Interpretation of Dreams: Freud Vs. Jung Essay

It is universally known that dreams are full of meanings and emotions. In Freud’s theory, all dreams are wish fulfillments or at least attempts at wish fulfillment. The dreams are usually presented in an unrecognizable form because the wishes are repressed. Freud proposes there are two levels in the structure of dreams, the manifest contents and the latent dream-thoughts. The manifest dream, a dream

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) was a one time friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud, who initially held similar views to Freud. He started to feel dissatisfied with Freud’s ideas though and broke away from that school of thought in 1913. Jung also had a great interest in mystical and magical subjects, Buddhism and Hinduism, which influenced Jung’s own ideas on a theory of personality. He too, suggested there were 3 parts; the conscious mind (or ego), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. ‘The main point of difference between the two men (Jung and Freud) was Freud’s definition of sexuality and libido. Although Jung conceded the importance of the

The point of view of which Freud interprets and examines the manifest of dreams content to obtain their latent meaning is of a professional psychologist and clinical observer who looked for a way to explain how our minds work and how the individual psychology functions. He based his work on clinical experiences and clinical neurosis of the matter of his own interpretations to be able to confirm his theories as a proven fact. The result Freud gets from the patients he observes and interpretation of their dreams are stereotyped to the complete human condition.

Jung agrees with Freud that personal conscious is a repository of content previously conscious, even though they may have been forgotten. For example; collective unconscious can be hereditary and transferred to another, which is why Jung agreed with Freud’s argument that Anna transferred her affect to Breuer. Both Jung and Freud agree that a human’s unconsciousness is buried deep and few are able to reach it on a psychoanalysis level. However, Jung disagreed with Freud’s claims that sexuality is the basis of unconscious

Freud presented his theory about dreams in the book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. In it he sets out to prove "there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams" and that

Carl Gustav Jung (a.k.a. C.G. Jung) was born in 1875, in Switzerland, and worked closely with Freud for many years, he learned many things from him in this time. Eventually Jung split from him because his ideas and concepts of psychoanalysis began to differ from those of Freud. Jung was a convectionist, unlike Freud who was a reductionist. Jung saw dreams as a way to come up with solutions to problems you are facing in your waking life. Jung took Freud’s one technique of “free association” and expanded on it. Unlike Freud, he saw this concept as being extremely important. He thought that the dreamer’s thoughts and opinions on what the dream could mean are even more important than anyone else’s, including many times an expert. Dreams, to Freud, are a way of interacting with your unconscious. Carl Jung’s methods to interpreting dreams could be a very important step to help people lead happier and healthier lives. He believed that the manifest content in our dreams is just as important as the latent content when it comes to interpreting our dreams. Freud took a very hands on approach when interpreting people’s dreams, but Jung put forth less information from himself because he thought dream interpretation relied heavily on the dreamer himself. A college student who is experiencing nightmares consistently may visit a psychologist who knows about the meanings of dreams. A psychiatrist who believes more in Freud’s ways may take the dream as being

Freud’s wish fulfillment theory began because he believed that the wishes in adult dreams were disguised in order to reduce their anxiety tendencies. Freud theorised that dreams are disguised by a “censor” of sorts, in four cognitive processes he collectively called the “dream-work” (Freud, 1900) these include; displacement, whereby highly charged thoughts are transferred to minor elements in the impending dream. Condensation then compresses several different dream thoughts. These two are then joined together by the regard for representability, which changes abstract thoughts into a form that is applicable for the sensor. Finally the dream is shaped by secondary revision which basically gives the dream content an understandable pattern. (Freud, 1900).

Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, once said that “most dreams are a sort of way for the unconscious mind to express its desire” (Freud). Sigmund Freud thought as dreams to be an idea that people strive for in life or the answer to a problem. He also concluded that dreams are “the fulfilment of a wish” (Freud). Freud thought as a dream to be something that people desire in life, or want to conquer in life. To him, dreams were something that could fulfill one’s life. However, Freud also noticed “punishment dreams and anxiety dreams” (Freud). Instead of these dreams doing something good for a person, they could be doing the opposite. Overall, one belief is that dreams can complete peoples lives, or deteriorate lives.

He believed by examining dreams he can understand how the unconscious mind works and what it is trying to hide from conscious awareness. Freud broke down dreams into two different types, the manifest content of the dream and the latent content. The manifest content of the dream contains all the images, events, and thoughts contained in the dream, this is fundamentally what the dreamer remembers upon waking. The latent content is all the hidden and symbolic meanings within the dream. Freud believed that dreams were essentially a form of wish fulfillment, by taking those unconscious thoughts and desires and making them into less unacceptable behavior in society

Carl Jung was a Swiss innovator progressing various theories of the unconscious mind. The Swiss psychotherapist based his work on Sigmund Freud's perspectives and beliefs of the unconscious mind. Carl Jung had deducted that a human's unconscious personality could not have started in the cognizant personality. The thought that certain ideas and pieces of imagination within the unconscious were shared to all individuals within a society was assumed by Jung. This mental imagery were claimed as "Archetypes" by Jung (hence the term "Jungian archetypes") due to the images being ubiquitous and all inclusive to humans.

Freud felt that he must rely upon his own dreams because of the difficulties of studying other people’s dreams. This was also a problem because he felt that he would then have to reveal his own private thoughts to the world. Freud states, “But if I was to report my own dreams, it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or that is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet. “ Having decided that he would willingly share his dreams and feelings for his studies he then expresses, “I can only express the hope that the readers of this book will put themselves in my difficult situation and treat me with indulgence”.

By analyzing dreams, Freud believed that it could lead to understanding the most mysterious part of the human body: the brain. He viewed dreams as the unconscious mind making an endeavor to resolve a conflict regardless of when the conflict arose (Freud, 1900, p.577). Freud eventually developed a theory that the symbols and images in dreams may only be the front for multiple connotations, linking icons in dreams to parts of the body and biological drives. The dreamer may “find the top part of a clarinet in the street or the mouth-piece of a tobacco-pipe” in response to stimuli from male sexual organs (Freud, 1900, p.111). Freud argued in many of his early works that many latent dreams are sexual in nature. These connections separated Freud from his colleagues, such as Carl

Freud was the first psychological thinker that believed that the unconscious is a big part in realizing a person's inner self. He was also the first person to give a very detailed description of the unconscious and also provide a way of taking our unconscious thoughts and making them into a language we understand and interpret. When Freud would work on his patients he believed that by interpreting their dreams he could better understand what their problems were and what their innermost thoughts were.

Freud’s theory is that dreaming is meaningful, unlike the activation synthesis theory. He believed that the mind had three sections, represented in a shape of an iceberg; the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious. The conscious is the tip of the iceberg above the water involves everything we are aware of right now such as our thoughts. The

In his book, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul, C.G. Jung gives a layperson insight into his ideas on dream analysis. Jung's primary objective in this book is to educate the reader as to what a psychoanalyst does when analyzing a patient's dreams. The principal message in the section of the book centered on dream analysis is that dreams should never stand alone. Dreams are meaningless in a vacuum, but on the other hand when put against a strict set of rules, they are oftentimes misunderstood. The unconscious is a fluid entity and cannot be handled either in isolation or with a static set of guidelines. Dreams are reflections of the unconscious and can represent many different things inside of