14 replies to this topic

[suri]

Does anyone agree that every dream is a wish fullfilment? And if it doesnt seem to make sense as a wishfulfillment it is because is it being sensored. And the meaning can always be found by taking into acount the thoughts and events of the previous day.

Or are dreams just a random vent of thoughts?

[Zero-Shift]

It's hard to say. For me, I tend to believe elements from both Freud and Jung. However, I tend to lean a little more towards the Freud side of the spectrum because I think his theories sound more concrete. Still, I think his ideas tend to get a little too hung up on things like libido. Also, I don't believe dreams are strictly for wish fulfillment. I believe Jung was right about dreams having a creative aspect. How else do you explain lucid dreaming? In either case, I don't believe dreams are simply random thought processes. I never have.

[Misaki-chan]

I think both Freud and Jung were brilliant, but both had some really twisted ideas from what I heard. I don't really know a lot about their theories myself, though. I have a friend who studied Jung's work, and his sister is a psychology major with only a few classes left to go. From what they've said, Freud was pretty much completely off in most areas, though he did have some ideas that actually went somewhere. And Jung was pretty off too, but his theories have since been revised, so maybe he wasn't completely wrong.

This is all secondhand information, though. Like I said, I don't really know much about this myself.

[KiloTango]

Freudian analysis is interesting, but can get very reductive, and is also generally rather sexist with his focus on castration anxiety and penis envy. (And then you have all the oedipal stuff as well, which all gets a bit dodgy...)

Things in dreams being symols for other things and in a way wish fullfillment is on the right track, but what Freud often insisted those wishes were can get a bit dubious to me.

[suri]

For me I haven't read anything of Jung, but Freud seems to make a lot of sense. When I was in psychology class I had a professor who clearly did not think much of Freud and she really shed a bad light on him to all of the students. However, I had read him before hand so luckily I wasn't effected by her smear campaign. ;P I don't really think Freud put that much focus on things like penis envy and Oedipus complex. He just says that they exist and have an effect in the unconscious mind. These are the things that most people talk about in regards to Freud so it is a tendency to think that they are something he always talks about as well. Most of the case studies in his books are wish fulfillments fueled by events and thoughts of the previous day like fears, jealousies, career desires and sexuality. But sex is not in any way dominant.

[KiloTango]

It seemed to be pretty dominant in the stuff I have been reading, and in general the whole area of Freudian psychoanalytic critism tends to refer to reading things in regards to oedipal ideas, the primeval scene, the sex and death drives and so on. Even without the sex, it is as much about sublimated and surpressed desires as simple wishes. I've only read a small amount of his work though, I have to admit, and what I have read has been his theoretical work rather than his case studies (Stuff like his paper on Fort-Da phenomenon and some bits of Beyond The Pleasure Principle), as I was coming at it from a philosophy perspective and then from a critical theory perspective rather than a psychology perspective. But then, I think critical theory, at least on the thematic side of things, can be applied to dreams as well as film or literature.

Either way, I don't think it is as simple as wish fullfilment, because that implies a desire about all of it that I don't think is always there. I reckon there is as much in dreams about fears, anxieties, and simple trying to make sense of things as there is in positive wish fullfillment. I mean, you could claim the weirder and more negative sides of things are from repressed desires for self destructive things (so, say, that archetype of the 'showing up to school naked' dream, while embarassing is symptomatic of a repressed desire for inhibition etc). That can get more difficult with things that are especially nasty (say, would a nightmare of someone raping you and killing all your freinds while you watch mean you desired something like that? Or that you want to be powerless, and to move on from current attachments perhaps?), or things that are a lot more surreal and harder to relate to real life experience, as then you have to go down a big chain of signifiers and associations in order to get to the 'truth', and while that technique is possible it seems it could be easy to get totally wrong, and may be hard to know where in the chain you should stop and go 'yeah, it means this'. I think it is a valid approach, but it isn't going to provide concrete answers or anything, just potential interpretations.

[suri]

as then you have to go down a big chain of signifiers and associations in order to get to the 'truth', and while that technique is possible it seems it could be easy to get totally wrong, and may be hard to know where in the chain you should stop and go 'yeah, it means this'. I think it is a valid approach, but it isn't going to provide concrete answers or anything, just potential interpretations.

But the idea is, when the dreamer hears the correct interpretation from the dream analyst, the thoughts (being so familiar) are raised into the conscious mind, and the meaning of the dream becomes clear to them. It is a conscious liberation of those desires and the whole dream will all of a sudden be remembered in a different light, with the true material(latent content) replacing the censored or replacement material(manifest content). So if it is a correct interpretation, there should be no doubt about it by the dreamer.

As for extremely grotesque and destructive manifest content, Ill try to find an example from one of his books, and include the interpretation that he and the dreamer came to. Though those types of dreams are not found that often among his case studies, I'd imagine this is due to the kind of thought material that was available for manifest content in those days. The average person did not have an abundance of violent and horrendous films as we do today.

[Q-Lok]

I'll tell you now, before I join this conversation in earnest, I have a very low opinion of Freud in general. I am inclined to agree with KiloTango when he says that sex is by far the dominant theme in Freud's work. I haven't read very much of it in its original form, but I have been looking in detail at Jung's work (and especially his autobiography). Basically, Jung said in his autobiography that Freud had some really good ideas at the beginning, but then ditched them all in favor of saying that everything is about sex. That's why he parted ways from his contemporary. As far as dream theory is concerned, I think Jung had some great ideas that hold up much better than Freud's. But I will certainly admit that later on Jung got a bit weird himself. See [u]Mysterium Conjunctionis[/i] for the prime example: it's a book about religion, alchemy, and mythology all applied to psychoanalysis and dream theory. Not a very pleasant read for the casual researcher, let me tell you.

[KiloTango]

Minor note:

I am inclined to agree with KiloTango when he says...

I'm a she.

On Jung, I like some of his ideas but from that I can tell (I've only looked briefly) they kinda rest on an idea of collective unconcious, so if you don't buy into that, some of his theories can be a little harder to accept. However, I do kinda feel there is something in it, as even though we might not all be connected by some floaty dream world, constants in our society and idelogies could make at least some kind of framework that could do a similar thing. I've got no problems at all with dreams being a metaphorical language for our thoughts and experiences. (Hell, actual language is metaphorical enough and all of that.) Following chains of signifiers is a valid way of exploring possible interpretations of dreams, but really the only person who can know the actual links between each image and concept is the dreamer, as everyone has their own array of conceptual links, not all of which will be concious. All that people can do is explore and see what they find. And I would assume that the conclusions would not really be about where the dream comes from anyway, but about what would be most helpful for the patient to hear in order to solve their problems/cause them to come back for more therapy.

The parts of Freudian psychoanalysis that I've encountered at just infuriating because there's some good stuff there and then it keeps getting ruined by putting sex at the very bottom of the chain in a really reductive way. Though, then again, didn't he also say 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'. My issues might not be with Freud (though I've not read so much of his stuff as to completely have a balanced opinion) but more with the way in which people have taken his stuff and run with it, and basically made everything about people wanting to screw their parents and agonising over a lack of penis or the potential of castration. I don't want to sound like an angry feminist (I find a lot of their theories a bit irritating as well) but I don't buy into that stuff being the case for everyone. Not to mention, Freud was one man, with his own agenda, giving theories on something that there can't actually be any proof for either way. So while his interpretations may work, I feel it is dangerous to see them as the only possible way of looking at stuff.

[Q-Lok]

Ah. My apologies, Kilo.

I absolutely agree. Freudian analysis has indeed been taken a tad off of its original design. However, from what I've read, it was pretty much about the business of boiling everything down to sex. Yes, he did say that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," but that is, in the words of my old Health teacher, "just about the only thing he ever said right." Opinion, yes.

Jung's theories do come from the collective unconscious theory, but I think that they still work quite well even without that. I mean, how else do you explain any of the world's archetype-supporting literature? At any rate, I agree with you -- it is up to the individual. I think that yes, therapists can be very useful in dream interpretation, but that they are only really there to help the individual uncover their associative chains.

[suri]

"just about the only thing he ever said right." too many teachers have that attitude Id like to see those teachers write numerous world changing books.
The man is a genius.
;P but I admit, easy to disagree with on somethings.

[Q-Lok]

Oh sure. I definitely think he had plenty of other great theories. But I also think that he too easily let them degenerate into "sex is everything"-type ideas.

[suri]

He never says everything is sex but, it is an important subject in his works. Sex is deep rooted into our being because we are organisms who are programmed to survive. The strongest drives are the ones most important to our survival. Live reproduction. Sex is a very strong emotion and where does it go when we are not thinking of it? Its still there in the unconsious mind. The whole idea is unconsious, we are civilized and have control on what we think about, so unless you are a 4chan junkie sex is not on the mind 24/7. Only because it gets vented during dreams. Why do you think people have so much sex when they are drunk or on drugs? Inhibitions removed. so I agree Sex is huge, not everything but huge.

[Louis]

Freud is hotly disputed, more fraud in my eyes. Personally I believe dreams may be a form of wish fulfillment for some, however society isn't homogenous, so interpretations aren't universal.

[KiloTango]

It's not so much the people likeing sex side that I have issues with, it's the penis envy/castration anxiety/Oedipal Complex stuff. And he doesn't just talk about the sex drive, he also has the notion of the Death Drive as well.

The guy might have written world changing books but that doesn't mean he's above critisism. Hell, Plato and Aristotle both wrote world changing things and practically created western philosophy, but we still crit the hell out of them where their stuff doesn't work. Even Descartes 'I think therefore I am' get critisised. You don't have to write world changing books yourself to be able to critisise a theory. It should be about the theory and the knowledge and the insight, not about who said it or how commercially sucessful it is.