Sigmund Freud's Psychological Theories Of Dreaming

Sigmund Freud is the first modern psychologist to look at dream. He developed “his psychological theory of dreams, from his experience with his troubled patients and his own life events” (Moorcroft pg. 200). According to Wayne Sproule, Freud argued that a dream is like a safety valve that harmlessly discharges otherwise unacceptable feelings. He believed that dreams had hidden meanings that can be showed through symbolic images and even puns. Dream was seen as a language of its own. Freud’s theory of dreaming has three basic aspects (Hunt, 1989): why dreaming occurs, (2) how dreams are formed, and (3) a method of dream interpretation (Moorcroft 173). Freud believed that all behavior, including dreaming, is motivated by powerful, inner, unconscious
On the contrary, the third time I had this dream, I dreamt about when my mother had her wedding and how she felt walking down the aisle by herself; the third dream was a memory of the past. There are two popular methods of interpreting dreams by Freud. According to Richards, “the first of these procedures considers the content of the dream as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and I n certain respects analogous to the original one” (Richards pg.170). Freud’s second popular methods of interpreting dream is “described as the decoding method since it treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning in accordance with a fixed key” (Richards pg.171). For example, I dreamt of a wedding and my
(page 188 Moorcroft). Moorcroft posits that, The process of synthesis during dreaming is no different from what occurs when you are awake. All us constantly synthesize the currently available sensory and motor information with our present affective state and then draw upon our memory banks of similar experiences and meanings to order to try to make it coherent (pg 189). On the other hand , according to the original version of this theory, a dream is catch as catch can synthesis by the forebrain, which is making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relatively noisy signals sent up to it from the brainstem” (Hobson & McCarley, 1977, p.1347). On the other hand, activation synthesis theory is not the best theory to explain dream. There are several critic of activation such as , being too neurological or too narrowly scientific to describe what dream is really about , there are people who have rems and do not dream and there are people who dream but don’t have rems , random stimulation of the forebrain that results in dreaming cannot explain the meaningfulness and it is based on animal brain research that may not apply to a mental functions in human” (Moorcroft