98
There are several techniques that
allow the unconscious to emerge.
One of the first to be discussed
by Freud at length was dream
analysis; he famously studied
his own dreams in his book, The
Interpretation of Dreams. He
claimed that every dream enacts
a wish fulfilment, and the more
unpalatable the wish is to our
conscious mind, the more hidden
or distorted the desire becomes in
our dreams. So the unconscious,
he says, sends messages to our
conscious mind in code. For
instance, Freud discusses dreams
where the dreamer is naked—the
primary source for these dreams in
most people is memories from early
childhood, when nakedness was
not frowned upon and there was
no sense of shame. In dreams
where the dreamer feels
embarrassment, the other people
in the dream generally seem
oblivious, lending support to a
wish-fulfilment interpretation
where the dreamer wants to leave
behind shame and restriction.
Even buildings and structures
have coded meanings; stairwells,
mine shafts, locked doors, or a
small building in a narrow recess
all represent repressed sexual
feelings, according to Freud.Accessing the unconscious
Other well-known ways in which
the unconscious reveals itself are
through Freudian slips and the
process of free association. A
Freudian slip is a verbal error, or
“slip of the tongue,” and it is said to
reveal a repressed belief, thought,SIGMUND FREUD
or emotion. It is an involuntary
substitution of one word for
another that sounds similar but
inadvertently reveals something the
person really feels. For instance, a
man might thank a woman he finds
desirable for making “the breast
dinner ever,” the slip revealing hisSalvador Dali’s The Persistence of
Memory (1931) is a surrealist vision
of time passing, leading to decay and
death. Its fantastical quality suggests
the Freudian process of dream analysis.
The interpretation of
dreams is the royal road to
knowledge of the unconscious
activities of the mind.
Sigmund Freud