GREAT TIPS OF DREAM ANALYSIS

Freud saw dreams as an expression of unconscious fears, needs and desires.  Some of these motivations are seen as being too intolerable to the individual, and therefore are expressed in symbolic form.

Latent content is viewed as the symbolic unconscious component.

Manifest content is the way in which the latent content is disguised into a more acceptable form to the dreamer.It is therefore the actual dream as it is experienced.

Dream interpretations also shed light on the client’s current life situation as well as past experiences and unresolved conflicts.

Freud regarded the dream as the “royal road to the unconscious”. Psychoanalysts can often use dream analysis as a way of gaining a deeper awareness of unconscious conflicts that might not emerge during conscious speech.

Dreams have both a manifest & latent content. The manifest content is the set of images and events which the person experiences while dreaming. The latent content is made up of unconscious impulses and repressed memories upon which the dream is based. Not all repressed material is expressed in dream imagery. Much of it is censored and distorted before it is translated into the manifest dream images. The client and the therapist work together in order to unravel these distortions, in order to arrive at the latent content, which tells the story of major conflicts in the unconscious. Usually the client focuses on each particular dream image and makes free associations about that image to aide access to the latent content. E.g. A house fails to resemble a place that is familiar to the dreamer.

After free associating on particular images of furniture for instance, the dreamer might realise that the house is an amalgamation of several different places where they have felt alienated or unloved.