Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories(^56) 2. Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
posttraumatic stress disorderwho repeatedly dream of frightening or traumatic ex-
periences (Freud, 1920/1955a, 1933/1964).
Freud believed that dreams are formed in the unconscious but try to work their
way into the conscious. To become conscious, dreams must slip past both the pri-
mary and the final censors (refer again to Figure 2.1). Even during sleep these
guardians maintain their vigil, forcing unconscious psychic material to adopt a dis-
guised form. The disguise can operate in two basic ways—condensation and dis-
placement.
Condensationrefers to the fact that the manifest dream content is not as ex-
tensive as the latent level, indicating that the unconscious material has been abbre-
viated or condensed before appearing on the manifest level. Displacementmeans
that the dream image is replaced by some other idea only remotely related to it
(Freud, 1900/1953). Condensation and displacement of content both take place
through the use of symbols. Certain images are almost universally represented by
seemingly innocuous figures. For example, the phallus may be symbolized by elon-
gated objects such as sticks, snakes, or knives; the vagina often appears as any small
box, chest, or oven; parents appear in the form of the president, a teacher, or one’s
boss; and castration anxiety can be expressed in dreams of growing bald, losing
teeth, or any act of cutting (Freud, 1900/1953, 1901/1953, 1917/1963).
Dreams can also deceive the dreamer by inhibiting or reversing the dreamer’s
affect. For example, a man with homicidal feelings for his father may dream that his
father has died, but in the manifest dream content, he feels neither joy nor sorrow;
that is, his affect is inhibited. Unpleasant feelings can also be reversed at the mani-
fest dream level. For example, a woman who unconsciously hates her mother and
would unconsciously welcome her extinction may dream of her mother’s death, but
the unconscious joy and hatred she feels is expressed as sorrow and love during the
manifest level of the dream. Thus, she is fooled into believing that hate is love and
that joy is sorrow (Freud, 1900/1953, 1901/1953, 1915/1957a).
After the dream’s latent (unconscious) content has been distorted and its affect
inhibited or reversed, it appears in a manifest form that can be recalled by the
dreamer. The manifest content, which nearly always relates to conscious or precon-
scious experience of the previous day, has little or no psychoanalytic significance;
only the latent content has meaning (Freud, 1900/1953).
In interpreting dreams, Freud (1917/1963) ordinarily followed one of two
methods. The first was to ask patients to relate their dream and all their associations
to it, no matter how unrelated or illogical these associations seemed. Freud believed
that such associations revealed the unconscious wish behind the dream. If the
dreamer was unable to relate association material, Freud used a second method—
dream symbols—to discover the unconscious elements underlying the manifest con-
tent. The purpose of both methods (associations and symbols) was to trace the dream
formation backward until the latent content was reached. Freud (1900/1953, p. 608)
believed that dream interpretation was the most reliable approach to the study of un-
conscious processes and referred to it as the “royal road” to knowledge of the un-
conscious.
Anxiety dreams offer no contradiction to the rule that dreams are wish fulfill-
ments. The explanation is that anxiety belongs to the preconscious system, whereas
the wish belongs to the unconscious. Freud (1900/1953) reported three typical anx-
50 Part II Psychodynamic Theories