Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Dreams and Mental Activity During Sleep151The Significance of DreamsKey Theme• The notion that dream images contain symbolic messages has been challengedby contemporary neuroscience studies of the dreaming brain.Key Questions• How did Freud explain dreams?• How does the activation–synthesis model explain dreams?• What general conclusions can be drawn about the nature of dreams?For thousands of years and throughout many cultures, dreams have been thoughtto contain highly significant, cryptic messages. Do dreams mean anything? Do theycontain symbolic or hidden messages? In this section, we will look at two theoriesthat try to account for the purpose of dreaming, starting with the most famous one.Sigmund FreudDreams as Fulfilled WishesIn the chapters on personality and therapies(Chapters 10 and 14), we’ll look in detailat the ideas of Sigmund Freud, thefounder of psychoanalysis. As we discussedin Chapter 1, Freud believed thatsexual and aggressive instincts are the motivatingforces that dictate human behavior.Because these instinctual urges are soconsciously unacceptable, sexual andaggressive thoughts, feelings, and wishesare pushed into the unconscious, or repressed.However, Freud believed thatthese repressed urges and wishes couldsurface in dream imagery.In his landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud wrote thatdreams are the “disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes” and provide “the royalroad to a knowledge of the unconscious mind.” In fact, he contended that “wishfulfillmentis the meaning of each and every dream.” According to Freud, then,dreams function as a sort of psychological “safety valve” for the release of unconsciousand unacceptable urges.Freud (1904) believed that dreams have two components: the manifest content,or the dream images themselves, and the latent content, the disguised psychologicalmeaning of the dream. For example, Freud (1911) believed that dream imagesof sticks, swords, brooms, and other elongated objects were phallic symbols, representingthe penis. Dream images of cupboards, boxes, and ovens supposedly symbolizedthe vagina.In some types of psychotherapy today, especially those that follow Freud’s ideas,dreams are still seen as an important source of information about psychologicalconflicts (Auld & others, 2005; Pesant & Zadra, 2004). However, Freud’s beliefthat dreams represent the fulfillment of repressed wishes has not been substantiatedby psychological research (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996; Schatzman & Fenwick,1994). Furthermore, research does not support Freud’s belief that the dream imagesthemselves—the manifest content of dreams—are symbols that disguise the dream’strue psychological meaning (Domhoff, 2003). According to psychologist WilliamDomhoff (2004):Freud on the Meaning of Dreams Dreamintrepretation played an important role inSigmund Freud’s famous form of psychotherapy,called psychoanalysis. Freudbelieved that because psychological defensesare reduced during sleep, frustratedsexual and aggressive wishes are expressedsymbolically in dreams. “In every dream aninstinctual wish has to be represented asfulfilled,” Freud (1933) wrote. Accordingto Freud, we consciously remember themanifest content, or actual dream images.Hidden is what Freud called the latentcontent—the true, unconscious meaningof the dream, which is disguised by thedream symbols.manifest contentIn Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the elementsof a dream that are consciously experiencedand remembered by the dreamer.latent contentIn Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the unconsciouswishes, thoughts, and urges that areconcealed in the manifest content of adream.