Contemporary dream interpretation

Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is a subdivision of dream interpretation as well as a subdivision of psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is the process of explaining the meaning of the way the unconscious thoughts and emotions are processed in the mind during sleep.

There have been multiple methods used in psychoanalytic dream interpretation, including Freud's method of dream interpretation, the symbolic method, and the decoding method. The Freudian method is the most prominently used in psychoanalysis and has been for the last century. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is used mainly for therapeutic purposes in a variety of settings. Although these theories are used, none have been solidly proven and much has been left open to debate among researchers. Some studies have shown that areas of dream interpretation can be invalid and therefore a decline in importance has been seen in psychoanalytic dream interpretation.

Freud believed dreams represented a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish. He believed that studying dreams provided the easiest road to understanding of the unconscious activities of the mind. His theories state that dreams have two parts: a manifested content, which is the remembered dream after we wake, and a latent content, or the dream that we do not remember which is considered part of the unconscious. He proposed that the latent, or unremembered, dream content is composed of three elements: the sensory impressions during the night of the dream, the residues left from the day before, and the id's drives that are already part of the dreamer.

During sleep, Freud believed that the repression by the super-ego is weakened due to the absence of voluntary motor activity. This creates an increased possibility of subconscious impulses from the id reaching consciousness. According to the idea that Freud proposed, the dream is considered the guardian of sleep. Dreams allow a gratification of certain drives through a visual fantasy, or the manifest content. This reduces the impact of these drives from the id, which might often cause the dreamer to wake in order to fulfill them. In layman's terms, dreams allow certain needs to be fulfilled without the conscious mind needing to be aware of such fulfillment. However, the manifest content is not comprehensive, because it consists of a distorted version of the latent content.

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