tudied after him, even students of his own science: psychoanalysis.
Freud recognized that the interpretation of dreams was a very difficult task. Many barriers to clear insights into dreams exist, and many elements of contamination may render the analysis of the dream as being incorrect, or make the dream impossible to analyze at all. One of the biggest problems was remembering the dream in detail. As dreams take place on a totally subconscious level, there is a good chance that aspects of dreams will be muddled or forgotten completely, aspects which may have had a significant impact on the analysis of the dream. He also realized that a the patient might fabricate the missing pieces of the dream, which would render it ingenuine and result in an inaccurate interpretation. Freud stated that the dream must be accepted as total fact if the dream is to be analyzed, which seems contrary to his typical practice of constantly questioning the validity of patients 'statements.
Another significant barrier to interpretation of dreams is the fact that there is often no textbook diagnosis available. This is to say that dreams of comprised of symbolism, and that what an object symbolizes for the individual varies from person to person. Therefore, the analyst must rely on the patient to provide significant amounts of background information in order to determine what objects symbolize. Of course, another obvious problem is that the meaning of the symbol may be repressed as well, or stem from a repressed event, and therefore the patient can offer no explanation of the symbol. Freud himself admitted in his works that he often encountered problems with patients not divulging enough background information, and that aspects of dreams were left uninterpreted.
Freud still offered some symbols as constants, however, and felt that all people incorporated these symbols and their meanings into dreams.However, the emphasis on sexual imagery is a majority of this text, ranging form symbolism of the genitals and other erogenous zones, to symbolism of sexual acts such as intercourse and orgasm. This is perhaps one of his most assaulted theories, as it not only states that there is a constant (or law) among all individuals that "object a = meaning a," but also that there is such an absurd amount of these sexual symbols that almost every dream could be boiled down to nothing more than an expression of sexuality. Though sexuality was certainly a present theme in nearly all Freud's works, modern analysts do not seem to find such a gross amount of sexual content in dreams.
Dreams use two main mechanisms to disguise forbidden wishes: CONDENSATION and DISPLACEMENT. Condensation is when a whole set of images is packed into a single image or statement, when a complex meaning is condensed into a simpler one. Condensation corresponds to METAPHOR in language, where one thing is condensed into another ("love is a rose, and you'd bett...
