After reading this article you will learn about the viewpoints on dream by different scientists.
1. Freud’s Viewpoint on Dream:
A Comparison With Earlier Concepts of Dream:
Freud was the first person who boldly interpreted the dreams in the right way and was able to clear up all the misunderstandings regarding interpretations of dreams. He for the first time introduced the concept of dream in psychology and applied the interpretation of dream for the treatment of patients by the method of psychoanalysis.
He opined that the unconscious mind of the individual is exposed in dreams and thus said, “Dream is the royal road to unconscious”. Dream is the main area in which the unconscious manifests itself. According to Wolman “it is a part of sleep and sleep is a temporary refusal to face the outside world.”
In his classic book “Interpretation of Dreams” Freud has discussed in detail about dream analysis and the implications of dream in analysing normal and abnormal personality. Freud was able to show that in order to know the unconscious desires, thoughts and buried wishes, the best way is to analyse one’s dream where the unconscious mind of the individual is reflected in a disguised form.
This is probably the most important contribution of Freud to the study of dreams. Dreams represent demands and wishes stemming from the unconscious. These wishes are usually repressed demands for instinctual gratification. Often the demands arise in the preconscious and are residues of the day’s activities in the waking state.
Freud’s approach to the study of dreams can be summarized in the following lines. “If the dream is a somatic phenomenon, it does not concern us, it can only be of interest to us on the hypotheses that it is a mental phenomenon.”
In the process of free association patients frequently described their dreams of the previous night or of several years past. Freud found that each dream has a definite meaning although it was very often disguised.
The unconscious memories and fantasies could be discovered by encouraging the patients to free association to fragments of the dream. This helped a lot in uncovering repressed wishes, desires and frustrations required for cure of mental diseases.
Coming to the scientific circles, it is commonly believed that the mental processes composing dreams arise without any direct psychical antecedent, but are the result of irregular excitation of various elements in the cerebral cortex by physiological processes occurring during sleep.
Freud viewed that like any other mental process, dream processes have their psychical history and in-spite of the peculiar attributes, they have legitimate and comprehensive place in the sequences of the mental life. Thus, Freud and his supporters viewed that the origin of dreams are to be traced psychologically like any other mental process.
Some earlier physiological theories prior to Freud considered dreams to be the result of chaotic neural impulses activated during sleep accidentally. Freud however, maintained that dreams are natural psychical phenomena which have a definite connection with the normal waking life.
He no doubt accepted the findings of previous physiologists and psychologists by viewing that both neural impulses occurring from preceding real experiences and the impulses aroused by the environment taken together were the mediums through which the unconscious desires and wishes fulfilled themselves in a symbolic form.
Another point of difference is that while before Freud, most dreams were considered having no significances, Freud clearly emphasized that all dreams have meaning, just as every action has got an underlying cause. Even the most unsystematic and irrelevant dreams have real meanings which become obvious only when analysed by a psychologist.
Wish Fulfilment Theory:
Freud in his early stage said that dream is nothing but wish fulfilment while the man in asleep. Those wishes of the id and superego which could not be satisfied in real life are fulfilled in the sleeping stage, when the ego is mostly in the subconscious stage.
This view of Freud has been explained by analysis of innumerable dreams of children and adults. When a child does not get a toy to play, he may dream in the sleep that he is playing with a beautiful toy.
A milkmaid who was very poor and could not get a suitable groom dreamt that she became a queen. A poor man who does not get a decent plate of food for which he pines so much dreams that he is taking his meal in a luxurious hotel.
Sometimes children dream of their parents, lover’s dream of their beloveds when they are parted and long to meet each other. Thus, Freud stated that the various wishes which could not be fulfilled in reality are fulfilled in dream.
As pointed out by Brown, the wish fulfilment is obvious in the dreams of hungry people about food, the sexually frustrated adolescent about sexual behaviour, the dreams of soldiers in the trenches about home. A young lady who was awarded scholarship for higher study abroad but could not avail due to familial difficulties dreamt doing research in a New york University.
Hungry people dreamt that they are eating nice food. Thus, analysis of innumerable dreams indicates that dreams are cases of wish fulfilment. No doubt this very idea was put forth by others before Freud.
However, Freud’s special contribution was recognised when he pointed out that even when there was no obvious wish fulfilment, the wishes are fulfilled in a disguised form. According to him, unpleasant and anxiety dreams fulfil Sadomasochistic wishes.
Dreams also reduce internal conflict by symbolic hallucinatory experiences. Brown remarks, dreams have a cause, a significance and an economy in that they preserve sleep.
Attempted wish fulfilment theory:
As Freud gathered more and more experience about patients, by coming in contact with their dreams, he found that most of the times in dream, the unconscious desire of the patient is poured out which were neither satisfied in reality or nor in dream. He noted that not all dreams represent a simple wish fulfilment. Many dreams are rather unpleasant and some of them are full of horrible ideas and nightmares.
All dreams represent rejected or repressed wishes. But some of them carry a violent inner conflict what represents a gratification for the unconscious Id may be perceived as a threat to the pre- conscious or conscious ego. Thus, he defined dream as “actual or attempted wish fulfilment.” Therefore all dreams are not cases of wish fulfilment.
Hence either the unconscious desires in dream are fulfilled or they go ahead in dream, but may breakdown in the middle. In these cases, the ego made attempts to satisfy these desires, but could not satisfy. Thus certain wishes represented in dream also remain unfulfilled.
A person saw a dream that he is cycling on a long beautiful pitch road two sides of which were full of mango groves. At a distance there was a stiff road after which there was a bridge and some women (the picture of the women was quite vague and not clearly distinguishable) stood near the bridge.
The dreamer attempted to come near the bridge. He tried his best to cross the road, but every time he was coming back 10 or 15 years and hence could not reach the bridge. Analysis of the dream indicated that the dreamer saw a group of women in the last vacation.
His desire to establish some sort of personal and emotional relationship with them could not be satisfied in reality. So attempt was made to satisfy these desires in dreams through the symbols. But in dreams also it could not be satisfied. This is an example of attempted but unfulfilled wish expressed in dream.
2. Jung’s Viewpoint on Dream:
Jung (1933) followed the theory of dream propounded by Maeder to emphasize the prospective character of dreams, i.e., striving after something new. Dream according to Jung presents a sublimated picture of the dream consciousness. To reduce the whole of dream in terms of past repression is only half interpreting it. It is not only of the past; but also a preparation for the future. It is becoming as well as has been.
The dream according to Jung therefore must be regarded as partly determined by the future. Jung also holds that the unconscious materials expressed in dreams besides being a release of infantile and repressed desires is also advancing the individual’s adaptation.
According to Jung there are two reasons why the dreams are full of sexual symbols:
(a) Our earliest difficulties are packed with sexual problems and we use to think the present difficulties from the same angle.
(b) Our dreams are primitive which carry the thought and symbols of the primitive race and hence sexual.
The very occurrence of the father and mother in dream are not general representations of the real parents, but of a more general and idealized conception of what the parents stand for. It stands for primitive ideas for power, authority etc. So he denied the universal sexual significance of symbolic thought in general and dreams in particular.
According to Jung there are certain universal symbols in dreams which are the expression of impersonal unconscious and its collective images. Jung believed to have these symbols inherited in a racial unconscious from the dreams of a large number of individual and study of language and folklore. The king is the universal symbol of father in both dreams and folklore and is referred to as father of the nation.
The most common symbols involve members of the family, basic facts of life like birth, the sexual act, sexual organs and death. The mother is symbolized by the earth and water from which life stems. Birth is symbolized by water. As Rank has shown, in folklore, the birth of the hero is often related in this way. Precaution is symbolized by sowing, tilling or manufacture, wood stands as a symbol of mother.
The sexual act surrounded by secrecy and repression is usually referred to symbolically in dreams. Penetration of hallow objects, travelling in some conveyance with someone represents sexual symbols. Death is represented by departure. Children are represented by little animals.
However, Jung holds that in-spite of certain universal symbols there is no fixed symbol with fixed meaning. Jung selected the following dream and has given its Freudian interpretation.
“I was going up a flight of stairs with my mother and sister. When we reached the top, I was told that my sister is soon going to have a child. It is easy for the Freudians to trace the sexual motivation of the dreamer behind the dream.”
According to them going up the stairs would symbolize as a disguised expression of sex act. According to Freudians this dream exemplifies Freud’s theory of the role of infantile sexuality in shaping the content of dream phenomena. But Jung points out his objections to the Freudian procedure.
He noted, certain parts of the manifest content are taken symbolically while others are taken literally. If the picture of climbing the stairs is regarded as a disguised symbolical act, why not the items of mother, sister and child be interpreted in the same way?
Jung’s criticisms amount to saying that Freudians are inconsistent in their handling of dream material. To avoid this criticism, he regarded all dream items in the manifest content as symbols and none of them are taken literally.
Jung analyses the above dream from his point of view in the following way:
The young-man after graduation did not get any job. So his idleness troubled him and the figure of the mother is a symbol of negligence. Association to the dream item of the sister revealed this to be a symbol of love for women. The word stair implied being great, growing up and making life a success. The stimulus word child elicited the idea of new born, a revival, a regeneration to become a new man.
On the basis of these associations Jung analysed the dream to be an expression of the patient’s longing for emancipation from dependent to mature, ones. In his utilization of dream material, Jung like Freud used free association to get patient’s direct observation. But unlike Freud, he was not primarily interested in repressed infantile desires, traumatic experiences and Oedipus functions.
3. Adler’s Viewpoint on Dream:
Adler (1924) and Jung (1933) who withdrew from their initial Freudian orientation and started rival schools naturally started rival modes of dream interpretation.
Adler did not view dreams as expressions of old desires and repressed wishes, but as means of reinforcing the dreamer’s style of life. He saw dreams as a means of arousing appropriate emotions for tackling one’s difficulties. According to him dreams point out to the immediate future and not to the past.
In Adler’s view dreams enabled man to realize unconsciously superiority which was denied him consciously. A dream to Adler is often a trial solution to a problem. The Adlerian school does not adhere very closely to psychoanalytic techniques in dream analysis.
Keeping in view individual psychology Adler holds that the dream is a form of preparation for the future. For Adler, the dream has no concern with the past and he scorns the infantile memories and the traces of the complicated sexual development which Freud insists.
Dreams according to Adler are concerned with the immediate or most distant future of the dreamer and any childhood memory dreams are evoked because of their bearing on future.
Dreams therefore for Adler are unconscious attempts to find out the immediate difficulties. He insists that it is always the purpose of the dreamer to pave the way towards the goal of superiority. The purpose’ of the dream is neither logically nor truthfully expressed.
According to Adler dream differs from waking life in degree, but not in kind. So he viewed “It is true that dream is a bridge that connects the problem which confronts the dreamer with his goal of attainment.” For Adler, therefore dreams are an attempt to solve a problem and since our fundamental problems are connected with the attempt to be superior dreams must be a way to this longed for goal.
The interpretation of dreams according to Adler requires knowledge of the individuals basic difficulties, so that the same dream material may have different meaning to different people.
According to Adler a dream of a person who is appearing in his old examination and passing out implies the individual is not prepared to face the problems before him. For another dreamer, the same dream suggests “you have passed the examination before and you will pass the test at present. Dream of flying which are sexually interpreted by Freudians are taken as expression of ambitions by Adlerians.
While saying style of life is the master of dreams Adler was maintaining that the function of dream is to make the person to experience the kind of feelings needed to cope with his adjustment problems. For Adler, this is the most important step in understanding dreams. Adler wrote the whole purpose of a dream is to excite the mood in which we are prepared to meet the situation.
In short, Adler’s approach to dream interpretation was congruent with his basic efforts to discover the ways in which his patients were meeting the challenge of threatened failure, the hunger for success, the struggle for status and the need to find a medium of security in a highly competitive culture.
Adler would interpret the dream analysed by Jung in the previous page as that the patient’s unconscious seems to goad the Youngman into more responsible kind of attack on his neurotic problem.
Woodworth points out that here an Adlerian could easily see a dependent style of life in this dream, since the dreamer did not climb up the stairs alone but with his mother and sister.
Since the same dream may have different interpretations according to different frame of references, interpretation of a dream is not an easy matter. The dream may be the royal road to unconscious, but as yet there is no royal road to the validation of dream interpretation.
Jung holds that something always comes of a dream if one dwells on it long and patiently. But this something is of course not of such a kind that we can boast of its scientific nature.
4. Glover’s Viewpoint on Dream:
“Although the study of dream life paves the way to understanding, it does not automatically bestow a capacity to interpret dreams.”
The easiest approach to the study of dreams is to consider first of all the regression functions of sleep and the dreams of young children. The dream is itself a proof that any psychical disturbance develop during sleep and they rise almost to the threshold of consciousness.
The dreams of small children represent simply the gratification of wishes that are more or less congruous with the period of mental development, dreams of eating unlimited pieces of chocolate or getting beautiful dolls, bicycles etc. These simple wish fulfilment serve temporarily the purpose of withstanding tensions that would otherwise be felt as painful frustrations.
When there is frustration one regresses to the earlier stage where frustration can be denied. The wish fulfilment in a dream acts in the interest of regression and this leads naturally to the assumption that the primary functions of dream are to preserve sleep.
Glover (1928) further remarks that, “ in contrast to many of the dreams of small children, the dreams of adults generally give the impression of being a jumble of inconsequent or incongruous elements, a sort of theatrical representation without rhyme or reason.”
In some cases recent impressions and memory pictures are woven together in such a way as to give the manifest content an appearance of logical form, but more often the manifest content includes a member of presentations that are entirely inconsequent, surprising, peculiar and apparently incomprehensible.
The process responsible for dream formation are themselves unconscious and that only by applying techniques which give asses to the unconscious system of mind we can expect to discover the meaning of a dream.
Contemporary understanding of the dream process however suggests that dreaming activity takes place in conjunction with the psychic pattern of Central Nervous System activation that characterize certain phases of the sleep cycle.