Sigmund Freud's Repression Of Dreams Essay

In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dreams are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives, they also have symbolic meanings, which relate to the fulfillment of our subconscious wishes {(power, security, strength). Freud theorized that everything we remember when we wake up from a dream is a symbolic representation of our unconscious primitive thoughts, urges, and desires. Freud believed that by analyzing those remembered elements, the unconscious content would be revealed to our conscious mind, and psychological issues stemming from its repression, such as anxiety or low self-esteem, could be addressed and resolved.
For Freud, sleep was best when it was completely dreamless. He actually believed that …show more content…
He once quoted, “There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades” –Freud The Problem is that during the night there is less automatic repression. These latent dream-thoughts would bubble up. If unchaste, these infantile drives, wishes, and traumas would be experienced in ways that would be so intense that people would repeatedly wake up. If people kept waking up, they would suffer from sleep deprivation and increasing mental impairments until they simply could not function anymore. Clearly, there would be an evolutionary advantage to those who slept better, so a psychic system evolved just for that purpose. What Freud proposed is that each of us have a censor, who’s job it is to such material safely unconscious so that we can stay asleep. However, if we have strong enough unconscious material (unconscious latent dream thoughts), that material blows up against the censor. The pressure builds and builds and would lead into a psychic breakdown if unchecked. The solution here is dreamwork that acts as a pressure release valve. Dreamwork results when some material is smuggled passed the censor and into the unconscious mind, running an altered more accessible form that will allow sleep to continue. The pressure of the unsconscious material is best decreased, yet the ability of the individual to stay asleep is maintained. This material that sits by the censor is called the manifest content of the dream and it is what we consciously remember about a dream when we wake up. An example of this

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