Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 8

Psychology - Essay Example In his book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, Sigmund Freud argued that the foundation of all dream content is the fulfillment of wishes, conscious or not. The theory explains that the schism between ego and id leads to "censorship" of dreams. The unconscious would "like" to depict the wish fulfilled wholesale, but the preconscious cannot allow it — the wish (or wishes) within a dream is thus disguised, and, as Freud argues, only an understanding of the structure of the dream-work can explain the dream. In every dream in which he attempts to do so, he is able to establish a multitude of wishes on a variety of levels — conscious wishes for the immediate future. (Freud, 59) According to Freud, our dreams are important and meaningful in understanding the causes of our problems, hidden issues, and painful issues we cant face during wakefulness. Freud identified two types of content in our dreams; latent content and manifest content. Manifest content is all the parts of the dream that we remember (the actual content). Its not the stuff we associate with our dreams, but the actual story lines of the dreams. This is regarded as Manifest Content. On the contrary, dreams have two types of content, each of which contains different meanings to the dreams. One of these type of content is latent content, which is the underlying, more hidden, but true meaning of a dream (as opposed to the manifest content). Freud believed that the latent content was somehow censored by the subconscious which was a way to protect us from the real meanings of the dreams. This was necessary because the dream content may be difficult for people to deal with, so people disguise the rea l meaning. However, Freud believed that when people were in conflict, if he could uncover or get to the latent content, then he could identify the persons problem and resolve their conflict. This is regarded as Latent Content. Similarly, the sexual motivator is that part of the