Chapter Eleven - Theories of Dreaming

Summary

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Freud presented his theory of dreams in his landmark work The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s basic claim was that the dream was a hallucinated wish fulfillment. Recent memories and imagistic fragments called day residues provide raw material for dream images that then activate motivated content and affects or wishes, and these wishes conflict with the waking ego and so must be disguised by the dream censorship mechanisms. The dreamwork mechanisms (condensation, representation, displacement, etc.) take the basic content carrying the desire or motivational wish and construct elaborate disguises around it (via secondary revision) while still attempting a hallucinated fulfillment of the wish. Up until the discovery of REM sleep in 1953, most scholars and scientists studying dreams operated within this Freudian framework. Carl Jung broke with the framework and presented his own theory of dreams as simulations that compensate for some aspect of the personality or psychic structure of the individual. Jung also postulated the appearance of mythic archetype in dreams, consistent with Freud’s claims concerning reenactments of the Oedipal tragedy and transgression in dreams.