Psychoanalytic dream interpretation
He believed that studying dreams provided the easiest road to understanding of the unconscious activities of the mind.
[2] Freud believed that the repression by the super-ego is weakened during sleep due to the absence of voluntary motor activity.
[3] At the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud and his followers considered dreams to be the main tool of self-analysis, as well as a prominent part of the treatment.
The therapy was designed to reveal the latent content of the patient's repressed sexuality and unconscious mind.
Since the practice relied too much on a broad meaning and had relatively few people who were considered able to interpret, it was eventually dismissed on Freud.
Thus an important goal of adaptive therapy is to access the wisdom of the unconscious mind, which is denied at the conscious level due to the pain and anxiety associated with the traumatic event.
According to Langs, the activities of unconscious processing reach the conscious mind solely through the encoded messages that are conveyed in narrative communications like dreams.
The emphasis on the ego defenses and the degradation of the importance of the unconscious led to further consequences for the interpretation of dreams.
According to them these associations are an additional defense, a disguise against the patient's primitive conflicts, and reveals only what the dreamer consciously feels or thinks about the dream.
If these character resistances are effectively analyzed, then the basic quality of the patient's dreams should alter significantly; they should become clearer and less disguised.
Dreaming can be defined as "a sequence of perceptions, thoughts and emotions during sleep that is experienced as a series of actual events.
The most apparent variability in dream content seems to deal with the emergence of aggression, which additionally diverges greatly due to age, as it has been demonstrated through a majority of studies.
[3] Ernest Hartmann was one of the theorists that envisioned dreams as contextualizing the dominant emotion, expressing it through a pictorial representation.
This pattern is found most clearly in dreams of people that are experiencing an intense emotion (such as in general stressful situations) and not major traumas.
In particular, the continuity hypothesis postulates that the content of everyday dreams reflects the dreamer's waking states and concerns.
[20] Within the context of the emphasis on personal concerns, there are sometimes distortions in settings, sudden scene changes, or unusual aspects to familiar characters, but dreams are in general a reasonable simulation of the dreamer's conception of his waking reality in terms of characters, social interactions, activities and settings.
[21] Insight is conceptualized as containing four elements:metaphorical vision with the intention of seeing oneself in a totally new perspective, connection with the aim of linking different aspects of one's experience, suddenness, which is described as an affect display of surprise, and newness, which means the profound exploration of one's psychic world.
This is because the dream content can reflect the evolution of the client's self-concept, defense mechanisms, core conflicts and at last transfer reactions.
Empirical studies suggest that dream pleasantness leads to higher levels of hope and openness towards conflict resolution, whereas unpleasant dreams have a negative impact on clients' progress, as the dreamer may focus on impending threats and therefore lead to unresolved conflicts.
Freud noted and warned readers that the psychological meaning of objects, people, or events in dreams were not meant to be universal.
Moreover, researchers have found that many dreams do not even appear to be distinguished symbols, rather they mirror everyday life activities and concerns that occupy our minds such as studying, shopping, going to work etc.
Studies done by Brenner (1969) and Waldhorn (1967) have downgraded Freud's classical view of dreams from extremely important to being on a level playing field with other psychological phenomena.
Developments in REM research (Ellman and Antrobus, 1991) have also played a part in diminishing dreams importance in both clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis.
This has dangerous implications for dream interpretation in a clinical setting as it can implant false memories in people's minds.
This theory states that while sleeping we cycle through REM (rapid eye movement) periods about every 90 minutes.
[31] G. William Domhoff and David Foulkes consider the idea that free association gives access to the latent content of the dream to have been invalidated by experimental psychology, concluding that the method is just arbitrary.
[33][34][35] Psychoanalytic dream interpretation can be used in various therapeutic settings to help patients gain insight into their unconscious thoughts, emotions, and unresolved conflicts.
Dream analysis allows patients to explore repressed memories and traumatic events[36] that may be contributing to their current psychological distress.
[38] While psychoanalytic dream interpretation has a long history, recent research has focused on integrating insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and other related fields.
Additionally, more rigorous empirical studies are needed to assess the efficacy of dream interpretation in various therapeutic contexts.
