A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of My Dream

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY
A psychoanalytic Interpretation of my dream
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1
PSYCHOLOGY
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Freud’s theories of dreams.........................................................................................................2
How and why he set about analysing them................................................................................3
Important concepts in Freud’s theory of dreams........................................................................3
Description of the dream (manifest content)..............................................................................4
Interpretation of my dream (latent content)...............................................................................5
Context of dream........................................................................................................................6
Evaluation..................................................................................................................................6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................7
References..................................................................................................................................8

2
PSYCHOLOGY
Introduction
Dreams are the representatives of the non-existent fulfillment of a wish or a
compulsion in early childhood, before it is repressed. The images in the dream mainly
represent the unconscious wishes or thoughts hidden through symbolization as well as other
distorting mechanisms. Freud has made an attempt where he has divided the mind into
unconscious, preconscious and conscious parts and distinguished them by their connection to
consciousness. Therefore, Sigmund Freud through his interpretation of dreams has claimed to
find the ‘royal road’ to reach the unconscious (Mannoni 2015). In this report, I will analyze
my dream with the help of Freud’s theories and concepts of dream analysis.
Freud’s theories of dreams
According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dream, it suggests that dreams are mainly the
representations of unconscious desires, thoughts as well as motivations (Alexander and Sachs
2017). As per Freud’s psychoanalytic viewpoint of personality, individual are driven by
aggressive as well as sexual instincts, which are repressed, from their conscious awareness.
Therefore, when these repressed thoughts are not expressed consciously, Freud said that they
make their way into the awareness through dreams. In his theory, he has further described
two different element of dream, which is manifest content and latent content. Manifest
content is built up with the actual images, thoughts as well as the contained that is involved
within the dream. On the other hand, latent content represent the secret psychological
meaning of dream. Freud (1900) observed that in dreams the ego’s defenses are decreased so
that some of the materials that are repressed come through to awareness in distorted form
(Hobson 2013). Thus, dreams play an important function for the unconscious mind as well as
perform valuable guide to how the unconscious mind works. Freud has further categories the