What do dreams reveal about our unconscious desires? How can understanding your dreams lead to deeper self-awareness?
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud writes that dreams express our repressed wishes and desires. He presents a layered model of the mind where unconscious thoughts emerge during sleep when our mental “censor” relaxes. Dreams use various tactics to disguise these hidden wishes.
Continue reading for an overview of this classic work.
Overview of The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, revolutionized the understanding of the human mind and laid the foundation for psychoanalysis. In this groundbreaking work, Freud presents his theory that dreams are expressions of repressed wishes and desires that can reveal your deepest motivations, conflicts, and psychological issues. He also offers a method to analyze these nocturnal visions and uncover their hidden meanings.
Freud’s work on dream interpretation was born from his clinical experience treating patients, and it quickly became a cornerstone of psychoanalytic practice. While some of Freud’s claims have been debated over the years, his broader insights about the significance of dreams and the unconscious mind continue to influence psychology and popular culture. By learning to interpret dreams using Freud’s methods, you can gain valuable self-understanding and insight into your own psychological problems.
We’ll explore Freud’s ideas in four parts:
Part 1: Freud’s Theory of Mind lays the foundations for understanding Freud’s theories of dreaming.
Part 2: What Happens When You Dream explores the processes taking place behind the scenes to produce your dreams.
Part 3: Common Themes of Dreams discusses Freud’s theories of the unconscious desires that most frequently appear in people’s dreams.
Part 4: How To Interpret a Dream walks step by step through Freud’s dream interpretation technique.
Part 1: Freud’s Theory of Mind
Before we discuss Freud’s theories of dreaming, we’ll lay the foundation by exploring Freud’s theory of the mind, starting with the importance of wishes and how they can become repressed. We’ll then take a look at Freud’s theory of the mind’s layers.
The Importance of Wishes
Freud asserts that the core activity of your mind is wishing—that every thought or mental action is driven by an underlying desire or motivation, even though you may not be aware of those wishes. These wishes may be simple, such as a desire to alleviate boredom, or they may be much deeper, such as a longing for connection and purpose in life.
The Repression of Wishes and the Censor
Freud argues that many of our wishes are repressed. This means that our minds are actively pushing against them, trying to prevent them from expressing themselves. These wishes are repressed because they’re in direct conflict with other wishes. For example, someone’s desire to be a faithful spouse may conflict with a romantic desire toward someone other than their partner. This means that the desire to be faithful may repress the desire for the extramarital affair and prevent the person from experiencing it.
Freud posits that a part of your mind is dedicated to repressing thoughts and feelings that would allow you to experience unacceptable wishes. He calls this part “The Censor” because it censors the activity of your mind. However, Freud explains that repressed wishes don’t disappear. Instead, they remain part of our minds and influence our mental health and dreams.
The Three Layers of the Mind
Freud conceives of the mind in three layers: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The differences between these layers lies in your ability to access the thoughts and feelings they contain.
1) The Conscious Mind
According to Freud, your conscious mind is your waking mind, encompassing your current awareness and thoughts. This is the part of your psyche that you actively engage with and can readily access. For instance, as you read this paragraph, your understanding of these words and your immediate thoughts about them are part of your conscious mind. Similarly, when you deliberately recall a memory or solve a problem, you’re operating within the realm of consciousness.
2) The Preconscious Mind
Freud describes your preconscious mind as a layer that consists of thoughts and memories not currently in conscious awareness, but which can be easily accessed by your conscious mind. For example, your home address or the name of your first-grade teacher might reside in your preconscious until you need to remember it.
3) The Unconscious Mind
Finally, Freud writes that your unconscious mind is the deepest layer of your psyche, consisting of thoughts, feelings, and memories that your conscious mind can’t directly access because they’ve been repressed by your censor. These are often primitive urges, traumatic experiences, or socially unacceptable desires that your conscious mind finds too threatening or disturbing to acknowledge.
Part 2: What Happens When You Dream
Now that we’ve laid the foundations with Freud’s theory of the mind, we can explain what happens when you dream. We’ll take a look at how unconscious wishes manifest themselves in dreams, the distortions they go through to make it past the censor, how dreams handle emotions, and the meaning of nightmares.
Unconscious Wishes Express Themselves In Dreams
Freud posits that unfulfilled wishes from your unconscious mind express themselves in dreams. This is because, during sleep, your censor relaxes and becomes weaker than it is when you’re awake. Thus, the scenarios of your dreams, no matter how bizarre, represent things that you want to happen. Furthermore, according to Freud, this is what happens every time you dream—all dreams can be interpreted as fulfilling some unconscious wish.
The Unconscious Desires In Dreams Are Distorted
Freud argues that, in dreams, your unconscious wishes can express themselves only in a veiled or distorted way. This is because your censor doesn’t completely disappear when you sleep—it just becomes weaker. Your unconscious desires can then get around your censor by expressing themselves using materials (thoughts and memories) available from your preconscious. This is why, Freud explains, dreams typically include some connection to recent experiences, usually from the previous day—those memories are easily available in the preconscious.
Latent and Manifest Content
According to Freud, a dream can be divided into two layers: the “manifest content” and the “latent content.”
- The manifest content of a dream is the surface level content: the events of the dream that you can remember when you wake up.
- The latent content consists of your repressed wishes that are trying to express themselves through the manifest content.
For example, an unconscious wish for recognition (latent content) might manifest in a dream about winning a race using elements from a TV show watched the day before (manifest content).
Dream Work
Freud theorizes that your mind engages in several processes to rearrange the latent content from your unconscious into the manifest content of your dreams. He calls these processes “dream work.” They include: symbolism, condensation, displacement, and secondary revision.
1) Symbolism
Freud writes that your unconscious operates primarily through images, not language. Therefore, it expresses abstract concepts, desires, and conflicts through symbols and metaphors in dreams. For example, a dream about traveling may represent a desire to move in a new direction in life. While Freud documents many recurring motifs in his patients, he notes that symbols often draw from each dreamer’s unique life and vary from person to person.
2) Condensation
Through the process of condensation, your mind combines multiple thoughts, experiences, and strands of symbolic meaning into a single dream element or situation. According to Freud, condensation allows the same dream imagery to represent different ideas and wishes at once. For example, a dream figure representing your mother could simultaneously connote ideas about nurturing, authority, and disapproval—all of which may stem from distinct childhood memories.
3) Displacement
Freud writes that in displacement, your unconscious disguises the true sources of your repressed desires by transferring them to a more acceptable symbolic substitute. This protects you from directly confronting the anxiety-provoking root of those feelings.
Let’s say that you feel angry toward your boss. Your censor represses these feelings because you can’t express them at work. Dream work then transfers your anger to a more acceptable object: For example, you may have a dream about being angry at a mailman who keeps stealing your packages. This transference simultaneously fulfills your wish of expressing anger and your wish of staying on good terms with your boss.
4) Secondary Revision
To further disguise underlying unconscious meanings and make your dream narrative more coherent, Freud suggests that your mind imposes order and logic onto raw disjointed dream images. This “secondary revision” process strings together dream scenes into a superficially meaningful sequence or story, further obscuring your dream’s true source in irrational primary unconscious thoughts.
Affective Content
Freud writes that not every aspect of latent content is distorted through dream work. He posits that emotions experienced in dreams—which he dubs “affective content”—often remain undisguised. He argues that this is because feelings are harder to distort and reshape than thoughts or memories. While objects, settings, and even people can be symbolic stand-ins for something else, intense emotions like anger, anxiety, fear, or sadness, are often genuine feelings related to your unconscious wishes.
Nightmares and Unpleasant Dreams
If all dreams show us the fulfillment of our unconscious wishes, then what about unpleasant dreams? If you dream of being chased by a bear, does that mean that you want to be chased by a bear?
Not necessarily. Recall that your censor represses wishes that would otherwise instill feelings of guilt, shame, tension, or other forms of emotional distress. These negative emotions then become part of the affective content (the emotional content) of your dream. Freud argues that when that happens, a dream that fulfills a forbidden wish will feel unpleasant. Furthermore, if you feel ashamed about an unconscious desire, you may also want to punish yourself for your unacceptable wishes. Therefore, unpleasant and nightmarish scenarios in your dreams may actually fulfill an unconscious wish for punishment.
Part 3: Common Latent Content of Dreams
While every dream and every dreamer is unique, Freud argues that there are common unconscious wishes that appear in dreams more frequently than others. We’ll explore Freud’s theories about the sexual content of dreams and about early childhood desires that stay with people into adulthood.
Sexual Wishes in Dreams
Freud argues that most of the unconscious desires expressed through dreams are sexual in nature. Recall that dreams arise out of the tension between an unfulfilled wish and the censor that filters out unacceptable thoughts and feelings. Freud states that sexual desires are heavily subject to repression because of the many religious and social taboos that encourage people to view their own sexual desires as unacceptable. Thus, while not all desires expressed in dreams are sexual, Freud asserts that most of them are.
For example, a dream featuring a steady rhythmic activity such as rowing a boat or riding a horse could be a symbolic stand-in for the act of having sex. Meanwhile, male genitals may be symbolically represented by long objects such as pencils or bread sticks, while female genitals may be represented by containers such as suitcases or boxes.
Freud’s Theories of Childhood Desire and Development
Freud also asserts that many of the unconscious desires expressed through dreams are left over from childhood. He maintains that childhood wishes are strong and thus leave a deep impression on our minds that can last for a lifetime. Furthermore, he contends that many childhood wishes are undeveloped versions of the adult desires we grow into as we age. We’ll explore how these childhood desires develop from family dynamics to become common themes in dreams.
Desire for Opposite-Sex Parent
Freud argues that a child’s yearning for closeness with their opposite-sex parent represents an early, rudimentary form of sexuality that evolves into adult sexuality as the child matures. As a child grows and develops, these feelings are typically repressed and redirected toward more appropriate objects of desire. However, Freud contends that this early experience of desire for a parent shapes your later romantic relationships and sexual preferences.
Rivalry with Same-Sex Parent and Siblings
Freud posits that an undeveloped sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent can make children view their same-sex parent as a rival, potentially causing feelings of resentment and antagonism. This may result in an undeveloped wish for the death of their same-sex parent. Freud emphasizes that this is not a wish for literal death, since children lack a mature understanding of death, but simply an undeveloped desire for the rival parent to disappear so that they may enjoy the complete attention and affection of their opposite-sex parent. For instance, a young boy might fantasize about his father being absent, allowing him exclusive access to his mother’s attention.
Freud explains that this desire for connection with the opposite-sex parent can also lead to rivalry with siblings, as a child may view them as competitors for the affection of their opposite-sex parent. This can result in a primitive “wish for death” for their siblings as well.
Why These Desires Influence Dreams
According to Freud, childhood sexual wishes play an outsize role in our dreams because they’re so heavily repressed. While any sexual feeling may be repressed, attraction to your opposite-sex parent is especially unacceptable because it’s viewed as incestuous, while a wish for the death of family members—parents or siblings—is unacceptable because it’s seen as murderous and immoral. Thus, these desires are banished to the unconscious, where they’re only capable of expressing themselves in dreams.
Part 4: How to Interpret a Dream
Freud argues that all dreams are meaningful, and that, by following his method, any dream can be traced back to the latent content of your unconscious desires.
Freud’s Method for Analyzing and Interpreting a Dream
We’ve distilled Freud’s methods for interpreting dreams into four steps.
Step 1: Write Down Your Dream
First, Freud suggests writing down your dream in detail. The more details you remember, the better: Because every detail in your dream is the expression of unconscious desires, every detail in your dream is meaningful, even ones that might seem arbitrary or unimportant. He advises that you also note what emotions you experienced during the dream, as these are less subject to distortion than thoughts or memories.
Step 2: Relax Your Mind
Before you begin interpreting your dream, Freud explains that it’s important to relax your mind and try to suspend your personal judgments of yourself. This is because your censor may try to resist the desires you uncover in your latent content. By suspending self-judgment, you’re more open to uncovering parts of yourself that your censor may resist. In his psychotherapeutic practice, Freud enabled this by having patients lie down on a couch and close their eyes to put them into a calmer state of mind while discussing their dreams.
Step 3: Uncover Associations in the Details
Once you’re in a relaxed state of mind, go back through the details of your dreams one by one. Identify what your personal association is to each detail. These will be memories, thoughts, and feelings that could relate to something recent or to something more distant, like your childhood. Your associations will be personal and idiosyncratic, since each detail comes from your own mind. According to Freud, they’ll be manifestations of unfulfilled wishes trying to fulfill themselves through the dream.
Step 4: Analyze Your Dream
Now that you have a list of personal associations with the details of your dream, look for common themes, patterns, and preoccupations, as well as instances of symbolism, condensation, or transference. Finally, ask yourself what wishes are fulfilled by this dream. According to Freud, your dream is motivated by desires that you’ve kept hidden from yourself, but which nonetheless play a very important role in life. By analyzing your dreams through Freud’s technique, you can gain a deeper understanding of yourself and recognize the hidden motivations that guide you.
