Question

15 – What is the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams in terms of manifest versus latent content?

Answer 1

In The Interpretation of Dreams in 1990, Freud presented a theory of dreamming process . He viewed the dream experience as a conscious expression of unconscious fantasies or wishes that is not readily acceptable to conscious working experiences.Thus, dream activity was considered to be one of the normal manifestations of unconscious processes. The dream images represented unconscious wishes or thoughts, disguised through a process of symbolization and other distorting mechanisms. This reworking of unconscious contents constituted the dream work. Freud postulated the existence of a “censor,” pictured as guarding the border between the unconscious part of the mind and the preconscious level. The censor functioned to exclude unconscious wishes during conscious states but, during regressive relaxation of sleep, allowed certain unconscious contents to pass the border, only after transformation of these unconscious wishes into disguised forms experienced in the manifest dream contents by the sleeping subject. Freud assumed that the censor worked in the service of the ego—that is, as serving the self-preservative objectives of the ego. Although he was aware of the unconscious nature of the processes, he tended to regard the ego at this point in the development of his theory more restrictively as the source of conscious processes of reasonable control and volition. The analysis of dreams elicits material that has been repressed. These unconscious thoughts and wishes include nocturnal sensory stimuli (sensory impressions such as pain, hunger, thirst, urinary urgency), the day residue (thoughts and ideas that are connected with the activities and preoccupations of the dreamer’s current waking life), and repressed unacceptable impulses. Because motility is blocked by the sleep state, the dream enables partial but limited gratification of the repressed impulse that gives rise to the dream.Freud distinguished between two layers of dream content. The manifest content refers
to what is recalled by the dreamer; the latent content involves the unconscious thoughts and wishes that threaten to awaken the dreamer. Freud described the unconscious mental operations by which latent dream content is transformed into manifest dream as the dream work. Repressed wishes and impulses must attach themselves to innocent or neutral images to pass the scrutiny of the dream censor. This process involves selection of apparently meaningless or trivial images from the dreamer’s current experience, images that are dynamically associated with the latent images that they resemble in some respect.