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Sigmund Frued (From The Interpretation of Dreams)

 

Dreams are, in some sense, designated to conceal events/emotions that would be too painful for a person to recall, but nonetheless do so in such a way as to still communicate those very events or emotions in disguised and indirect form. .
             Freud distinguishes between latent and manifest contents of dreams. There is a complex process of partial concealment; both the function and method of which require elaboration. Freud began to analyze his own dreams, and was quite excited by the analytic insight which he believed his first dream interpretation produced. This dream specifically became known as the dream of Irma's Injection, and serves as the "specimen dream" that Freud uses for the starting point of The Interpretation of Dreams. The interpretation of this dream, as of any other, depends on the spontaneous association of the dreamer to each of its elements. It is the dreamer, and not the analyst, who provides the interpretation. Therefore, in this case, Freud begins the analysis with his own immediate reactions to the dream. It comes to light that dreams are organized in terms of relationships between events and emotions concerning these events. The dream also clearly makes sense in the context of the dreamer's current waking preoccupations and activities. The dream-thoughts appear absorbed in characteristically mundane themes, yet, considering what initially appears to be incidental elements in this dream, Freud is compelled to recall events from a more remote past. Thus, distant events are connected with incidents from the previous day through an unpredictable series of links. The dream-thoughts are consistent and logical; it is only the complexity of the allusions through which they are expressed that give rise to the appearance of over-complication and arbitrariness. .
             Freud's method of interpretation through spontaneous association, and analysis of the mechanism of content representation through a desire for wish fulfillment, is formulated in distinction to what he took to be the commonly-held historical tradition of symbolic understanding.


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