Components of DA

• Dreams as wish fulfilment

  Freud believed that all dreams were the unconscious fulfilment of wishes that could not be satisfied in the conscious mind as they are unacceptable (desires of the id)

  Dreams therefore protect the sleeper by stopping these desires from building to an unacceptable level which may threaten their sanity

  Dreams allow us to express and live out some of these desires in a more acceptable way, the repression of the true desires is seen to be a source of mental disorders

  Therapy aims to interpret dreams to uncover the true wishes they represent
• Symbolic nature of dreams

  To further protect from unacceptable truth, what we dream appears in a disguised form

  DA works on that what the dreamer recalls is actually symbolic representation of the truth buried in unconscious mind

  Freud suggested there are two contents to our dreams;

  • Latent content: hidden/real meaning
  • Manifest content: the dream itself

  Process of changing is know as ‘dreamwork’

  Several processes of dreamwork, an example it displacement

  • This is when the emotional significance of a dream object is separated from its real object and attached to an entirely different one
• Dream Diary

  Between therapy sessions the client may be asked to record their dreams on waking

  The manifest content of the dream is often forgotten as we get involved in a new day and so the client may be asked to keep the dream diary near their bed to record dream whilst in their memory

  The manifest content that is recorded in the diary is the basis fro discussion during therapy sessions
• Role of the therapist

  The role of the therapist is to reverse the dreamwork process by decoding the manifest content back into latent content

  Freud emphasised that only trained psychoanalysts should do this as the interpretations need to be in context with the client’s life experiences (Freud did not support the idea of dream dictionaries)

  Sometimes the manifest content of the dream does not actually represent some latent content

  The therapist suggests several interpretations of the dream and the client chooses the most suitable one to the context of their life