| What do dreams represent for Freud | - Meaningful expressions of unconscious material
- "The royal road to knowledge of the unconscious mind" |
| Why are dreams like symptoms | - Dreams tell us what is ailing the unconscious |
| What do dreams express | - Unconscious intrapsychic conflict (biological, emotional, security needs)
- Events + situations desired or feared by the dreamer |
| What are dreams | - Hallucinatory wish-fulfilments
- If not dreamt, would leave the dreamer frustrated, waking sleeper
- So if you have a wish while asleep it is embodied + fulfilled in a dream, so you stay asleep |
| What happens in nightmares and anxious dreams | - The underlying repressed wish is not completely disguised
- It is felt by the dreamer - hence the anxiety |
| What are anxious dreams a failure of | - Failure to reach a compromise between the wish (id) + the censor (superego) |
| Latent content | - True nature of the wish |
| Manifest content | - The interpretation of the dream upon awakening |
| What is the dreamwork | - Where dream comes into being
- Unconscious wish is expressed |
| What are the four process of dreamwork censorship? | - Condensation
- Displacement
- Visual Representation
- Secondary vision |
| Condensation | - Several images fused together creating composite
- Latent elements that have something in common |
| Displacement | - Idea/thing is replaced by a related idea/thing in the dream
- Or the emotional intensity of one idea can be transferred to another |
| Visual representation | - Visual symbols stands for some abstract thought
e.g. sitting on object = ‘possession’ |
| Secondary vision | - Upon awakening from a dream, our pre-conscious mind moulds latent creations into sensible forms to waking intelligence
- Creating even more distortion |
| How can the latent content of dreams be discovered | - Using method of free association |
| What is the cognitive psychology criticism of Freud's theory of dreams? | - Others say dreaming is random
- Unlikely to serve any adaptive function |
| Is all dream content unconscious? | - There is both conscious and unconscious material |
| What did Freud hypothesize to be the purpose of dreams? | - To protect sleep
- Because if you were conscious of the wish not being fulfilled you would wake up and try to fulfil it |
| What four points from contemporary neuroscience does Solms raise to offer support for Freud's theory of dreams? | Dreams...
- Are meaningful
- Are motivated
- Require interpretation |
