Many times people ask us about dream interpretation method at Freud, thinking of the old, traditional method consisting on the use of the
dream-keys. This paper is designed to clarify this subject matter, that is how psychoanalysis deals with the dream interpretation. Freud first established a dream interpretation method he called
scientific, still keeping in mind that tradition claims that dreams have a meaning. His scientific world - and most of our as well - did not believe that dreams have a meaning. Freud made this giant step from
denying the meaning of dreams to asserting it as accurate, and treating dreams with the respect due to all natural psychical phenomena.
What are the main features of the Freudian method? Here are the most important:
- dreams are interpreted only with the help of the dreamer's associations;
- the interpretation consists in the transformation of the manifest content into the latent one;
- dreams express repressed wishes;
- dreams are interpreted on the object level, meaning on the base of the relationship of the dreamer with persons or situations from his outer, social, life;
- dreams are restricted to traumatic events from the dreamer's childhood;
- the interpretation of dreams concerns only the practice of analysis in the therapeutical environment (Freud denies the precognitive
quality of dreams)
All these aspects are treated mainly in our module 3 of the initiation into psychoanalysis course (click here to learn more about this module). Here we will insist only on the first one, which is related
to free associations.
So dreams are interpreted starting from the associations of the dreamer. What are these associations?
Working with his patients, Freud invented the method of free associations in
order to explore their unconscious. The same method, with a few minor modifications, also applies to the interpretation of dreams. The modification consists in the fact that the associations are no longer free and
spontaneous, but connected to the themes that form the content of the dreams. But even in this case the dreamer has to allow him/herself to be led by his/her associations without deliberately interfering in their
course, without selecting or choosing something special.