Dream interpretation according to Freud and Jung
By Dr Marcel de Roos, Psychologist PhD, the Netherlands https://www.marcelderoos.com/
According to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) dreams are the expression of our unconscious mind. In his book “The interpretation of dreams” (1900), he wrote about the significance of dreams. Dreams are symbolic, and they mirror the subjectivity of the dreamer, and they are a manifestation of her psychological language. So a dream has a hidden message, but only within the life story of the dreamer herself.
Freud believed that dreams are encrypted messages from our unconscious. He thought that every dream conceals repressed desires. In his theory we keep these suppressed needs out of our consciousness during daytime, but at night the door pries open. The self-imposed censorship is then less controlling, and desires can emerge in an encoded fashion.
In his theory, there are two versions of each dream. The manifest dream is the dream as it was dreamt and retold: usually a peculiar sequence of events. But behind this manifest dream exists a concealed, second meaning: the latent dream. By means of interpretation and analysis (like a puzzle) it’s possible to translate the manifest dream into the original latent meaning. According to Freud it’s needed to divide the dream into individual elements, and by means of free association with these separate elements you notice new images. Eventually you’ll see all kinds of cross connections and similarities which can be reduced to one core idea: the latent significance.
Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist with a great interest in Freud’s psychoanalytic method. He met the twenty year older Freud in 1907 and started working with him. Freud regarded the intelligent and gifted Jung as his successor as head of the international psychoanalytic movement. But the two men differed about the theory of psychoanalysis and they eventually didn’t get along on a personal level either. They broke up and Jung developed his own theory: the analytic psychology.
Where dreams are concerned, Jung accepted Freud’s approach that the manifest content of dreams stems from events in recent days and from childhood, but Jung believed that there is a third source, belonging to the evolutionary history of our species, which he called the collective unconscious. Moreover, contrarily to Freud, Jung believed that the forbidden wishes manifesting themselves in dreams weren’t predominantly sexual in nature, but much wider. Dreams could also be seen for example in the light of wishes for a healthier psychological future. Jungian therapy and dream analysis differs significantly from Freud’s ideas. It goes beyond the scope of this article to go deeper into this, and Jung’s style of writing is often complex, demanding and requires constant attention from the reader.
Within the regular psychotherapy, dream analysis is considered to be outdated and the use of it in the treatment process is limited. Only in specialised psychoanalytic therapy, dreams are an integrated part of the treatment. They offer a unique insight to the personality of the dreamer. But Freud’s idea that there is only one interpretation of a dream has disappeared. A dream has endless interpretations, but the interpretation that the patient and therapist jointly share, has an impact on the course of a therapy. The manifest content of a dream and how that relates to the life story of the patient has significance. Dreams show that our psyche has less known elements and that the human mind is much richer and more complex than we think it is.
