Question

Free association and dream analysis which are the techniques of psychoanalytic approach. Explain each of these clearly. It should be include;
-what is the aim of the technique?
-What is the idea behind it?
-How does it work?
Please include a paragraph between 350 and 400 words. Explain and please it should be a paragraph, no short answer or no definition.

Answer 1

Free Association

The technique of free association was developed by Freud. In free association, patients are first seated comfortably on a couch. Then, they are encouraged to talk about whatever comes to their mind freely without censoring it in any way. When patients associate one thought with another, it provides a window into their unconscious thoughts. With free association, the important phenomena of resistance, transference, and countertransference still occur but with the major advantage that the patient is conscious. Also, although when using free association it is often more difficult to arrive at the original traumatic experience, once attained it is available for the patient to deal with in a rational manner.

Dream association

According to Freud, dreams also provide a window into an individual's unconscious. He felt that dreams  could be seen as symbolic manifestations of repressed traumatic thoughts.  During sleep, a person’s defenses are down but not eliminated, so a repressed experience reaches consciousness only in disguised form. Therefore, there is a major difference between what a dream appears to be about and what it really is about. What a dream appears to be about is its manifest content, and what it really is about is its latent content. Freud concluded that every dream is a wish fulfillment. That is, it is a symbolic expression of a wish that the dreamer could not express or satisfy directly without experiencing anxiety. Wishes expressed in symbolic form during sleep are disguised enough to allow the dreamer to continue sleeping because a direct expression of the wish involved would produce too much anxiety and disrupt sleep. According to Freud, dream interpretation is complex business, and only someone well versed in psychoanalytic theory can accomplish the task. One has to understand the dream work that disguises the wish actually being expressed in the dream. Dream work includes condensation, in which one element of a dream symbolizes several things in waking life, such as when a family dog symbolizes an entire family. Dream work also involves displacement, in which, instead of dreaming about an anxiety-provoking object or event, the dreamer dreams of something symbolically similar to it.