feudal society. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” The bourgeois epoch is distinguished by constant disturbance of all social conditions and the ceaseless expanding market. To establish connections and its “civilization”, bourgeoisie compels all nations to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, to become bourgeois themselves. Bourgeoisie develops with a corresponding political advance of that class, and it has conquered the exclusive political sway. Political centralization was hence the consequence of concentration of the means of production and property in a few hands.
In addition to the periodical commercial crises– the objective law of the bourgeoisie—which is an irreversible result of too much means of subsistence and productive forces, the proletariat is also the product of the epoch. The proletarian has no property or national character, its number and strength grow very fast with the development of industry. To realize every person’s independence and individuality, it is destined to struggle with the bourgeoisie. This struggle between classes is also a political struggle. As the lowest stratum of society, the proletariat is in the interest of the immense majority. Their mission is to destroy individual property and to abolish the bourgeois property to become masters of the productive forces of society and to establish the sway of the proletariat. That’s the first step in the revolution. Theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. As a revolutionary class, the proletarian political party’s organization and development did not go without any difficulties.
“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.” I doubt this argument, it’s a little idealistic, and I think the development and realization of communism will last long, there are distinguishing socialist systems conforming to different countries’ situations, it sounds a bit like “all men are equal”, not that easy to be attained.
“Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” This argument turns out to be incorrect, our society develops quite well under the bourgeoisie, and there is no indication of its fall or replacement by socialism and then communism.
Undeniably, as the symbol of the generation of Marxism, 《Manifesto of the Communist Party》 is one of the world’s most influential political manuscripts, it provides an important guiding ideology on the revolutionary road for many socialist states, like China, Viet Nam, the North Korea, Cuba and Mongolia, after socialist revolution and transformation, they have socialist market system, socialist democracy, socialist legal system and general line for socialist construction. Communists are atheists, they believe in science, not in God. I think this is a defect of communism, because religious beliefs are really important in our lives, faith impels us forward.
No matter socialist society or capitalist society, they all have their own mode of production and inherent laws of development. They can develop harmonious in this epoch, on the same globe.
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
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?
Dream
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.
