The FREUDIAN Unconscious

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"My Unconscious Made Me Do It!”– The Freudian Unconscious

            Free Association was Freud's major tool of investigation. It involves first clearing our minds of thoughts and then saying whatever comes to mind, no matter if it's surprising or embarrassing. This technique was suggested to Freud by one of his patients, who (during a therapy session) told him to stop interrupting her and just let her talk.

          The idea here is that we are temporarily bypassing the protective barrier to the unconscious (which Freud thought was the censoring mechanism of the ego). That is, unconscious forces determine the nature and direction the associations take. As one association leads to another, we get closer and closer to our unconscious urges and our "true feelings." Freud believed that our random associations hold valuable psychological material.

          Free association sometimes can be more structured and trickier than simply saying whatever comes to mind. For example, the therapist might run through a list of words and have the client report what comes to mind in response to each word.

An Example of Free Association

        Let's try an example of free association. This exercise works better if you try it with another person. Ask someone (ideally, a person who is comfortable around you) to follow these instructions:

Please relax and close your eyes [it is even better if the person reclines in a chair or on a couch]. [Once the person is relaxed] Now, I'd like you to simply say the first thing that comes to mind when I say the following words. Don't worry about what you say. In fact, purposely don't think about the words! Just say whatever comes to mind automatically.

Are you ready?

Okay, let's begin: [work through each word every 2-3 seconds] --  “rock,” “fish,” “love,” “night,” “mother,” “snake” [feel free to use different words here!]

Normally, most people might respond with associations like "hard, “water,” “marriage,” "day," “father,” or "grass" but if the assessor moves quickly enough, some interesting exceptions (“fear” or “shame” or “kill”) might intrude.

Freudian Dream Interpretation

            For Freud, dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious."  We have all had powerful dreams that strongly affected us in the past. Freud believed that dreams allow our id impulses to be safely expressed, and he thought of them as a form of symbolic wish fulfillment. That is, every dream represents an attempt to fulfill a wish of some kind. For Freud, dreams are carefully constructed camouflages in which there is always a concealed wish and a true meaning to be found.

          In order to make sense out of what are often "nonsensical" dreams, Freud argued that we need to distinguish between a dream's manifest content (what is seen and remembered) and its latent content (what is really being said). The latent content refers to the underlying (or unconscious) intrapsychic events that gave rise to the manifest content. Freud argued that our unconscious id thoughts, wishes, and fantasies, being repressed as they are, are expressed in disguised form in our dreams. What strikes us as a silly or absurd dream may provide the psychoanalyst with valuable clues about our unconscious thinking and conflicts. We can get to these contents by free association with the dream as remembered.

          For Freud, many of our unconscious thoughts and desires are expressed symbolically in the dream. For example, we might find dreams about penises, vaginas, or sexual intercourse threatening or disturbing. So, instead, we dream about a fountain, or cave, or a train entering a tunnel, which are translations of or "stand for" the threatening content. Dream symbols are not that different from the symbols we find in fairy tales, myths, and works of literature. And there seem to be many obvious and common symbols that appear in our dreams. For example, to a Freudian a house might represent the human body, a house with ledges and balconies might represent the female body, and a king and queen could represent our parents.

          Freud wrote that anything that resembles the shape of the penis (such as a stick, umbrella, pencil, rifle, or banana) is a symbolic representation of it. Alternatively, vessels or containers (like bottles, boxes, doors, ships, or purses) are thought to represent female genitalia. Activities like dancing, climbing, or riding symbolize sexual intercourse. Sounds like that recent dream you had did have some underlying sexual content, no? Given such a list, it's hard to think of many dreams that cannot be interpreted sexually! Consider the dream listed in Exercise 10-A and some of the possible Freudian interpretations of this dream.

FREUDIAN INTERPRETATIONS OF DREAMS

Before continuing, please complete Exercise 10-A Freudian Dream Interpretation (opens in a new window)