Freud's Methods of Dream Interpretations

A detailed Summary of Freud's Methods of Dream Interpretations


1. Freud's method of dream interpretation allowed him to reflect on his own dreams to discover their latent and manifest meanings. Examining the dream of one of his patients, he showed how the manifest content served as a symbol for the underlying meaning and psychological import of the dream. For example, a comb was a symbol of "mixing the breed," or racially mixing (p. 61-63). The young woman had recently argued with her parents over marrying a man of a different ethnic and religious heritage. The manifest content of the dream, a comb, symbolized her deep-rooted anxieties about racially mixed marriages.

Freud had already begun to apply the theory of manifest and latent dream content to his own dreams years earlier. For example, Freud dreamt he was on a train accompanied by an elderly gentleman who was blind in one eye. Freud acted as his nurse and held out a bottle for the man to urinate in, and the man then takes out his penis. All this is the manifest content of the dream.

Investigating the manifest content of this dream allowed Freud to probe into his childhood and discover the latent meaning of the dream. For example, the elderly gentleman in the dream symbolized his father. The symbol of uncontrolled urination referred to


Freud, who had already suspected a suppressed erotic desire for the mother and a suppressed aggression toward the father, used the ancient Greek myth to add substance and cultural symbolism to his psychoanalytic theory.

3. Freud divided the mind into the preconscious and the unconscious: the preconscious containing ideas and memories that could become conscious; the unconscious containing potentially destructive desires and urges that often remain repressed or suppressed (p. 68). The unconscious desires and urges, which are usually sexual in nature, are based on primal physical instincts. The desire to fulfill those primary instincts is called the pleasure principle (p. 68). The preconscious has its roots in logic: the need to conform to external rules such as social codes or the basic laws of nature.

Next, the male child starts to touch his penis but is scolded for self-touching. These successive stages of psycho-social development occur during the toddler years, but the emotions and memories of these encounters with oral, anal, and penile pleasure and self-control can lead to confusion.

4. The stages of psycho-sexual development include the oral, the anal, and the phallic stages. The infant first experiences arousal and pleasure from oral activities: gratification through sucking on the mother's breast. The breast and sucking action become primary object of erotic desire

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Approximate Word count 934
Approximate Pages 4 250 words per page double spaced

Category: Science

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