scious meaning. For example, a wife says to her husband, just before retiring to
bed, “I want to kill you.” The husband is taken aback. The wife, abashed, says,
“Honey, I don’t know why I said that. I meant to say I want to kiss you.” The
interpretation in this case is that, at the level of the id, there is substantial hostility
toward the husband. Slips of the tongue are sometimes called Freudian slips.
(Not all psychologists agree that every slip of the tongue has an unconscious
meaning. There are probably so-called Watsonian slipsalso, errors made because
of a conflict of speech habits.)(a) What kind of therapy attempts to reduce suffering by exploring the unconscious roots of
a mental-emotional problem?(b) What is the principal “digging” tool used by psychoanalysis?
(c) An consists of making sense of content that has been repressed at the
unconscious level.(d) According to Freud, are speech errors that reveal a forbidden wish.
Answers: (a) Psychodynamic therapy; (b) Free association; (c) interpretation; (d) slips of
the tongue.The interpretation of dreams is a central feature of psychoanalytic therapy.
Freud said that dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious.” He asserted that a
dream has two levels. The manifest levelis the surface of the dream. It is what is
presented to the dreaming subject and what is remembered when the individual
wakes up. The latent levelis the concealed aspect of the dream, its meaning. This
contains a forbidden wish. The manifest level is often cast in symbolic form. The
symbols cloak or disguise the hidden content of the dream. Like slips of the
tongue, the interpretation of a dream is likely to reveal either repressed hostility or
a repressed sexual impulse. For example, a fifty-year-old married man dreams that
a young man meets a beautiful stranger in an unfamiliar city and has sexual rela-
tions with her. An interpretation might suggest that the young man symbolizes
the dreamer’s youthful nature. The forbidden wish is perhaps a desire to have sex
outside of the marriage.
Patient-initiated transferenceexists when the patient projects onto the ther-
apist feelings obtained from an unconscious level. There are two kinds of patient-
initiated transference. A positive transferenceoccurs when the patient sees the
therapist in glowing, magical terms. The therapist is a wonder worker; he or she
can do no wrong. Sometimes that patient develops a crush on the therapist and
thinks he or she is in love.
A negative transferenceoccurs when the patient sees the therapist in nega-
tive, derogatory terms. The therapist is a jerk; his or her interpretations are stupid.
A negative transference often forms toward the completion of therapy when the234 PSYCHOLOGY