Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill^63
Companies, 2009
target person during this 5-minute period; and in the mention condition, other partici-
pants were instructed to think about anything at all after noting (mentioning) the target
person’s initials. Moreover, during the 5-minute period when they were either to think
or not think about the target person, they wrote a “stream-of-consciousness” report and
put a check mark on the side of the report every time they thought of the target person.
This was a validity check to establish whether the suppression manipulation technique
worked. It did. When they awoke the next morning, participants reported whether they
dreamed, and if so, how much they dreamed and how much they dreamed of the target
and nontarget people (self-rated dreaming). Lastly, they wrote a report describing the
dream (dream report). The stream-of-consciousness and dream reports were coded by
a rater blind to conditions on frequency of target and nontarget appearances.
Results showed that students dreamed more about the suppressed targets than
nonsuppressed ones; they also dreamed more about the suppressed targets than the
suppressed nontargets. In other words, students were more likely to dream about
people they spend some time thinking about (target), but especially those targets they
actively try not to think about (suppression). Suppressed thoughts, the authors con-
cluded, are likely to “rebound” and appear in dreams. This finding is quite consistent
with Freud’s theory and not consistent with the activation-synthesis theory that REM
sleep provides random activation of brain activity that is devoid of meaning. In the
words of Wegner et al. (2004), “although there remains much to be learned about
how dreams are formed, the finding that suppressed thoughts rebound in dreams pro-
vides a bridge linking an early insight of psychoanalysis to the discoveries of cogni-
tive neuroscience” (p. 236).
However, the current trends in neuropsychoanalytic research neither confirm
nor even mention Freud’s psychosexual stage theory, especially its more controver-
sial elements of Oedipal conflicts, castration anxiety, and penis envy. Instead, neu-
ropsychoanalytic research has focused on those parts of Freud’s theory that appear
to be empirically standing the test of time. The neglect of Freud’s psychosexual stage
theory is somewhat consistent with much post-Freudian and neo-Freudian theorizing
that has either downplayed or abandoned this part of Freud’s theory. So, while many
of Freud’s major ideas—unconscious, pleasure seeking, repression, id, ego, and
dreams—might be garnering neuroscientific support, not all are, and still others are
in need of modification.
One area that has recently received attention is the work of the dream censor
(Boag, 2006). The dream censor, according to Freud (1917/1963), is the mechanism
that converts the latent content of dreams into the more palatable and less frighten-
ing manifest content. Boag (2006) articulates how one conceptualization of the
dream sensor is to think of it as a mechanism that engages in repression and/or inhi-
bition. This conceptualization is helpful if one is interested in empirically testing
Freud’s notions regarding dreams because there is a large amount of neuroscience re-
search on inhibition (Aron & Poldrack, 2005; Praamstra & Seiss, 2005). Specifically,
Boag (2006) proposes that the basal ganglia and amygdala may be key brain struc-
tures responsible for dreams including the conversion of latent content into manifest
content. Arguments such as Boag’s (2006) and those of other scholars in the neu-
ropsychoanalysis field make an out-of-hand dismissal of Freud from a scientific per-
spective more and more difficult as findings from cognitive psychology and neuro-
science accumulate that support basic assumptions of Freud’s theory.
Chapter 2 Freud: Psychoanalysis 57