Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
most obvious example), the dream will attempt to accommodate this in order not to
disturb the dreamer’s sleep. However, outside and inside stimulus of this sort is always
transformed. As he explains, ‘Dreams do not simply reproduce the stimulus; they work
it over, they make allusions to it, they include it in some context, they replace it by
something else’ (125). An alarm clock, for example, may appear as the sound of church
bells on a sunny Sunday morning or as the sound of the fire brigade rushing to the
scene of a devastating fire. Therefore, although we can recognize how outside stimulation
may contribute something to a dream, it does not explain why or how this something
is worked over. Similarly, dreams are also informed by recent experiences, ‘the
day’s residues’ (264). These may often determine much of the content of a dream, but,
as Freud insists, this, as with noise and somatic disturbances, is merely the material out
of which the dream is formulated and is not the same as the unconscious wish. As he
explains, the ‘unconscious impulse is the true creator of the dream; it is what produces
the psychical energy for the dream’s construction’ (1973b: 47).
Dreams, according to Freud, are always a ‘compromise-structure’ (48). That is, a
compromise between wishes emanating from the id and censorship enacted by the
ego: ‘If the meaning of our dreams usually remains obscure to us . . . it is because
[they contain] wishes of which we are ashamed; these we must conceal from ourselves,
and they have consequently been repressed, pushed into the unconscious. Repressed
wishes of this sort and their derivatives are only allowed to come to expression in a very
distorted form’ (1985: 136). Censorship occurs but wishes are expressed; that is, they
are coded in an attempt to elude censorship. According to Freud’s (1976) famous formulation,
‘a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish’ (244).
Dreams move between two levels: the latent dream thoughts (unconscious) and the
manifest content (what the dreamer remembers dreaming). Dream analysis attempts
to decode the manifest content in order to discover the ‘real meaning’ of the dream. To
do this it has to decipher the different mechanisms that have translated latent dream
thoughts into manifest content. He calls these mechanisms the ‘dream-work’ (2009:
246). The dream-work consists of four processes: condensation, displacement, symbolization,
and secondary revision. Each in turn produces ‘the transformation of
thoughts into hallucinatory experience’ (1973a: 250).
The manifest content is always smaller than the latent content. This is the result of
condensation, which can work in three different ways: (i) latent elements are omitted;
(ii) only part of a latent element arrives in the manifest content, and (iii) latent elements
which have something in common are condensed into ‘composite structures’
(2009: 247). ‘As a result of condensation, one element in the manifest dream may correspond
to numerous elements in the latent dream-thoughts; but, conversely too, one
element in the dream-thoughts may be represented by several images in [the manifest
content of] the dream’ (1973b: 49). Freud provides the following example:
You will have no difficulty in recalling instances from your own dreams of different
people being condensed into a single one. A compromise figure of this kind
may look like A perhaps, but may be dressed like B, may do something that we
remember C doing, and at the same time we may know that he is D (2009: ibid.).